Good old Speakup

Good old Speakup

[Martin McCormick]

Those of us who use screen readers have things we particularly
like about them and stuff we dislike and a lot of that is
totally subjective which makes the job of programming them even
harder than simply coding.  I have used speakup or espeakup
depending on the time period we are talking about since 2009 or
thereabouts when I first got vinux to work and no longer had to
use a MSDOS PC running kermit and feeding a hardware speech
synthesizer so I know of what I speak.

	I have a good and fast PC running debian bookworm with
orca and the speech is good under orca but I always have wanted
to have a pure command-line instance of old-school speakup for
use in command-line stuff such as programming in c++, perl and
shell scripts, PIC assembler and system administrative tasks.

	There are at least 2 command line consoles that open text
terminal windows on Control-Alt-F3 and Control-Alt-F4.  They
don't talk so I installed fenrir and now, they talk but it's not
what I was hoping for.

	By pure accident/stupidity on my part, I once installed
espeakup on here before finding out that that is not a good idea
because espeakup is not a user-space application and uses kernel
modules that might conflict with orca.

	I forgot about the installation and have used orca a lot
with no trouble but when i installed fenrir and got pipewire
reconfigured to work with it, I was rudely reminded of espeakup
which was a sleeping giant and awoke.  Both espeakup and fenrir
would simultaneously speak screen output in the command consoles,
each one at a different pitch and rate.  It was kind of amusing
for about 15 seconds and then frustrating because the babble of
the 2 voices, both e-speak but at different settings, tended to
obscure what each was saying.

	I worked on that issue on and off for a couple of days
before another happy accident which clued me in on what happened.

	I pressed the PrintScreen button and one of the voices
said, "You killed speakup."  Pressing it again brought it back
like normal.

	So now I knew it was espeakup and fenrir having the
babble battle.

	I de-installed espeakup and fenrir now talks but it's not
the same thing.  If you set punctuations to some, one must do
that in the configuration file, then restart the service.  When
you do that, the = sign is not one of the punctuation marks that
is spoken, so much for programming.

	Also, for some odd reason, Control-J (newline) and
Control-K cause the screenreader to say "," as in the comma
punctuation even there are no commas on the screen as near as i
can tell.

	That, alone drives me batty since it is confusing to say
the least.

	I am not trying to talk trash about fenrir because it's a
good idea and there are things I like about the interface but oh,
how I would like to just experience speakup in those command
consoles.  It's easy to go through different punctuation levels
and change speech rates on the fly plus, if one sets the
punctuation to most, you do hear what one  needs to hear and that
is important when programming and doing administrative tasks.

	Any constructive ideas are appreciated.

	Since espeakup did try to run, I have thought about
putting it back as it never bothered orca while it was installed
and then removing fenrir since both were trying to work at the
same time.

Martin

Re: Good old Speakup

[Jookia]

Hi Martin,

speakup and espeakup don't conflict with orca, you can use them both at
the same time. :) Maybe try removing fenrir and seeing if things just
work?

Jookia.

