a very challenging question?

[Tim Chase]

I haven't tested FreeBSD running any accessibility software locally,
accessing FreeBSD boxes mostly via SSH. Speakup is a Linux-specific
set of patches and thus unavailable on FreeBSD.  But the Speech
Dispatcher daemon (speechd) appears to be in the FreeBSD ports
collection, as do both Festival and Flite soft-synths, along with
Orca and yasr.  Both Orca and yasr should be able to connect to
speechd, and that should be able to talk to either of the soft-synths
above or to any supported hardware synth.  I'm hoping to acquire an
older netbook that my sister-in-law intends to discard, in which case
I can try throwing FreeBSD on there and test accessibility options
but it might not be until sometime in the new year.

Regarding yasr and single consoles, might I recommend that you
investigate "tmux" or possibly GNU Screen?  You can spawn yasr, and
then as your first command, launch screen/tmux to multiplex multiple
sessions into that one screen-reader session.  One of the nice things
is that you can detach from your active session and then reattach via
SSH to have all your windows/shells as you left them.  Once you're
done accessing it remotely, you can detach, then reattach back within
yasr and everything is still as you left it.  It's awesomely powerful
and sounds like the perfect solution to your annoyance with the
single-console nature of yasr.  While yasr may be a bit old and
dusty, it's done most of what I've wanted to do when I've poked at it.

I wrote up a brief explanation/tutorial on tmux for the Raspberry VI
mailing list which Mike Ray posted at the wiki:

 http://www.raspberryvi.org/wiki/doku.php/tmux

If you have any more questions, I can't guarantee that I'd know the
answers, but I'd be more than happy to chase them down to the best of
my abilities (and hardware)

Hope this helps.

-tim


On December 23, 2014, Kyle wrote:
> I've wanted to play with FreeBSD or another sort of *real* BSD that
> hasn't been tainted by Apple for quite a few years. However, I am
> stopped thus far by a lack of a fully functional screen reader.
> GhostBSD is really nice, as it is said to run the MATE desktop now,
> but the problem is that Orca doesn't speak because of a Python
> conflict that causes it to fail to talk to speech-dispatcher. This
> would limit me to the command line, where the only full-featured
> screen readers run on Linux only as far as I am aware. Speakup is a
> set of modules that are specific to the Linux kernel, and SBL as
> far as I know only runs on Linux. The only other choice then would
> be YASR, which is rather old and is probably unmaintained now, and
> runs as a subshell rather than as a system daemon, so one must
> login without speech and run the YSR subshell manually in order to
> get a somewhat decent screen reader for only a single virtual
> console. This isn't really a problem if you intend to run your
> FreeBSD machine remotely over ssh or telnet, but it makes running
> it directly on your machine next to impossible. Please do correct
> me if I happen to be wrong, as I would immediately try to set it up
> here, at least on a virtual machine, and I could then support BSD
> as well as Linux in the computer business that I run. -- "Don't
> judge my disability until you are able to see my ability." ~Kyle:
> https://kyle.tk/ My chunk of the internet:
> https://chunkhost.com/r/Kyle
> 
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