userspace console screenreaders was Re: speechd-up

[Trevor Saunders]

Hi,

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 10:27:53PM -0500, Chris Brannon wrote:
> 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.

yeah, not to mention the hackishness of that.

> 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.

I'm not sure I'll be interested in what you find out :-)

> 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.

 I don't use speakup much, but to be perfectly honest I think if we
want information from early boot a kernel module is probably the right
answer.  I believe brltty does fairly well at this though so maybe
there is another reasonable answer, but the kenrel module is a pretty
clean simple way to do it imho.

As I've said before if you are willing to do mad hacks you can run
yasr at the login prompt.  However I'd like to propose a different
solution if we want to use yasr as the terminal screen reader to go
forward with.   That is to patch login to be able to speak the prompt
if an option in login.defs is set.  This should be fairly easy, login
sees if speak_logins is set if so it will do spd_sayf(blah) and
printf(blah).
THere may still be one or two things we can't get, the only one that
comes to mind, and I'm not sure if even works with speakup is the
output of alt sysrq h to get the other sys requests one can make.

I think yasr as a terminal screen does have some benefits too,
particularly the fact that you can run it in shells with an x session
meaning that you have high quality access to shells without having to
switch between x and non x, which can on some machines be slow.

I'm not sure exactly what we have access to if we want to look at the
brltty / sbl route, but by doing what yasr does we can see terminal
escapes which means we can look at doing interesting things like
changing pitch based on for and background colors.  Somewhat like what
emacspeak does with syntax highlighting in emacs.

thoughts? ideas?

Trev

> -- Chris
> 
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