On Wed, Jan 22, 2025 at 12:49:30PM -0600, Martin McCormick wrote:
> Those of us who use screen readers have things we particularly
> like about them and stuff we dislike and a lot of that is
> totally subjective which makes the job of programming them even
> harder than simply coding.  I have used speakup or espeakup
> depending on the time period we are talking about since 2009 or
> thereabouts when I first got vinux to work and no longer had to
> use a MSDOS PC running kermit and feeding a hardware speech
> synthesizer so I know of what I speak.
> 
> 	I have a good and fast PC running debian bookworm with
> orca and the speech is good under orca but I always have wanted
> to have a pure command-line instance of old-school speakup for
> use in command-line stuff such as programming in c++, perl and
> shell scripts, PIC assembler and system administrative tasks.
> 
> 	There are at least 2 command line consoles that open text
> terminal windows on Control-Alt-F3 and Control-Alt-F4.  They
> don't talk so I installed fenrir and now, they talk but it's not
> what I was hoping for.
> 
> 	By pure accident/stupidity on my part, I once installed
> espeakup on here before finding out that that is not a good idea
> because espeakup is not a user-space application and uses kernel
> modules that might conflict with orca.
> 
> 	I forgot about the installation and have used orca a lot
> with no trouble but when i installed fenrir and got pipewire
> reconfigured to work with it, I was rudely reminded of espeakup
> which was a sleeping giant and awoke.  Both espeakup and fenrir
> would simultaneously speak screen output in the command consoles,
> each one at a different pitch and rate.  It was kind of amusing
> for about 15 seconds and then frustrating because the babble of
> the 2 voices, both e-speak but at different settings, tended to
> obscure what each was saying.
> 
> 	I worked on that issue on and off for a couple of days
> before another happy accident which clued me in on what happened.
> 
> 	I pressed the PrintScreen button and one of the voices
> said, "You killed speakup."  Pressing it again brought it back
> like normal.
> 
> 	So now I knew it was espeakup and fenrir having the
> babble battle.
> 
> 	I de-installed espeakup and fenrir now talks but it's not
> the same thing.  If you set punctuations to some, one must do
> that in the configuration file, then restart the service.  When
> you do that, the = sign is not one of the punctuation marks that
> is spoken, so much for programming.
> 
> 	Also, for some odd reason, Control-J (newline) and
> Control-K cause the screenreader to say "," as in the comma
> punctuation even there are no commas on the screen as near as i
> can tell.
> 
> 	That, alone drives me batty since it is confusing to say
> the least.
> 
> 	I am not trying to talk trash about fenrir because it's a
> good idea and there are things I like about the interface but oh,
> how I would like to just experience speakup in those command
> consoles.  It's easy to go through different punctuation levels
> and change speech rates on the fly plus, if one sets the
> punctuation to most, you do hear what one  needs to hear and that
> is important when programming and doing administrative tasks.
> 
> 	Any constructive ideas are appreciated.
> 
> 	Since espeakup did try to run, I have thought about
> putting it back as it never bothered orca while it was installed
> and then removing fenrir since both were trying to work at the
> same time.
> 
> Martin
> 

Re: Good old Speakup

[Kirk Reiser]

I agree with Jookia, espeakup with speakup works just fine with orca
here. I have to say that orca is more of an after-thought here because
I use speakup on 11 of the twelve consoles that come with debian.

I ran into an iritating situation last evening trying to get espeakup
working on a RPI-5 with some sort of sound board stuck on it to
provide a 3.5mm jack option. Never did figure out why espeakup
couldn't open the softsynth device even set to 666 mode. That however
is a totally different situation.

   Kirk

On Thu, 23 Jan 2025, Jookia wrote:

