speechd-up

[Halim Sahin]

Hi Tomas,
On Fr, Jul 30, 2010 at 10:27:43 +0200, Tomas Cerha wrote:
> 
> I'll just try to formulate what I believe is important in this discussion.

let's see

> There is no doubt that a console screen reader is important, that blind
> users deserve equal access etc, so any discussions in this direction are
> unnecessary and complicate coming to a resolution.


ACK. Please then people who are pushing the great new world of
usersessionintegration should tell us a _practicable_way for adding such
support in:
sbl, brltty and speechdup.
It's not enough to say we should run those apps in an usersession
without providing such details.
Keep in mind that speechd wasn#t usable in most linux distros since
pulseaudio was selected as standard soundserver.
And it has many disadvantages to run it as user.


> We also understand that some temporary solutions are necessary.  But we
> want to clearly identify what is a temporary hack and what is the
> desired final solution.  We can not afford following dead end roads.
> Long term accessibility must rely on main stream development, not
> obscure, specifically tailored hacks.

Who decides what the mainstream is and that the mainstream is _ok_ for
a11y?
Go on reading I.ll tell you who is responsible for that :-(.


> We really welcome if anyone wants to work on Speakup and speechd-up in
> the direction which Hynek roughly described.  We may discuss the details
> of it, but it approximately is the only way to go and keep up with the
> current development, which we can hardly stop and there actually is not
> a reason for doing that.  It brings some additional complexity, but it
> addresses real issues.  

Yes the people behind consolekit and pulseaudio are thinking this way.
Here you can read about their quick fix for our problem:
http://www.mail-archive.com/pulseaudio-discuss at mail.0pointer.de/msg05948.html
"real console logins should really go away"

This would fix all problems and nobody needs to take care.
Back to topic:
Nobody tells you you should stop the mainstream developement of such
technologies.
It would be enough to recognice the issues for other apps when doing
those radical changes. They are adressing one thing but breaking many
other apps without providing an usefull solution for them.
running a consolescreenreader in idle mode and starting it for _all_
tty's is not an improovment.
It wastes  resources and needs many changes in the code. The bigest
problem is that we don't know if these changes can work as expected.

I don't want to tell you please work on on speechd-up (it's your
decision).

But please don't give a11y under linux a no_go direction.
No_go because there are serious problems to implement a practicable and
usable screenreader-support for the new sessionintegration stuff.
Jan wrote:

they have deep experiences with accessibility and the key problem they
consult with me.

Well he also wrote that he is using brltty with the sd driver.
Afaik brltty runs as root. This is the keyproblem. No access to sd from
brltty during login time of consolelogin.

Please let us know how you did solve that issue!
After that please try to run brltty as user and try to use keyboard
input from external keyboards and cursorrouting on the brailledisplay.
you can use such displays eg. from handytech.

With regards
halim