This post walks through installing the screen-reader yasr and configuring it to use speech-dispatcher with a TTS engine.

This assumes you have successfully installed a stock OpenBSD system and that your user has doas access to install software.

Install required packages

First, install the requisite packages from the repos:

$ doas pkg_add speech-dispatcher espeak flite

Currently yasr isn't available as an OpenBSD package, but it's fairly easy to install. You should be able to obtain the source code from the yasr source repository.

$  git clone https://github.com/mgorse/yasr

$ cd yasr/yasr
$ make

Ensure that sound works

If you haven't already, make sure that your OpenBSD box can play audio. You can check this by using

$ aucat -i somefile.wav

aucat -i /usr/local/share/sounds/speech-dispatcher/test.wav

Set up speech-dispatcher

To create a user configuration file in ~/.config/speech-dispatcher/ use

$ spd-conf

The yasr screen-reader requires speech-dispatcher to listen on an inet socket rather than a Unix socket, so edit the config file with your favorite text editor and uncomment/change the CommunicationMethod from "unix_socket" to "inet_socket"

$ ed ~/.config/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf
/CommunicationMethod.*unix_socket
a
CommunicationMethod "inet_socket"
.

wq

Configure yasr

Copy the default yasr configuration file for modification:

$ cp ~/tmp/yasr-0.6.9/yasr.conf ~/.yasr.conf

• Comment out all the synthesizer=… lines except the synthesizer=speech dispatcher line, uncommenting that one
• Uncomment the synthesizer port=127.0.0.1:6560 line
• Set the shell=… to your preferred shell. OpenBSD doesn't install bash at /bin/bash so you'll either want to use /bin/ksh or, (if you have bash installed) /usr/local/bin/bash, or your preferred default shell.

Testing

It took me a bit to figure out that speech-dispatcher listens for a connection but times-out (by default, 5 seconds) and then quits. So you need to invoke it and then immediately launch yasr

$ speech-dispatcher && ~/tmp/yasr-0.6.9/yasr/yasr

Getting started with yasr

The ~/.yasr.conf file lists all of the keyboard commands for both normal/interactive mode (the default) and for review mode. Keys are given by ASCII value written in hex.

When you enter review-mode, commands go to yasr directly instead of being passed to the application.

I'm not quite sure what several of those do, but feel free to experiment with them.

Next steps

From here, you can tweak your yasr keyboard commands in your ~/.yasr.conf or change your speech-dispatcher settings in your ~/.config/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf and ~/.config/speech-dispatcher/modules/espeak.conf files.

You might copy/link the yasr binary into some place on your $PATH such as

$ mkdir ~/bin
$ ln -s ~/tmp/yasr-0.6.9/yasr/yasr ~/bin

If you're feeling adventuous and prefer flite you might try configuring speech-dispatcher to use that instead.

Finally, it helps to have a suite of applications that play nicely with text-to-speech output. A few you might want to try:

• Local mail: mail/mailx
• Remote mail: s-nail (available as a package)
• Calendar: remind (available as a package)
• Web-browsing: lynx or edbrowse
• RSS: rss2email or newsboat (both available as as packages)
• IRC: ii (available as a package) or tinyirc (not currently available as a package)
• Task management: taskwarrior or devtodo (both available as as packages)
• Music: cmus or mpd/mpc (both available as as packages)
• Terminal multiplexing: tmux or GNU screen (available as packages) It helps to either hide the status-bar or remove the clock so that it doesn't constantly spam you with time updates
• Games:
  • bsdgames collection
  • frotz interpreter for Infocom-style text adventures