Re: [orca-list] OT: Best console screen reader for roguelikes?

[Alexander Epaneshnikov <aarnaarn2 gmail com>]

15.01.2021 21:15, Mewtamer via orca-list writes:
> Even with a console screen reader, I haven't had much luck with the
> few console rogue-likes I've tried.
>
> I think part of the problem is that rogue-likes tend to represent the
> dungeon map on-screen as a grid of ascii characters with empty floor
> tiles represented as white space while most console screen readers are
> designed primarily for reading plain text. Reading whole rows of such
> a map often doesn't parse well, especially with the asumption that
> whitespace is unvoiced, and while it would be useful to be able to
> read character-by-character up and down columns and not just
> left-and-right across rows, or to have the screen position of the
> character under the reading cursor spoken, to my knowledge, no console
> screen reader provides either of these functions.

some clarifications. the floor cells in rogelikes are most often 
indicated by a dot symbol. empty cells mean areas invisible to the 
character.
also the coordinates of the character on the screen can be found using 
speakup + del


> That said, regarding options for console screen readers:
>
> Speakup is probably the most widely used console screen reader,
> usually with espeakup acting as a bridge between it, the user, and
> espeak(-ng). Alternatively, I believe speechdup can serve as a bridge
> between speakup and speech dispatcher, allowing the use of any tts
> engine with a speech dispatcher module. That said, unless things have
> changed, speakup is stuck in the Linux Kernel's staging tree and isn't
> available by default on distros with a blanket no staging policy for
> the kernel packages they ship. I believe the main offenders in this
> regard are Fedora and some other RedHat-Family distros.

things are certainly changed. starting from 5.9 kernel speakup is in 
main tree.

--

Sincerely, Alexander.