console screenreader (using /dev/input and /dev/vcsa)

[C.M. Brannon]

Tony Baechler <tony at baechler.net> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Rather than focusing your efforts on a screen reader specific to
> Linux, why not make it more portable?  It would be really, really nice
> to have a screen reader that runs under BSD for example.

Hi,
Have you looked at YASR?  YASR spawns a shell and uses a
pseudo-terminal to capture output and supply input to that shell.  I
think ptys are fairly portable, so YASR is portable as well.
YASR works quite nicely, IMHO, but I've only used it under Linux.
Its only limitation is that you have to be logged in as a user to
use it.  That may or may not be a limitation, depending on your point
of view.

The use case I have in mind is as follows.
Speech-enable the console during the lifetime of the system for which
user-mode processes may run.
I.E., the screenreader could start executing shortly after the init
process has started.  It runs as a daemon, probably started by a
script under /etc/init.d.
Login prompts and kernel messages sent to the console are
speech-enabled.

Is there any way to realize this goal portably, using facilities
provided by POSIX or other standards?

-- Chris