Well, the USB thing is reason enough to rewrite speakup. But another
reason is that it's stuck in the staging area because the code is not up
to the standards set by the kernel developers.
That 6-month thing is totally a wild-ass guess. At one time, I could
write a kernel module in a week. That was 20 years ago though and I'll
admit I neither remember how to do it nor can I understand the kernel
code currently. It can't be *that* much harder though than it used to
be. Of course, there is a lot more to speakup than the synth driver
modules. But I'm figuring a lot of the code could be re-used. I mean,
you don't have to redesign the user interface.
On 02/07/2015 11:57 AM, Mike Ray wrote:
Slackware is, as far as I know, the only distro which has, seemingly ALL
the speakup synth 'modules' compiled into the kernel, e.g. not as
external modules.
I think the above is historical, but is also coincidentally an advantage
to us, as for those of us with hardware synths, it makes it possible to
boot and install, assuming it is working right.
Speakup re-written in 6 months? Why is there a need to re-write it?
The only reason I can think of is the now almost universal lack of
serial ports on computers and the current inability of speakup to use
USB for hardware synths. I don't know if it is even possible to use USB
with a kernel module. And I don't know whether USB or USB hardware
synths use or support hardware hand-shaking.
There has been talk of the tty being removed from the kernel, at which
time speakup will, presumably, become unusable at all.
The see-saw nature of accessibility in modern Linux is a downside to
diversity. There is a lot to choose from, which means there are also a
lot of failure points. There are a lot of developers who, being able to
see perfectly well, give little thought to accessibility. Projects
change hands, developers move on, and a project which had good
accessibility can suddenly stop working for us simply because of a
developer change.
Orca certainly needs more financial support. If God forbid, anything
happened to take Joanie away from Orca development, we would be in
crisis. But that is not an uncommon situation in OSS.
I think installers are getting better. So much so that VI-specific
distros like Vinux and Sonar are now almost irrelevant. IMHO their only
advantage is ootb package tweaking. A lot of inaccessible packages are
not included by default like they are in mainstream distros, where we
have to fiddle about cherry-picking what we can and cannot use.
Back to speakup specifically for a moment...IMHO what is really needed
is for the source to be brought up to kernel standards to get it out of
staging, and for the web site to be refreshed. The web site looks and
feels stale and untouched. Leading some sighted folks to believe
speakup is dead and irrelevant, which it is definitely not.
Mike
On 07/02/2015 15:55, John G. Heim wrote:
I wouldn't go quite that far. I will agree though that the accessibility
tools in linux have gotten worse in the last 5 years, not better. This
is a disturbing trend. I think things began to fall apart when Oracle
bought Sun and got rid of the orca development team.
What we should really do is to put together a group to collect grants to
pay for orca development. We could include speakup development but I
think a single dedicated developer could probably rewrite speakup from
scratch in about 6 months. It's a small project compared to the
continuing development that orca represents.
I'll talk to IAVIT's lawyer about it.
On 02/07/2015 08:43 AM, Glenn / Lenny wrote:
You know, I use Ubuntu, and I have become disenchanted with Linux. With
every new release, we have to rebuild accessibility.
Sure it is free, and it is safer and more powerful than Windows, but
Windows
is still more accessible than Linux.
I had big hopes for Linux, and I have reached a point now where it is
just a
tool in the toolbox, mainly for drive manipulation.
Glenn
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Holmes" <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <speakup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, February 07, 2015 2:52 AM
Subject: Re: finished with slackware
I hate hearing stuff like this; we have made so much progress over the
years in making Linux accessible and then these things start coming
up. When you can't even boot a basic system with current versions of
installer and kernel, then there is something seriously wrong!
I grew up on Slackware clear back in 1994 or so. I then had to login
from a different computer running a terminal emulator but that was a
start.
As for me, I like Arch Linux and there is a current talking image
available. I thought Fedora was currently accessible; no?
On Fri, Feb 06, 2015 at 08:37:32PM -0500, Jude DaShiell wrote:
I was trying to install a current version of slackware using the
litetalk
synthesizer earlier. Given slackware's installer kernel is broken, I
got
some remote sighted assistance and was told wait 30 seconds then key in
boot parameters and that fails persistently insofaras getting speech up.
So apparently slackware and Fedora have something in common. In both
cases an installer interested in doing an accessible installation
needs to
find and download an earlier version of the operating systems that did
install accessibly and use that version to install then upgrade through
the versions to get to current versions. Moonshine on Fedora worked on
intel machines in the past and if my memory is correct, maybe slackware
11.2 ought to be able to get it done in this case. What I will do
now is
take a stab at getting slackware 11.2 to speak and if that fails as time
and my download quotas permit will try other versions in the future.
This
is now a low priority back burner project. I was surprised the
distribution got broken in this way.
jude <jdashiel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Twitter: @JudeDaShiell
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