Cli-focused screen reader

[Patrick Smyth <patricksmyth@fastmail.com>]

Hi all,

Apologies if this is a basic or trivial question, but I wanted to 
ask about setting up screen readers for the command line on Linux. 
I am using Linux Mint (functionally Ubuntu LTS), and while I can 
use Orca to read X11 terminals, it's quite slow and annoying to 
use, and I'd prefer something specific to the terminal. I'm also 
pretty happy with speakup when I drop out of the graphical 
interface, so not looking for anything there.

I've tried a couple command-line specific screen readers, and I've 
had a lot of trouble getting them to work. The two I've tried 
recently are tdsr (https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr) and fenrir 
(https://github.com/chrys87/fenrir). Setting aside Fenrir, since 
the setup is a lot more involved, when I run tdsr I get the 
following error

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'speechd'

I have speech dispatcher installed with aptitude (apt-get install 
speech-dispatcher). I downloaded the speech dispatcher project 
from GitHub and tried importing the Python API, but it gives me a 
circular import issue. Here's the speech dispatcher repo on 
GitHub, there's a clients folder with a Python library: 
https://github.com/brailcom/speechd

If people have gotten speech dispatcher for Python or the tdsr 
screen reader working, I'd appreciate any guidance. If people are 
more familiar with fenrir, I can try to articulate where I'm stuck 
with that, but it's significantly more involved as a setup 
process. And apologies if edbrowse isn't the place for this kind 
of question, though it seems fairly likely some of us are using 
CLI screen readers in this community.

Thanks, and hope you have a good end of the week!


Best,
Patrick