[BRLTTY] introduction

[kendell clark]

hi list
My name is kendell clark, and I am a co developer of a linux
distribution specifically designed for the blind and visually impaired
called sonar gnu linux.  Myself, along with Kyle Brouhard and Jonathan
Nadeau develop this manjaro based linux distribution. I wanted to
introduce myself and begin contributing to the brltty project. We've
been trying to replace speakup with brltty as the console screen reader
for a few weeks now. I've run into a couple of minor problems, and I was
hoping for a little help. To start with, It's pretty easy to get brltty
to speak on startup, but upon logging in, all speech stops. I'm hoping
this isn't the same error that affects speakup. Does anyone know how to
review the screen using the keyboard? I don't own a braille display, so
I'm hoping screen review via the keyboard is possible. The other
question is this. I've been trying to enable the speech-dispatcher
brltty speech module. Brltty errors out, saying it can't load the shared
library. According to the readme in the source code, brltty will build
it's speech-dispatcher module if speech-dispatcher is found when it's
built, but I can't seem to get this to work. My last question is about
brltty's espeak speech plugin. Espeak was recently forked into a project
called espeak ng. Would it be possible to add support for this fork?
Normally you wouldn't need to modify the plugin but for some reason the
espeak plugin doesn't work with the fork. I'd also like espeak varients
and voices (languages) to be selectable in brltty. Is this possible?
Please forgive all my questions, I'm completely new to brltty and don't
really understand how it works yet. If this is already covered in the
documentation, point me to it and I'll gladly go through it. I don't
know c code very well, but I am learning it so I can help you guys out.
This is a fantastic program and I want to personally thank everyone who
contributes to it for making it free software.
Thanks
Kendell Clark