speakup 
=======

speakup is a kernel-based speech synthesizer driver suite for Linux. It drives
various serial-based and ISA-based synthesizer hardware, as well as providing
an interface for driving software-based synthesizers in userspace.

For installation instructions, see INSTALLATION.
For usage documentation, see the files in the doc/ subdirectory.

This release is intended to apply against Linux 2.6.26 or later.

Homepage: http://www.linux-speakup.org
Support is provided through a mailing list on the above site.

Usage
=====

There are different ways that speakup can be configured, but the most common
is building speakup and the synth drivers as modules. At this point it is just
a case of using modprobe to load a synth module driver, which will pull in
the speakup core as a dependency, e.g.:

	modprobe speakup_soft

Further user documentation can be found in the doc/ subdirectory, specifically
doc/spkguide.txt. Some information here may be out of date, corrections are
accepted.

Implementation
==============

As mentioned above, speakup is implemented as a series of kernel drivers.
Usually this kind of thing would be kept purely in userspace, however by
implementing it this way, blind people would be excluded from kernel
development and other low-level activities due to not being able to 'see'
the early boot messages, kernel crash dumps, etc.

The long term plan is for kernel inclusion, but the kernel developers may
decide that this kind of functionality should be kept out of the kernel for
purely technical reasons.

Like the Linux kernel speakup is maintaned in a git repository which
can be retrieved from http://linux-speakup.org with the command:

git clone http://linux-speakup.org/speakup.git