| Speakup project home: http://www.linux-speakup.org | |
| Mailing List: speakup@braille.uwo.ca | |
| Speakup is a kernel based screen review package for the linux operating | |
| system. It allows blind users to interact with applications on the | |
| linux console by means of synthetic speech. | |
| Currently, speakup has several issues we know of. | |
| The first issue has to do with the way speakup communicates with serial | |
| ports. Currently, we communicate directly with the hardware | |
| ports. This however conflicts with the standard serial port drivers, | |
| which poses various problems. This is also not working for modern hardware | |
| such as PCI-based serial ports. Also, there is not a way we can | |
| communicate with USB devices. The current serial port handling code is | |
| in serialio.c in this directory. | |
| Some places are currently using in_atomic() because speakup functions | |
| are called in various contexts, and a couple of things can't happen | |
| in these cases. Pushing work to some worker thread would probably help, | |
| as was already done for the serial port driving part. | |
| There is a duplication of the selection functions in selections.c. These | |
| functions should get exported from drivers/char/selection.c (clear_selection | |
| notably) and used from there instead. | |
| The kobjects may have to move to a more proper place in /sys. The | |
| discussion on lkml resulted to putting speech synthesizers in the | |
| "speech" class, and the speakup screen reader itself into | |
| /sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon0/speakup, the nasty path being handled by | |
| userland tools. | |
| Another issue seems to only happen on SMP systems. It seems | |
| that text in the output buffer gets garbled because a lock is not set. | |
| This bug happens regularly, but no one has been able to find a situation | |
| which produces it consistently. | |
| Patches, suggestions, corrections, etc, are definitely welcome. | |
| We prefer that you contact us on the mailing list; however, if you do | |
| not want to subscribe to a mailing list, send your email to all of the | |
| following: | |
| w.d.hubbs@gmail.com, chris@the-brannons.com, kirk@braille.uwo.ca and | |
| samuel.thibault@ens-lyon.org. | |