Re: Cli-focused screen reader

[Adam Thompson <arthompson1990@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Sep 09, 2022 at 01:36:37PM -0500, Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 09, 2022 at 02:25:09PM -0400, Patrick Smyth wrote:
> > 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'm sure there's much better things out there and I look forward to seeing
> them listed here :)  But if I were to want this right now, I would write a
> brief wrapper to wrap around a shell, which writes fd 1 and 2 output to
> espeak.  (I've used espeak for several things like this, and love how easily
> i can switch the voice and accent and speed and pitch.)  I'd be curious
> however, for your use case, what you'd want to do about input.  Do you only
> want output to be spoken, or do you want each character spoken, or the input
> spoken when you hit return?  Also not sure whether you'd want stdout and
> stderr interwoven, or whether that depends on whether the command has exited
> or is interactive, etc.

It sounds like the use-case here is to run within a graphical environment
but with a terminal screenreader. In that case simply outputting the FDs
from a shell (although a nice idea) probably won't do since there'll be no
review functionality etc. Tbh, I usually just use a console for CLI stuff
and a graphical environment for graphical stuff and take the sub-optimal
experience in the cases where I need to have the two interact (I spend most
of my day job in the console so a CLI-optimised experience is preferable).

To the original question though, at least in Debian, I seem to remember
there's a python-speechd (or probably python3-speechd) package one can
install for the speech-dispatcher python API. If not, or if it's not in
Mint, does TDSR have a requirements.txt file? If so I'd try installing with
pip (or pip3 since I remember it being Python3) and let that do the hard
work.

As to whether this list is the right place, I remember there's another list
for general command-line stuff which I'm also subscribed to although I've
lost the subscription response and thus have totally forgotten the address.

Cheers,
Adam.