speakup 
=======

speakup is a kernel-based speech synthesizer driver suite for Linux. It drives
various USB-based, 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 be built against Linux 5.9 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 Some information here may be out of date, corrections are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

Updating the source
===================

This repository is following the Linux source. It should be kept up to date with
the following procedure:

- From a Linux clone:

  rm -f 00*
  git format-patch 568035b01cfb107af8d2e4bd2fb9aea22cf5b868..HEAD drivers/accessibility/speakup  Documentation/admin-guide/spkguide.txt

that produces the series of patches that were applied since last update.

- From the speakup repository, in the linux branch:

  git am 0001*

If needed, fix the merge and commit. Repeat for each patch.

Copy over the linux files and commit any difference. That can happen due to
merge commit fixes.

- From the speakup repository, in the next branch:

  git pull --rebase . linux

to merge the commits included in next, possibly just seeing that they were
applied in the Linux tree.

- From the speakup repository, in the submitted branch:

  git pull --rebase . next

to merge the commits submitted to next, possibly just seeing that they were
applied in the next tree.

- From the speakup repository, in the main branch:

  git pull . submitted

to eventually merge everything back into the main speakup tree.

- Update the git ID in the git format-patch command above, to the id of the last
  patch that was applied.