Speakup is a screen reader for Linux. Originally written by a blind person, speakup is a cool piece of software in more than one way:
- It entirely lives in kernel
- The only screen reader which starts speaking very early on during boot, before there is even the user space - some interesting techniques used to achieve that and we'll look into them!
- Speakup is also a driver which has to talk to hardware but it never directly talks to a physical port. Told you it's cool :)
- Currently in staging/ directory of mainline Linux kernel but on the verge of being moved out into kernel proper. So expect it in your main distros going forward
We'll cover the story of speakup, how it started and evolved to where it is now and where it's headed. Then we will try to cover some technical details which will touch some kernel internals too. In the end we'll look at speakup's development process and finally Q&A. Feel free to check out the slides deck for a more intelligent conversation during the talk.
