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" (take your pick; it doesn't really matter much). It supports a number of synthesizers, although interfacing issues exist with some of them at the moment. Currently, yasr attempts to support the Speak-out, DEC-talk, BNS, Apollo, and DoubleTalk. 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. It is small enough to fit on a root disk if necessary (provided an Emacspeak server is not needed, of course). It 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. The current version should also run under FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Solaris (thanks to Rich Burridge for the Solaris port).

You can download version 0.6.9 of yasr (dated Feb. 2, 2008) here. You can also access the cvs repository by setting your CVSROOT to :pserver:anonymous@yasr.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/yasr.

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