> Hi Martin,
>
> speakup and espeakup don't conflict with orca, you can use them both at
> the same time. :) Maybe try removing fenrir and seeing if things just
> work?
>
> Jookia.
>
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2025 at 12:49:30PM -0600, Martin McCormick wrote:
>> Those of us who use screen readers have things we particularly
>> like about them and stuff we dislike and a lot of that is
>> totally subjective which makes the job of programming them even
>> harder than simply coding.  I have used speakup or espeakup
>> depending on the time period we are talking about since 2009 or
>> thereabouts when I first got vinux to work and no longer had to
>> use a MSDOS PC running kermit and feeding a hardware speech
>> synthesizer so I know of what I speak.
>>
>> 	I have a good and fast PC running debian bookworm with
>> orca and the speech is good under orca but I always have wanted
>> to have a pure command-line instance of old-school speakup for
>> use in command-line stuff such as programming in c++, perl and
>> shell scripts, PIC assembler and system administrative tasks.
>>
>> 	There are at least 2 command line consoles that open text
>> terminal windows on Control-Alt-F3 and Control-Alt-F4.  They
>> don't talk so I installed fenrir and now, they talk but it's not
>> what I was hoping for.
>>
>> 	By pure accident/stupidity on my part, I once installed
>> espeakup on here before finding out that that is not a good idea
>> because espeakup is not a user-space application and uses kernel
>> modules that might conflict with orca.
>>
>> 	I forgot about the installation and have used orca a lot
>> with no trouble but when i installed fenrir and got pipewire
>> reconfigured to work with it, I was rudely reminded of espeakup
>> which was a sleeping giant and awoke.  Both espeakup and fenrir
>> would simultaneously speak screen output in the command consoles,
>> each one at a different pitch and rate.  It was kind of amusing
>> for about 15 seconds and then frustrating because the babble of
>> the 2 voices, both e-speak but at different settings, tended to
>> obscure what each was saying.
>>
>> 	I worked on that issue on and off for a couple of days
>> before another happy accident which clued me in on what happened.
>>
>> 	I pressed the PrintScreen button and one of the voices
>> said, "You killed speakup."  Pressing it again brought it back
>> like normal.
>>
>> 	So now I knew it was espeakup and fenrir having the
>> babble battle.
>>
>> 	I de-installed espeakup and fenrir now talks but it's not
>> the same thing.  If you set punctuations to some, one must do
>> that in the configuration file, then restart the service.  When
>> you do that, the = sign is not one of the punctuation marks that
>> is spoken, so much for programming.
>>
>> 	Also, for some odd reason, Control-J (newline) and
>> Control-K cause the screenreader to say "," as in the comma
>> punctuation even there are no commas on the screen as near as i
>> can tell.
>>
>> 	That, alone drives me batty since it is confusing to say
>> the least.
>>
>> 	I am not trying to talk trash about fenrir because it's a
>> good idea and there are things I like about the interface but oh,
>> how I would like to just experience speakup in those command
>> consoles.  It's easy to go through different punctuation levels
>> and change speech rates on the fly plus, if one sets the
>> punctuation to most, you do hear what one  needs to hear and that
>> is important when programming and doing administrative tasks.
>>
>> 	Any constructive ideas are appreciated.
>>
>> 	Since espeakup did try to run, I have thought about
>> putting it back as it never bothered orca while it was installed
>> and then removing fenrir since both were trying to work at the
>> same time.
>>
>> Martin
>>
>

Re: Good old Speakup

[Martin McCormick]

Thank you so much.  I thought this should work but it's nice to
not have a warm brick sitting here and espeakup is functioning on
5 command consoles while orca is quite alive and well.

Martin
Jookia <contact@jookia.org> writes:
> Hi Martin,
> 
> speakup and espeakup don't conflict with orca, you can use them both at
> the same time. :) Maybe try removing fenrir and seeing if things just
> work?

They sure did.

Re: Good old Speakup

[Martin McCormick]

Thanks to all.  That reduces the number of computers that have to
be turned on by 1.  I was using that system as a talking terminal
in to some raspberry Pi's and my main Linux system.  The I86
system has two working CDROM drives but it's power supply fans
are starting to make occasional bearing sounds and the CPU is a
good extra source of warmth in mid Winter but unwanted heat in
Summer so now, it can serve as extra resources when needed but
doesn't need to always be on, shortening the time the UPS can
keep things going.  Again thanks.

Martin	WB5AGZ

Re: Good old Speakup

[chrys]

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Hi Martin,
just some random small comments. (also if they do not belong here IMO)
> I was rudely reminded of espeakup
> which was a sleeping giant and awoke.  Both espeakup and fenrir
> would simultaneously speak screen output in the command consoles,
> each one at a different pitch and rate.
well running multible screenreaders at once will never be a good idea. 
they will read the input twice but also fight for exclusive access to 
your keyboard (as both want to consume shortcuts not ment for the 
terminal but the screenreader. only one application can have exclusive 
access to an device.

> 	Also, for some odd reason, Control-J (newline) and
> Control-K cause the screenreader to say "," as in the comma
> punctuation even there are no commas on the screen as near as i
> can tell.

I guess what you see is fenrirs way to handle "pause" on some TTS 
systems. to "emulate" an pause when communicating with an TTS fenrir 
sends an , (comma) what is interpreted by the most TTS as a small break. 
if this does not fit for you can just disable it:
respectPunctuationPause=True
newLinePause=True

just set them to false.

