Welcome to the speakup project for the Speakup speech package for Linux.

Speakup is written by Kirk Reiser and Andy Berdan.  It is licensed
under the GPL.  If you don't already know, the GPL stands for the GNU
General Public License.  Which basically states that this code is free to
copy, modify and distribute to anyone interested in playing with it.
The one thing you may not do is turn any part of it into proprietary
or commercial code without the permission of the author.  That's me.

If you are interested in being involved with the development of speech
output for Linux you can subscribe to the Speakup mailing list by
sending a message to speakup-request@braille.uwo.ca with the line: subscribe.  You can also subscribe by going to the speakup web page and following the links at http://www.linux-speakup.org.

We are at a very early stage in the development of this package.
Hopefully changes will happen often and many.  The current files in
this directory are:

DefaultKeyAssignments		# speakup's default review keys
INSTALLATION			#  for installing speakup from the tar ball.
README				# this file
keymap-tutorial			# a tutorial on how to layout the keyboard

Read the INSTALLATION file to learn how to apply the patches and the
default.map for the keyboard.  You should also read the Changes file.
It really has any new things I've added since last time.

There is no documentation in any of these files to instruct you what
to do if something goes wrong with the patching or compilation.  If
you would like that information you will need to subscribe to the
mailing list and ask for help, or write me kirk@braille.uwo.ca for
help.  I suggest the mailing list because I will probably tire quickly
of answering the same questions over and over.  You could always
decide to dig-in and take on the task, and write documentation to help
others.

There also is a speakup reflector for the Speak Freely package, which
many of us hang out on and discuss all sorts of topics from speakup
problems to ALSA driver installation and just about anything else
you'd like to talk about.  The reflector is at lwl.braille.uwo.ca:4074
with it's lwl page at lwl.braille.uwo.ca/speakup.html.  Come and join
us, it's fun!

Acknowledgements:

I am really very new at kernel hacking and screen review package
writing, so I have depended heavily on other folks kindness to help me
a long.  No doubt I will continue to abuse them freely and others
before this is a really good speech solution for Linux.  (Oh Well!,
somebody's got to do it.)

Theodore Ts'o.  He gave me a good discussion of unicode and UTF and
the like.  He doesn't even remember writing me about it.

Alan Cox.  He has answered many questions about scheduling and wait
queues and timers along with code fragments and so on.  I just wish I
understood it all totally.  He has also helped immensely in moving
this package toward inclusion in the standard kernel tree. (Maybe next
release!)

Martin Mares.  He pointed me in the right direction to figuring out
the colour attributes and other useful tidbits.

Paul McDermott.  He really is the catalyst for me to actually get
this all working.  Besides I like seeing him bounce around and get all
excited every time I have something new working.

John Covici, He was the first person to actually attempt writing
another synthesizer driver for speakup.  It was the Speakout driver so
it was also the first serial driver.

Brian Borowski, he was the first person to actually write a speakup
function other than Andy and I.

Jim Danley, he has more or less become my main man in helping test
code, add new features, bounce ideas off and generally become a good
friend.

Matt Campbell, he basically rewrote the drivers to be able to include
all synths in the kernel at the same time.  The distribution
maintainers appreciate him a lot as well.

Gene Collins, he was very helpful debugging the current release prior
to its public showing.  He has also worked hard educating others on
the list and writing the ALSA mini howto.

I would also like to really thank the folks that handle the
distribution packages.  I and many other people would not find access
to speakup nearly so convenient without their efforts.  They include
Bill Acker, Tom Moore, Matt Campbell, Joe Norton and Joshua Lambert.

There are probably many more I am forgetting right now.  I guess I'll
just have to add you all later.


Happy Hacking!

  Kirk

