Hi. As some of you might know, d-i already has some rudimentary support for people with disabilities. That currently includes speakup, a kernel patch to enable the usage of hardware based speech synthesizers during installation (connected via a serial port) and BRLTTY, a user-space solution to use a braille display (tactile reading) during installation. Both of those screen readers are currently included in the "access" floppy flavour. The boot image uses kernel-image-2.4.xx-speakup as a kernel, and the root image includes the brltty-udeb.
Unfortunately, something seems to have broken recently, and the currently generated access floppy images do not boot anymore. The boot floppy starts to load normally, and after some time, SYSLINUX reports: "Boot failed: Please change disks and press any key to continue." Since this is a syslinux error, I am a bit at a loss as to how to debug this. I am calling for help from anyone who might know why this is happening. It has definitely worked in the past, but since I don't have the time to retest the access flavour every week or so, I do not know when it actually broke. How to test? You might be asking: "How can I help without special hardware?" You can boot the access floppy flavour without any special accessibility hardware, just don't specify any speakup_synth/speakup_ser or brltty kernel boot options, you should get a normal text-based installation menu which uses the cdebconf-text frontend. If you've got any idea why boot fails and how this could be fixed, please let me know. It'd be sad if we would have to drop the access flavour again. What remains to be done: Future tasks for improving accessibility of d-i would be to generate an alternative initrd for CD booting which basically would mimick the access floppy configuration. Using image names, the user would be able to select normal install or accessibility enabled install from one and the same CD. I personally don't own a CD burner (yet?), so help in this direction would be welcome too. It is also probably the single most asked question by prospective blind users: "Can I boot from CD and still get accessibility support?" Why a special kernel? I've been asked several times in the past why speakup needs to be in its own kernel image and why I didn't try to get it into the standard debian kernel image. The explanation is fairly simple: speakup is a quite intrusive patch. Upstream has attempted to get it into mainline at several points in time in the past, but it wasn't accepted. I wouldn't want the Debian standard kernel to include the speakup patch because I do not trust it fully for anything other than desktop machines. -- Thanks for your help, Mario | Debian Developer <URL:http://debian.org/> | Get my public key via finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] | 1024D/7FC1A0854909BCCDBE6C102DDFFC022A6B113E44
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