My follow-up question, then, is whether it's possible to revise Speakup
to work as well with USB ports as it does with serial ports. (I know
that whether somebody would have the time to do it is another matter.)
Al
On 10/08/2014 04:32 PM, Kyle wrote:
According to Al Sten-Clanton:
# My knowledge of this business is minimal, but I thought that one
# advantage of the current approach, if you can use a hardware speech
# synthesizer, is that you can get at least some of the boot-up
# messages--not as early as sighted folks get them, but well before
# software speech can kick in. If this is true, wouldn't the proposed
# change be a very builty-in reduction in non-visual access?
This was a lot more true in the early days of Linux than it is now.
Computers have evolved to the point where most of them, especially home
computers, no longer have dedicated serial ports, which is the only type
of port over which Speakup is able to communicate with a hardware speech
synthesizer. To add to the problem, very few hardware speech
synthesizers are currently being made these days, and those that are
still being produced only have a USB interface. So in order to take
advantage of receiving every kernel message from startup to shutdown,
one must have an old computer or a server, as well as an old hardware
synthesizer purchased used, probably something like an old DECTalk
Express, accent SA, DoubleTalk LT, etc. And sadly no, a USB to serial
converter will not solve the problem of getting a serial port onto a
laptop or most desktop computers, as Speakup has no knowledge of this
type of device, nor does it know how to communicate through it, as I
believe it has to be enumerated by udev or similar, meaning it isn't
*always* going to have the name /dev/ttyS1 or /dev/ttyS2 or similar. I
hope this answers your question.
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/
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