Hello,

I'm a part of a group of developers of accessibility for blind and visually impaired. We are working under the project www.freebsoft.org and collaborating basically with all other projects in Free Software accessibility. We are seeking help with RPM packaging of several software components which are now widely used by the handicaped community.

Basically, we have a package called Speech Dispatcher which provides access to sound synthesizers via a high-level socket interface SSIP (Speech Synthesis Interface Protocol). There are several tools (clients of speech-dispatcher) already developed and being used: speechd-el (accessibility to Emacs), speechd-up (interface for the Speakup screen reader to software synthesis), driver for Gnome Speech (Gnome accessibility technologies). Also, KDE is planning to migrate its speech services to Speech Dispatcher (via KTTSD) for the KDE4 release.

Especially the combination speech-dispatcher/speechd-up/Speakup is used quite a lot by Fedora Core users. Today, Speakup together with Emacspeak are the most widely used accessibility tools for blind people on Free Software. This is the only combination which allows users to use Speakup with software speech synthesis (otherwise many users are using hardware devices too). Already there are available Speakup patched kernel packages for Fedora (Speakup, the console screen reader, works in the kernel).

Many users have problems with compiling Speech Dispatcher and SpeechD-Up from source code, but even more with setting up the rc scripts and init.d startup (both packages are meant to be run as system services). I believe the task of creating the packages is not difficult for someone with knowledge of Fedora, our resources are however very limited in accessibility and we are not using Fedora on our machines, so we do not have the necessary experience here in Free-B-Soft.

Is there please somebody who would be kind enough to help us and the users of our accessibility tools by creating and maintaining at least these two packages? I can provide all the support and guidance as a developer of these two packages.

I'm sorry if this is not the right place to ask. In such case, please tell me where it would be more appropriate.

More information about Speech Dispatcher http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd and SpeechD-Up http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd-up as well as other accessibility tools from Free-B-Soft http://www.freebsoft.org/projects

More information about the SpeakUp screen reader http://www.linux-speakup.org/

Thank you, Hynek Hanke