[Fedora-packaging] Accessibility packages (speech-dispatcher + speechd-up)

[Hynek Hanke]

Hello,

I'm a part of a group of developers of accessibility for blind and
visually impaired. We are working under the project www.freebsoft.org
and collaborating basically with all other projects in
Free Software accessibility. We are seeking help with RPM
packaging of several software components which are now widely
used by the handicaped community.

Basically, we have a package called Speech Dispatcher which
provides access to sound synthesizers via a high-level socket
interface SSIP (Speech Synthesis Interface Protocol). There
are several tools (clients of speech-dispatcher) already developed and
being used: speechd-el (accessibility to Emacs), speechd-up (interface
for the Speakup screen reader to software synthesis), driver for Gnome
Speech (Gnome accessibility technologies). Also, KDE is planning to
migrate its speech services to Speech Dispatcher (via KTTSD)
for the KDE4 release.

Especially the combination speech-dispatcher/speechd-up/Speakup
is used quite a lot by Fedora Core users. Today, Speakup together
with Emacspeak are the most widely used accessibility tools for
blind people on Free Software. This is the only combination
which allows users to use Speakup with software speech synthesis
(otherwise many users are using hardware devices too). Already there
are available Speakup patched kernel packages for Fedora
(Speakup, the console screen reader, works in the kernel). 

Many users have problems with compiling Speech Dispatcher
and SpeechD-Up from source code, but even more with setting up the rc
scripts and init.d startup (both packages are meant to be run as system
services). I believe the task of creating the packages is not difficult
for someone with knowledge of Fedora, our resources are however very
limited in accessibility and we are not using Fedora on our machines,
so we do not have the necessary experience here in Free-B-Soft.

Is there please somebody who would be kind enough to help
us and the users of our accessibility tools by creating and
maintaining at least these two packages? I can provide all
the support and guidance as a developer of these two packages.

I'm sorry if this is not the right place to ask. In such
case, please tell me where it would be more appropriate.

More information about Speech Dispatcher
	http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd
and SpeechD-Up
	http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd-up
as well as other accessibility tools from Free-B-Soft
	http://www.freebsoft.org/projects	

More information about the SpeakUp screen reader
	http://www.linux-speakup.org/

Thank you,
Hynek Hanke