[BRLTTY] introduction

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by kendell clark on 2016/03/19 at 10:13 -0500]

>It's pretty easy to get brltty to speak on startup, but upon logging in, all 
>speech stops.

Are you referring to logging in via a text console or via an X session?

You might try capturing a debug log so that you can gain more insight into 
what's going on. In this regard, there are two options that you should 
familiarize yourself with. One is -L (uppercase) which lets you specify the log 
file, and the other is -l (lowercase) which lets you specify what you want in 
the log. So, for example:

   -L/path/to/logfile -ldebug,speech,spkdrv

The "speech" log category logs core events related to speech, and the "spkdrv" 
log category logs events within the speech driver itself.

>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.

Brltty supports keyboard tables. These bind keyboard key combinations to brltty 
navigation functions. There are a few of them - the one named keypad supports 
the most functions. For a full description of what you can do with it:

   Go to: brltty.com
   Click on: Documentation
   Click on: Key Binding Lists
   Click on: Computer Keyboard Bindings
   Click on: Bindings for Keypad-based Navigation

You can enable a keyboard key table in a couple of ways. One is to use the -k 
command line option (e.g. -kkeypad). Anotehr is to specify it within 
brltty.conf, for example:

   keyboard-table keypad

>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.

When does it say that it can't load the shared library? From what you've 
written, it seems that it's saying this at run-time. If so, this implies very 
strongly that it did build the driver, but that the needed shared library can't 
be found at run-time.

Is it possible, for example, that you're starting brltty from an initrd that 
doesn't contain all of the neded shared libraries?

>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.

Again, we'd need to see a debug log in order to try to gain some insight as to 
what's going wrong. I trust you can appreciate that I'd rather not guess.

>I'd also like espeak varients and voices (languages) to be selectable in 
>brltty. Is this possible? 

Yes. The eSpeak speech driver already has a voice= parameter. More could easily 
be added.

-- 
Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | The Bible is the very Word of God.
Phone: 1-613-726-0014 | Ottawa, Ontario   | http://Mielke.cc/bible/
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