path: root/Documentation/admin-guide/spkguide.txt

The Speakup User's Guide
For Speakup 3.1.2 and Later
By Gene Collins
Updated by others
Last modified on Mon Sep 27 14:26:31 2010
Document version 1.3

Copyright (c) 2005  Gene Collins
Copyright (c) 2008, 2023  Samuel Thibault
Copyright (c) 2009, 2010  the Speakup Team

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A
copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free
Documentation License".

Preface

The purpose of this document is to familiarize users with the user
interface to Speakup, a Linux Screen Reader.  If you need instructions
for installing or obtaining Speakup, visit the web site at
http://linux-speakup.org/.  Speakup is a set of patches to the standard
Linux kernel source tree.  It can be built as a series of modules, or as
a part of a monolithic kernel.  These details are beyond the scope of
this manual, but the user may need to be aware of the module
capabilities, depending on how your system administrator has installed
Speakup.  If Speakup is built as a part of a monolithic kernel, and the
user is using a hardware synthesizer, then Speakup will be able to
provide speech access from the time the kernel is loaded, until the time
the system is shutdown.  This means that if you have obtained Linux
installation media for a distribution which includes Speakup as a part
of its kernel, you will be able, as a blind person, to install Linux
with speech access unaided by a sighted person.  Again, these details
are beyond the scope of this manual, but the user should be aware of
them.  See the web site mentioned above for further details.

1.  Starting Speakup

If your system administrator has installed Speakup to work with your
specific synthesizer by default, then all you need to do to use Speakup
is to boot your system, and Speakup should come up talking.  This
assumes of course  that your synthesizer is a supported hardware
synthesizer, and that it is either installed in or connected to your
system, and is if necessary powered on.

It is possible, however, that Speakup may have been compiled into the
kernel with no default synthesizer.  It is even possible that your
kernel has been compiled with support for some of the supported
synthesizers and not others.  If you find that this is the case, and
your synthesizer is supported but not available, complain to the person
who compiled and installed your kernel.  Or better yet, go to the web
site, and learn how to patch Speakup into your own kernel source, and
build and install your own kernel.

If your kernel has been compiled with Speakup, and has no default
synthesizer set, or you would like to use a different synthesizer than
the default one, then you may issue the following command at the boot
prompt of your boot loader.

linux speakup.synth=ltlk

This command would tell Speakup to look for and use a LiteTalk or
DoubleTalk LT at boot up.  You may replace the ltlk synthesizer keyword
with the keyword for whatever synthesizer you wish to use.  The
speakup.synth parameter will accept the following keywords, provided
that support for the related synthesizers has been built into the
kernel.

acntsa -- Accent SA
acntpc -- Accent PC
apollo -- Apollo
audptr -- Audapter
bns -- Braille 'n Speak
dectlk -- DecTalk Express (old and new, db9 serial only)
decext -- DecTalk (old) External
dtlk -- DoubleTalk PC
keypc -- Keynote Gold PC
ltlk -- DoubleTalk LT, LiteTalk, or external Tripletalk (db9 serial only)
spkout -- Speak Out
txprt -- Transport
dummy -- Plain text terminal

Note: Speakup does * NOT * support the internal Tripletalk!

Speakup does support two other synthesizers, but because they work in
conjunction with other software, they must be loaded as modules after
their related software is loaded, and so are not available at boot up.
These are as follows:

decpc --