>   It's easy to go through different punctuation levels
> and change speech rates on the fly plus, if one sets the
> punctuation to most, you do hear what one  needs to hear and that
> is important when programming and doing administrative tasks.
fenrir is also able to change this on the fly, maybe the shortcuts are 
unbound as i implemented it using the quick menu. but you can just 
rebind them

   *     inc_sound_volume
   *     inc_speech_pitch
   *     inc_speech_rate
   *     inc_speech_volume


for in crease the given attribute and

   *     dec_sound_volume
   *     dec_speech_pitch
   *     dec_speech_rate
   *     dec_speech_volume

or just using the quick menu.

by the way... same for punctuation level: toggle_punctuation_level


maybe a bit technical, but you can find all available commands here:

https://github.com/chrys87/fenrir/tree/master/src/fenrirscreenreader/commands/commands

maybe not all of them are bound by default. as i never used an 
screenreader by my own, the default settings are mostly done by others.


cheers chrys

Am 22.01.25 um 19:49 schrieb Martin McCormick:
> Those of us who use screen readers have things we particularly
> like about them and stuff we dislike and a lot of that is
> totally subjective which makes the job of programming them even
> harder than simply coding.  I have used speakup or espeakup
> depending on the time period we are talking about since 2009 or
> thereabouts when I first got vinux to work and no longer had to
> use a MSDOS PC running kermit and feeding a hardware speech
> synthesizer so I know of what I speak.
>
> 	I have a good and fast PC running debian bookworm with
> orca and the speech is good under orca but I always have wanted
> to have a pure command-line instance of old-school speakup for
> use in command-line stuff such as programming in c++, perl and
> shell scripts, PIC assembler and system administrative tasks.
>
> 	There are at least 2 command line consoles that open text
> terminal windows on Control-Alt-F3 and Control-Alt-F4.  They
> don't talk so I installed fenrir and now, they talk but it's not
> what I was hoping for.
>
> 	By pure accident/stupidity on my part, I once installed
> espeakup on here before finding out that that is not a good idea
> because espeakup is not a user-space application and uses kernel
> modules that might conflict with orca.
>
> 	I forgot about the installation and have used orca a lot
> with no trouble but when i installed fenrir and got pipewire
> reconfigured to work with it, I was rudely reminded of espeakup
> which was a sleeping giant and awoke.  Both espeakup and fenrir
> would simultaneously speak screen output in the command consoles,
> each one at a different pitch and rate.  It was kind of amusing
> for about 15 seconds and then frustrating because the babble of
> the 2 voices, both e-speak but at different settings, tended to
> obscure what each was saying.
>
> 	I worked on that issue on and off for a couple of days
> before another happy accident which clued me in on what happened.
>
> 	I pressed the PrintScreen button and one of the voices
> said, "You killed speakup."  Pressing it again brought it back
> like normal.
>
> 	So now I knew it was espeakup and fenrir having the
> babble battle.
>
> 	I de-installed espeakup and fenrir now talks but it's not
> the same thing.  If you set punctuations to some, one must do
> that in the configuration file, then restart the service.  When
> you do that, the = sign is not one of the punctuation marks that
> is spoken, so much for programming.
>
> 	Also, for some odd reason, Control-J (newline) and
> Control-K cause the screenreader to say "," as in the comma
> punctuation even there are no commas on the screen as near as i
> can tell.
>
> 	That, alone drives me batty since it is confusing to say
> the least.
>
> 	I am not trying to talk trash about fenrir because it's a
> good idea and there are things I like about the interface but oh,
> how I would like to just experience speakup in those command
> consoles.  It's easy to go through different punctuation levels
> and change speech rates on the fly plus, if one sets the
> punctuation to most, you do hear what one  needs to hear and that
> is important when programming and doing administrative tasks.
>
> 	Any constructive ideas are appreciated.
>
> 	Since espeakup did try to run, I have thought about
> putting it back as it never bothered orca while it was installed
> and then removing fenrir since both were trying to work at the
> same time.
>
> Martin
>

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Re: Good old Speakup

[Didier Spaier]

Hi Chrys,

nice to hear from you!

