RE: creating a speakup cli cd

[Don Raikes <DON.RAIKES@ORACLE.COM>]

John,

Nice write-up.  
I will test grml over the next few days and see how it feels to me.

-----Original Message-----
From: John G. Heim [mailto:jheim@math.wisc.edu] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2013 8:10 AM
To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
Subject: Re: creating a speakup cli cd

Have you seen the wiki entry I wrote on using the accessibility features of grml?  Here is the link again:

http://wiki.iavit.org/index.php/Accessing_grml

I've been working on getting that into the grml wiki itself. It'll be there soon.

It may be possible to improve on grml but I think it would be hard. Grml just uses the standard speakup kernel modules and includes whatever blind-friendly packages are available including espeakup and brltty. You could build a live CD that loads the speakup_soft module by default and automatically starts speech. But building the rest of the live CD is no small feat. A lot of work goes into including all the right packages and making sure the disk boots on almost al hardware. I wouldn't want to take on that task. If I was going to build a live CD, I'd absolutely start with grml and fix up a few things to make it easier for a blind person. YMMV.

About five years ago, I used to put out a customized grml disk that automatically loaded the speakup module for doubletalk synthesizer. I made a couple of other minor changes too. But the standard grml disk has worked so well for me lately that I just haven't found any reason to bother making a custom CD.

Another drawback to making a disk customized for blind people is that those projects tend to go away with time. Remember oralux?  That was a great project. But when the person driving the project can't do it any more, it tends to disappear. That could happen with grml but it is far less likely. There are a lot of grml developers.

My humble opinion is that if you really want to hmake a difference, get on the grml list  at Grml@ml.grml.org and contribute by testing and offering feedback.

On 2/6/2013 2:06 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:
> I had to give up on GRML.  First, it installs a ton of extra packages 
> that are unnecessary, but that's a different issue.  The two recent 
> releases I've tried did not come up talking and I couldn't get Speakup 
> to start by hand. I ended up throwing away two different CDs because I 
> couldn't get them to work.  I'm sorry, but I can no longer recommend 
> it.  You can do pretty much the same thing with the Debian Squeeze 
> live CD if you have hardware speech.  If you have software speech, it 
> only takes one command to install espeakup by hand.  As mentioned in 
> my previous mail, it looks very easy to create a custom live CD with 
> the Speakup packages already included which would come up talking.  It 
> already includes a number of rescue tools and it's easy to add more.
>
> On 2/5/2013 1:11 PM, Kirk Reiser wrote:
>> I think wanting to create this type of CD is admirable, however, the 
>> grml rescue disks already have these items as far as I know. They are 
>> designed as a rescue system and I have installed the last five or six 
>> systems I've set-up with it. I'm not quite sure what you could 
>> provide that isn't already part of grml. They have always been 
>> accessibility friendly, right from their inception.
>>
>> I'd suggest at least burning one and learning about them before you 
>> redesign a wheel. You could even get involved with helping them if 
>> you find them useful.
>>
>> Once you boot the most recent all you do is modprobe speakup_soft 
>> after the beedley-bop sound it makes to let one know it is finished 
>> booting and them type espeakup to start the speech output. Very 
>> simple. I'm sure it's just as simple to start brltty. Maybe even 
>> easier.
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