userspace console screenreaders was Re: speechd-up

[Chris Brannon]

William Hubbs wrote:
> There is one serious issue, imho, with sbl which will have to be fixed
> somehow.  Basically, it does not autoread anything.

Right, and I'm not sure how to solve this problem in a user-space daemon,
either.  I suppose we could just poll the /dev/vcsa device every so often, and
somehow determine when new text has been displayed.  I'd be afraid of losing
data, though.
Is brltty's speech functionality anything like Speakup's?  Can it auto-read
text that is scrolling on the screen?
I need to look at that code for inspiration.

yasr solves the autoread problem by spawning a shell in a pseudo-terminal.
It captures all output sent to the pseudo-TTY.
The only real problem with yasr is that it has to be run by a user who
is logged in to the system.  We lose things like boot messages, login
prompts, and the like.

-- Chris