Jurij Smakov <jurij@wooyd.org> writes: > On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 12:14:04AM +0100, Frans Pop wrote: >> On Thursday 15 February 2007 23:53, Gilles Casse wrote: >> > Today, in principle using a Speakup enabled kernel + Speechd-Up + >> > SpeechDispatcher + eSpeak or in user space, Yasr + emacspeak server + >> > eSpeak, a text based dialog might be correctly spoken. >> >> However, we understand that the speakup patches have never been properly >> ported to current 2.6 kernels and that there were security issues with >> the speakup patches. That is why speakup support was dropped from the >> installer when we dropped support for 2.4 kernels. We dropped support for it since I did not have the time and motivation to continue maintaining it. I do primarily work with braille output, so I wasn't able to test stuff as much as I think is required for properly supporting it. speakup is indeed ported to 2.6 kernels upstream, just not in Debian... In January 2005 there were discussions between the speakup maintainer (Kirk Reiser) and kernel hacker Matthew Wilcox during a FSG Accessibility Workgroup meeting to work on finally getting speakup accepted into the mainline kernel sources. As I understand it, both parties had problems getting the initial contact going (spam filters were really preventing communication here), but I do not know what further came of it. To work on mainline integration would reduce maintainance cost on speakup a lot for distributions. Willy, are you still willing to help the speakup project to do the final cleaning up so that mainline submission could happen? > I've recently recognized that we no longer have a speakup-enabled > kernel, and I'm willing to work on the kernel team side to bring it > back for Lenny. Great, I'd be very happy to see a volunteer working on this, since speakup has a quite large user base in the blind linux users community... Back when I was still maintaining a speakup enabled kernel in Debian, I bought a hardware speech synthesizer especially for testing speakup support for it. If you are really going to work on speakup in Debian, I can provide that hardware to you for testing purposes since these days, you can't even buy those things anymore. However, many people still have them, and would like to continue using them instead of software speech synthesis. Besides, using hardware speech synthesis in speakup does enable a very cool feature for blind users, i.e. being able to review the screen even after a kernel crash or panic. -- CYa, Mario | Debian Developer <URL:http://debian.org/> .''`. | Get my public key via finger mlang@db.debian.org : :' : | 1024D/7FC1A0854909BCCDBE6C102DDFFC022A6B113E44 `. `' `- <URL:http://delysid.org/> <URL:http://www.staff.tugraz.at/mlang/>
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