Speakup in userspace

[Tyler Spivey <tspivey@pcdesk.net>]

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I have some oppinions on this, and I'd like some input on how possible
this is. I'm not a very good C coder, but that's less important. I'm
hoping, if a user space screen reader is implemented, that it can be
extended; e.g. perl, python, etc. The problems with this seems to be:
1. How can a userspace program get extended key sequences such as caps
lock+i? Under Linux, I don't think that an API exists for this.

2. What about console output? There is /dev/vcs[a]x, but polling that
a few times a second would be inefficient if the system was under load.
The rest is relatively easy - Linux already has serial port devices if
needed, and also speech dispatcher communications. I see no reason why a
smaller subset of speakup (just an API to get keyboard/console
input/output) couldn't be included into the kernel - it probably
wouldn't change much, compared to the user-space adapter that would be
using that API. This is similar to what the Jupiter project is doing;
although that's all in-kernel.
any thoughts?
- - Tyler

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