Package: yasr (0.6.9-6)

General-purpose console screen reader

Yasr is a general-purpose console screen reader for GNU/Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The name "yasr" is an acronym that can stand for either "Yet Another Screen Reader" or "Your All-purpose Screen Reader".

Currently, yasr attempts to support the Speak-out, DEC-talk, BNS, Apollo, and DoubleTalk synthesizers. It is also able to communicate with Emacspeak servers and can thus be used with synthesizers not directly supported, such as Festival Lite (via eflite) or FreeTTS.

Yasr is written in C and works by opening a pseudo-terminal and running a shell, intercepting all input and output. It looks at the escape sequences being sent and maintains a virtual "window" containing what it believes to be on the screen. It thus does not use any features specific to Linux and can be ported to other Unix-like operating systems without too much trouble.