SBL & speechd (Re: Using graphical interfaces as a blind user, and a little wish (Re: pulseaudio and speech: performance issues))

[Klaus Knopper]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 07, 2010 at 10:47:51PM +0100, Halim Sahin wrote:
> Hi,
> Have you tested knoppix / adriane system?
> It contains the latest stable version of sbl.
> 
> SBL is a console screenreader supporting speech and braille.
> It can be used also in braille or speech only mode.
> Unfortunately it isn't included in debian based systems yet.

The part of SBL I liked best when I first met it, was that it can
(appart from decent braille support via various interfaces) also
optionally navigate with keyboard-hotkeys ONLY, opposed to brltty which
seems to always need a braille device that not everyone can afford.

sbl supports profiles for different applications, so bash and elinks
will behave differently when using sbl. In elinks, only the links are
read by default, whereas in bash, the entire commandline and every
keystroke is being read, and in other orpgrams, other elements are
automatically read, depending on their ncurses attributes.

But maybe brltty can do this too in the recent versions. I have not
checked on brltty in a while.

> Sbl uses speech-dispatcher for speech output and uses the brl-daemon
> (included with sbl) for braille output.

This is the part where I came along speech-dispatcher first, otherwise
we would be still using direct oss audio output.

Regards
-Klaus