Re: [RFC] accessibility, speakup, speech synthesis & /sys

[Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>]

On Fri 2009-06-26 00:04:52, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Just as a reminder, Speakup is an in-kernel screen reader that uses
> hardware speech synthesis to say what gets printed on the Linux console.
> 
> In the process of cleaning it, we are moving its configuration stuff
> into proper places.  I believe there are two things:
> 
> - per- harware speech synthesizer parameters (e.g. speed, pitch, etc.)
> - screen reading parameters (e.g. characters pronunciation, key_echo,
>   current synthesizer being used etc.)
> 
> Speech synthesizers should probably have their own device class, how
> should it be called? "synth"? "speech"?

speech. 'synth' sounds like something midi-related. 

> Synthesizers are usually plugged on serial ports, but there is no bus
> abstraction for that, so I believe we can put them in the virtual bus.
> 
> Then there are the screen reading parameters. I'd tend to think that
> like there are /sys/{block,firmware,fs,power}, there could be a
> /sys/accessibility, or even shorter, /sys/a11y?  Speakup parameters
> could then be in /sys/a11y/speakup?

Please keep a11y and similar madness far from kernel. /sys/speech ? Or
even better /sys/class/speech? What is global about it?

BTW... from 486+, cpus are fast enough for speech synthesis. Why not
doing it in software, viewing hw synthetisers as 'flite coprocessors'?

What modifications   would be needed to make useful a11y w/o
 additional hw?

								Pavel

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