[BRLTTY] SPEAK_NEXT_WORD and word boundaries in Debian Trixie

Eric Scheibler email at eric-scheibler.de
Fri Jan 2 08:18:33 UTC 2026


Hello,

I have a question about word boundary delimiters for speech output on Debian.

Previous behavior: The commands SPEAK_PREV_WORD and SPEAK_NEXT_WORD included among others the / as a word boundary delimiter.

    For example: % file /path/to/file.txt

Assume, that the speech cursor is positioned at the end of the line. After pressing SPEAK_PREV_WORD once, it would jump
backwards to the previous / and only speak the file name (file.txt) and so on.

After the dist-upgrade from Debian Bookworm to Trixie, the speech cursor takes the whole path as a single word, jumps
directly to the "new" word beginning (the first / before the SPACE) and speaks the whole path.

It's the same with other delimiter characters. For example the , and ; in a csv file.
If you have a line without SPACE like `abc,def,ghi,jkl` SPEAK_NEXT_WORD would jump over the whole line at once.

I would like to restore the previous behavior. But I'm not sure which component is responsible for this change. Which
setting does Brltty use to know, what defines a word boundary? Could you point me in the right direction please?

I use:
- Debian Trixie with kernel version 6.12.57+deb13-amd64
- Brltty version 6.7-3.1+deb13u2
- Speech-dispatcher with module espeak-ng version 0.12.0-5

Thank you!

Cheers
Eric


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