SBL

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Tony Baechler here.

While this looks interesting, I see a few major problems:

1. It only supports a few speech synths. It looks like Mbrola is the only 
software speech. You can't even use ESpeak.

2. It requires a patched 2.2 kernel. Version 2.2 is rather ancient and long 
since dead. I didn't see a way in my quick reading of the docs to use newer 
kernels.

3. The last git commit was from 2013. I'm a little concerned when I see 
things like "not tested."

On 4/26/2017 3:43 PM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> I am a sbl user since one of the first releases and I still like this screenreader very much. Many features are also in brltty, but sbl has some nice features that brltty does still not have:
>
> - automatic profile switching
> - free configurable keyboard layout and other settings for every profile
>
> sbl is not using a kernel module, it is running as a deamon process.
>
>
> I
>> wouldn't hold out much hope if it's only available as a binary RPM
>> and the .deb in Knoppix though.
>
> You can get the sbl sources from
>
> http://openblinux.de.
>
> And yes, you are right, that sbl is not maintained very much during the last years. This does not mean, that it is old and useless, I still can use sbl on actual linux distros. But sbl does not support that many braille devices then brltty does, which is the biggest disadvantage of sbl IMHO currently, all other features are still good and some should be ported to brltty :-).