Adding something important, if slightly different, to this discussion.
speaking personally, I feel it is absolutely critical to raise the Linux
profile generally among accessibility discussions if you desire anyone
outside of your personal computer use to understand your needs and take
you seriously.
That means articles with the a11y project, making sure that webaim
includes Linux when doing surveys..something that they did not last time I
checked because they felt the population is too small.
Personally, that makes me more than a bit angry, because a disability
experience is only one person at a time regardless, and there is a major
difference between compliance, and inclusion of those individual
experiences.
Preaching to the choir i. e. only to the impacted population, is not going
to result in broader understanding from those involved with major
distributions, nor those seeking information on inclusion from outside of
the experience.
Until Linux is considered to be more than just a programmers hobby,
getting elements effortlessly incorporated may be a challenge.
Kare
On Sun, 19 Sep 2021, John G. Heim wrote:
I get this thing about speakup belonging in user space practically every time
I discuss it outside this list. Even with other blind people. I'm like, okay,
if you can tell me how I can get speech during poot, I'm willing to listen.
Or are you telling me that as a system admin, I don't need access to boot
messages? Lets disable everybody's video during boot and see how they like
it.
I think the question of whether it's better to work on a custom distro for
the blind or on fixing mainstream distros is a tough call. The problem is
clearly that a lot of custom distros for the blind have disappeared once the
original developer lost interest. But while they last, they are probably
doing some good. I do think though that on the balance, it is better to work
on fixing mainstream distros. You can have a greater, longer lasting impact
that way.
On 9/19/21 9:09 AM, Kirk Reiser wrote:
Hello Didier: Thank you for the rc script. That's an impressive shell
script. 'grin'
You are of course correct that there is no mention of systemd in the
espeakup source code. My comment was in reference to the systemd
service provided in the espeakup repository. I think I was just
surprised by it more than anything.
Still, as far as I can tell espeakup indebian sid appears to be broken
with some recent upgrades and it seems so are some of the other
distros. There is probably a good chance that how to handle the
stopping and starting of speakup has been dicussed on other mailing
lists I'm not a member of. I am only on two lists, this one and the
blvuug list which is fairly new. If there has been discussion on some
other accessibility lists I would appreciate it if someone would give
me/us a synopsis of those discussions and their
recommendations/decisions.
It also seems to me that we have two different situations wrt distros,
general communities like debian, ubuntu, arch etc and those that are
specially put together for the blind community like debuan, slint and
others I don't remember there names of anymore. I'd kind of like to
know what people think of those situations is it better to be separate
or part of the whole? The inclusion of pulseaudio for example in
packages could make a difference those theose who want it and those
who don't. This is of course an issue that doesn't just have merit to
the accessibility community of speakup. Huh, does anyone use
pcaudiolib other than espeak, just wondering.
The whole question of whether a package should run as root or a
regular user is another interesting question. I don't think that
espeakup would have broken if some group hadn't decided that one way
was better than an other for everybody. Once again personally I like
the idea of running as an individual user but I also want access to
devices from boot-up on and not loading accessibility until a user
logs in is a non-starter there imo.
Anyway I seem to be ranting, sorry about that.
Didier, does slint have a bootable image for the RaspBerry Pi 4B?
Espeakup on raspbian and debian is fucked in completely different ways
on that platform.
Kirk
On Sun, 19 Sep 2021, Didier Spaier wrote:
> Hi Kirk,
>
> answering inline.
>
> Le 18/09/2021 à 21:26, Kirk Reiser a écrit :
> > Huh, are you running arch on that box as well? I am wondering if
> > speakup is even loaded. I noticed in the espeakup build systemd
> > services that it loads speakup_soft when the systemd service is
> > started.
> >
> > I'm not crazy about that being the way to load speakup particularly
> > but I'm not that familiar with various distros way of doing things but
> > it appears the espeakup maintainers figure everyone is running
> > systemd.
>
> To be clear you mean the packagers of most distributions right? there is
> no
> mention of systemd in the source code, of course.
>
> As a counter example the daemon manager for Slint is attached.
>
> > That's one of the reasons I mentioned getting folks opinions in my
> > last message to you. For people that don't run systemd it will
> > certainly break things.
>
> Cheers,
> Didier
>
--
###
John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
