Hello, It is quite a coincidence that I happen to have talked with some people working on systemd-consoled the other day at the XDC2014 conference. I was thus able to discuss the concern about CONFIG_VT "going away" with them, and there are quite a few reassuring points: - the CONFIG_VT option is here to stay, even if some production systems will indeed disable it (such as embedded devices and such); I believe a lot of kernel hackers and such will keep it enabled, and thus it will be kept maintained; - on production systems where CONFIG_VT is not available, sighted users will not see kernel boot messages etc. until the userland console gets started (and a userland screen reader thus has the opportunity to get started too). Those kernels have no text rendering except one thing I'll discuss below; everything should be available to the userland screen reader, so it means that blind people have no less access to what the computer says than sighted people, be it normal work or boot messages. If boot messages are needed to debug something before systemd-consoled and screen reader are started, sighted users will need some way to get them anyway, and such kind of way (CONFIG_VT, serial console, network console, etc.) is already accessible to blind users. - the only text rendering done by the kernel is oops messages. In the cases where that ends up with a kernel hangup (so-called kernel panic), speakup can not work any more anyway, be it with CONFIG_VT or not, so there is no regression here, at least. Unfortunately that case can't really be made accessible: writing text to video memory is possible in that case, interacting with the user to access the screen is not really (no interrupts, etc.). So a serial console is needed to debug such case. In the cases where that doesn't end up with a kernel panic, a syslog notification is enough to get the oops message. - I could discuss with a developper of systemd-consoled, to explain him what requirements speakup and such screen readers have, to get the content of the console: screen content and stream of text. He understood it well, and is willing to provide the support. Samuel _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
