Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 08:35:39 +0200 (MEST) From: Søren Schmidt <sos@sos.freebsd.dk> To: dcarmich@mcs.com (Douglas Carmichael) Cc: jkh@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Some ideas for accessibility in FreeBSD Message-ID: <199709260635.IAA01227@sos.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: <199709252316.SAA00219@dcarmich.pr.mcs.net> from Douglas Carmichael at "Sep 25, 97 06:16:55 pm"
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In reply to Douglas Carmichael who wrote:
> (These are just ideas, I can't implement them because I have no access to
> any of these alternate devices).
> 1) Patching the syscons and pcvt drivers to accept *input* from a
> serially-connected alternate input device and display on the standard
> display (a sort of "hybrid console"). For the functions needing two keys
> (e.g. VT switching), there should be an option in the kernel config file
> to only require one key.
That would be pretty easy, allthough some knowledge of the device will
be nessesary to make prober use of it..
> 2) Patch the console drivers to display on the normal console and take
> input from either the keyboard or a user-specified device but also
> shunt all output to a serial port (for speech synthesizers)
Looks more and more like normal & serial- console together, should be
easy to do by hacking the lowlevel console rutines..
> 2a) Utilize a speech synthesizing driver as an LKM which
> would utilize the user's existing sound card (preferably loaded in the 3rd
> stage boot)
I long ago looked at some code that could do this, but I had difficulty
understanding the sounds that came out of it :), Its not impossible
though, just not exactly easy...
> 3) Changing the X server to accept text from a non-keyboard
> input device (i.e. alternate keyboard, etc.)
That could be arranged.
> 4) Patching the console drivers to allow larger text for people with
> vision problems.
Syscons allready have a 40x25 mode, that produces larger text to some
extent, for even bigger test, a little changes will have to be made
to the drivers...
> 5) If the user selects it, use either simplified boot messages or sounds
> to signify which stage of the boot process has been reached.
Thats easy to do, just put in a call to the beeping function in one
of the console drivers and you're off...
Are you into makeing computers for handicapped people ??
It would be nice to have functionality to help out there...
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Søren Schmidt (sos@FreeBSD.org) FreeBSD Core Team
Even more code to hack -- will it ever end
..
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