Add speakup screen reader

[bdubbs@…]

​http://www.linux-speakup.org/

[Armin K]

I only know of one such project - the GNOME Orca, a screen reader.

It uses speech-dispatcher (with either espeak or festival as a backend) for text-to-speech syntesis and liblouis + brltty for braile display support.

Sure, it's developed by the GNOME project, but can be used everywhere else (at least in Xfce and LXDE, but I see no reason why it couldn't be used in KDE too).

It uses GNOME's AT-SPI2 technologies, so any toolkit using that and any apps using such toolkit should gain instant accesibility support.

So far, GTK+3 and Qt5 support this out of the box. GTK+2 has the accesibility plugin through at-spi2-atk and Qt4 requires a (now obsolete) qtatspi (I can find the link if necessary, but really Qt4 should go away). I am not sure what's it in there for plain X11.

There's a wiki page for it, but it's kinda outdated:

​https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca

A bit newer guide is available at the GNOME help project:

​https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/

It's released as part of GNOME Desktop project and its release cycle is synchronized with other GNOME components. You can find it at:

​https://download.gnome.org/sources/orca/

I doubt that we could test the braile display support, but we can add the optional packages for that too. text-to-speech support should be easy to test here.

I can help with this if needed.

[Armin K]

A couple of URL's:

eSpeak: ​http://espeak.sourceforge.net/

Festival: ​http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ (I've never installed it before, unlike everything else mentioned in here).

speech-dispatcher: ​http://devel.freebsoft.org/speechd

brltty: ​http://mielke.cc/brltty/

liblouis: ​http://liblouis.org/

Last time I installed orca, it required python3. All 3 accesibility packages it requires are able to build python3 modules, but may need a couple of modifications to do that (mainly, setting the PYTHON variable or using python3 explicitly). In addition, it also needs pyatspi2, which is available from GNOME servers and pyxdg which is available in BLFS archive (or maybe still part of the official python modules page, not sure).

[bdubbs@…]

Until we get more participation from interested editors, we can only add this if we get a commitment add the page and do necessary updates.

[Douglas R. Reno]

I would be interested in adding it and doing updates. Accessibility is important to me, considering that my right eye still causes issues that require me to put an eyepatch on and increase my font size to 250-500%. A screen reader would be helpful for me in emergencies.

[Samuel]

Website is no longer down

[bdubbs@…]

Milestone renamed

[pierre]

According to ​http://www.linux-speakup.org/download.html, there is now a speakup module in the kernel tree. Closing this ticket.