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

[Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@ens-lyon.org>]

Pavel Machek, le Sun 12 Jul 2009 12:31:34 +0200, a écrit :
> On Wed 2009-07-08 11:42:19, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > Pavel Machek, le Wed 08 Jul 2009 11:35:16 +0200, a écrit :
> > > On Thu 2009-07-02 00:19:04, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > > > Pavel Machek, le Tue 30 Jun 2009 08:34:54 +0200, a écrit :
> > > > > Please keep a11y and similar madness far from kernel.
> > > > 
> > > > What do you qualify as "madness" precisely?  Could you explain why you
> > > > are using such extreme word?
> > > 
> > > If the word is so long that you have to write number of its letters
> > > inside... then you are using wrong word.
> > 
> > Unfortunately that's the word.  If the very notion of accessibility was
> > realized by mankind earlier maybe we'd have had a shorter word for it.
> 
> "speech" would seem good enough substitute.

For the speech case. Then you could have braille, speech recognition,
etc.

> > > > > BTW... from 486+, cpus are fast enough for speech synthesis. Why not
> > > > > doing it in software, viewing hw synthetisers as 'flite coprocessors'?
> > > > 
> > > > At least because flite is very far from proprietary hardware
> > > > synthesizers in terms of quality.
> > > 
> > > Well... but for reading boot messages, it might be adequate, right?
> > 
> > I'd actually say it's particularly not adequate.  Try to feed your dmesg
> > to a speech synthesizer and try to understand it.
> 
> Do you really expect blind people to do kernel hacking?

They do.  Why shouldn't they be able to?

> > > You know... "normal" consoles (such as vt) do fail sometimes, too.
> > 
> > Yes, and in such case sighted and blind users are on equal basis.  In
> > that case there is no need for a particular support for blind people.
> 
> You know, we do not translate kernel messages into other languages,
> either. So maybe we should make sure that Linux machines can be used
> without reading dmesg, and just do it from initrd?

People can learn english. Blind people can't learn seeing.

> After all, most distributions _already_ put splashscreens on, so 99%
> of people do not see kernel messages, either...

Blindness is orthogonal to that 99%.

Samuel