On 22/01/2025 23:40, chrys wrote:
> well running multible screenreaders at once will never be a good idea. they will
> read the input twice but also fight for exclusive access to your keyboard (as
> both want to consume shortcuts not ment for the terminal but the screenreader.
> only one application can have exclusive access to an device.

Well, that's of course true if you speak about screen readers on a console, like
espeakup, fenrir (used on the console), speechd-up or tdsr.

However there is no issue having a console screen reader + Orca or Cthulu
running, so user have keep speech (with the same voice or not) when toggling
between a console and a graphical environment, hearing one or the other but not
both together.

Cheers,
Didier

Re: Good old Speakup

[Janina Sajka]

Hi Martin, All:

Fwiw, I also played around with fenrir some years ago. I quickly came
home to Speakup. I do use Orca with Speech Dispatcher as well. My
solution is to have two different audio devices, one for Speakup on the
23 consoles I open, and one for Orca/SD.

I never succeeded trying to get either Speakup or Orca happy with
pulseaudio, though. I haven't yet mucked around with what pipewire might
offer as I'm waiting for it to settle down before doing that. Maybe it's
pretty settled most recently. I just don't like software making
decisions about what audio stream plays on what device. That's where I
failed with pa.

These days I run Arch as my Linux distro of choice and I tend to do a
full system update about once a week.  I do have one issue on boot that
I solve by a very hokey work around. My process is as follows:

Boot and log into the default console.

Launch my vtconsole script that opens the remaining 23 consoles. As root
(not sudo) run a loadkeys to get consoles 13-24 accessible.

At that point I can start my orca environment with startx. But I don't
auto start Orca, just the gui environment, because I need
speech-dispatcher to take the correct device for output, and sd ignores
my config setting for that.

So the hokey work around is to start a wav playing on the device I want
SD to stay away from and then start Orca. Works like a charm!

Yes, yes. Amen to the sentiment of good old Speakup! Amen, and amen.

Best,
Janina

Martin McCormick writes:
> Those of us who use screen readers have things we particularly
> like about them and stuff we dislike and a lot of that is
> totally subjective which makes the job of programming them even
> harder than simply coding.  I have used speakup or espeakup
> depending on the time period we are talking about since 2009 or
> thereabouts when I first got vinux to work and no longer had to
> use a MSDOS PC running kermit and feeding a hardware speech
> synthesizer so I know of what I speak.
> 
> 	I have a good and fast PC running debian bookworm with
> orca and the speech is good under orca but I always have wanted
> to have a pure command-line instance of old-school speakup for
> use in command-line stuff such as programming in c++, perl and
> shell scripts, PIC assembler and system administrative tasks.
> 
> 	There are at least 2 command line consoles that open text
> terminal windows on Control-Alt-F3 and Control-Alt-F4.  They
> don't talk so I installed fenrir and now, they talk but it's not
> what I was hoping for.
> 
> 	By pure accident/stupidity on my part, I once installed
> espeakup on here before finding out that that is not a good idea
> because espeakup is not a user-space application and uses kernel
> modules that might conflict with orca.
> 
> 	I forgot about the installation and have used orca a lot
> with no trouble but when i installed fenrir and got pipewire
> reconfigured to work with it, I was rudely reminded of espeakup
> which was a sleeping giant and awoke.  Both espeakup and fenrir
> would simultaneously speak screen output in the command consoles,
> each one at a different pitch and rate.  It was kind of amusing
> for about 15 seconds and then frustrating because the babble of
> the 2 voices, both e-speak but at different settings, tended to
> obscure what each was saying.
> 
> 	I worked on that issue on and off for a couple of days
> before another happy accident which clued me in on what happened.
> 
> 	I pressed the PrintScreen button and one of the voices
> said, "You killed speakup."  Pressing it again brought it back
> like normal.
> 
> 	So now I knew it was espeakup and fenrir having the
> babble battle.
> 
> 	I de-installed espeakup and fenrir now talks but it's not
> the same thing.  If you set punctuations to some, one must do
> that in the configuration file, then restart the service.  When
> you do that, the = sign is not one of the punctuation marks that
> is spoken, so much for programming.
> 
> 	Also, for some odd reason, Control-J (newline) and
> Control-K cause the screenreader to say "," as in the comma
> punctuation even there are no commas on the screen as near as i
> can tell.
> 
> 	That, alone drives me batty since it is confusing to say
> the least.
> 
> 	I am not trying to talk trash about fenrir because it's a
> good idea and there are things I like about the interface but oh,
> how I would like to just experience speakup in those command
> consoles.  It's easy to go through different punctuation levels
> and change speech rates on the fly plus, if one sets the
> punctuation to most, you do hear what one  needs to hear and that
> is important when programming and doing administrative tasks.
> 
> 	Any constructive ideas are appreciated.
> 
> 	Since espeakup did try to run, I have thought about
> putting it back as it never bothered orca while it was installed
> and then removing fenrir since both were trying to work at the
> same time.
> 
> Martin

