Okay, so I just have to rant about something that I think is going to hold the Linux Desktop back a bit, especially for blind users. That is config files. Specifically, editing some file that's got no kind of linter, or checker, to make sure that whatever the user put in it works and doesn't leave one without speech.

So, this is specifically about the Speech dispatcher, which is a package in Linux a bit like Microsoft's SAPI. Of course, there's that new one, Spiel, that's being worked on, but I've not tried it yet. So, you can run spd-conf to set up a config file, but a lot of folks tell me that, in order to increase the default speech rate for stuff like games that use speech-dispatcher, web apps that speak through speech-dispatcher, self-voicing apps, I'd have to edit the config file.

Now, that's not awful for me, I can do it. But there really, really needs to be a GUI for it. And if you ask *me* why I don't make it myself, I'll tell you that if it's so easy, you should have made it with the snap of *your* tallented fingers, instead of spending all that time being a reply-guy. Windows has a speech properties dialog. Mac has Spoken Content in System Settings. Linux should have something similar. And, if it turns out that there is and I just don't have the proper package installed, I'll gladly change my tune to "distros should have this installed by default."

I've also seen this in Emacs packages like Ellama, where you have to set up Emacs Lisp calls to the right function with the right parameters inside your usepackage block, and it's hard for me to figure out how to add the openAI-compatible service that I have to Ellama. And AI hasn't helped yet.

So, having things being customizable is amazing. It really is. There are so many keyboard configuration settings, for example, that I think blind people are going to love playing with. But goodness, there needs to be something to change your system TTS stuff, and hopefully one day we can have a command to turn on and off the screen, like the iOS screen curtain so we can maintain privacy.

#Linux #accessibility #blind #LinuxDesktop #foss #tts