-- 

Janina Sajka (she/her/hers)
Accessibility Consultant https://linkedin.com/in/jsajka

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Co-Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures	http://www.w3.org/wai/apa

Linux Foundation Fellow
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/board-of-directors-2/

Re: Good old Speakup

[tony seth]

Heya there Chrys! damn good to hear from ya again:
Yup, I do love good ol' Speakup most of the time, but I also do use 
Fenrir, mostly on my Arch box, but on my Slint box I like Fenrir with 
Ninjam because I can turn off autoread feature and still have access to 
my channels, and other peoples' channels too, for mixing and panning and such.
Both have their place and to my knowledge, neither of them interfere 
with Cthulhu, or Orca on either system.
So thanks muchee to both Kirk and Chrys for both console speech options!
Take care... Cheereo!

re: good old speakup

[Jude DaShiell]

I may have to power wash this chromebook again but it might be worth finding out.
I could take this system up to trixie in debian.  If debian replaces the google kernel with the trixie kernel maybe I'll find speakup_soft in that kernel and be able to run speakup on trixie but not google's version of bookworm.
I have some programming to finish before going on that adventure and some notes to make.

re: good old speakup

[Jude DaShiell]

Last time I tried doing stuff with a kernel I ended up reinstalling a whole operating system after I found my results.
I seem to remember gentoo in that respect.
I did get frobtads-3 to build and run on this chromebook earlier.
to do it, dependencies are cmake libcurl4-gnutls-dev and libncurses-dev.
Then
git clone https://github.com/realnc/frobtads
follow instructions in ~/frobtads/doc/INSTALLATION
and the build will take a while to get done.
The games are at
https://ifarchive.org/indexes/tads/
and will work well with speakup.
Debian also has glulxe for the infocom games.

re: good old speakup

[Kirk Reiser]

Um, I had/have an old Asus 720 Chromebook which I used to use. My
guess is that speakup is on it which you can check by modprobing
speakup_soft as root from the console. It seems to me that I had to
blacklist the hda intel driver to get it to be used by espeakup but
it's been a long time and I just don't remember anymore. See if
espeak-ng will work.

   Kirk

On Thu, 23 Jan 2025, Jude DaShiell wrote:

> I have been trying to get speakup working on a virtualized containerized debian bookworm environment on an acer spin #713 chromebook without success.
> Has anyone managed to get speakup talking on a chromebook yet?
> I'm thinking google which installs this version of linux on chromebooks may have ripped out the necessary speakup kernel support.
> How I'm writing anything on the chromebook in terminal is by using a screen reader called tdsr.
> My other linux tower computer died last year so I'm down to this chromebook.
>

re: good old speakup

[Jude DaShiell]

I have been trying to get speakup working on a virtualized containerized debian bookworm environment on an acer spin #713 chromebook without success.
Has anyone managed to get speakup talking on a chromebook yet?
I'm thinking google which installs this version of linux on chromebooks may have ripped out the necessary speakup kernel support.
How I'm writing anything on the chromebook in terminal is by using a screen reader called tdsr.
My other linux tower computer died last year so I'm down to this chromebook.