From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Jun 1 06:09:14 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 43E3316A50A for ; Fri, 1 Jun 2007 06:09:14 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from timothyk@wallnet.com) Received: from mail-gw5.njit.edu (mail-gw5.njit.edu [128.235.251.173]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 504AA13C4F4 for ; Fri, 1 Jun 2007 06:09:11 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from timothyk@wallnet.com) Received: from [128.235.18.1] (vpn18-1.njit.edu [128.235.18.1]) by mail-gw5.njit.edu (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id l515M0rF002599; Fri, 1 Jun 2007 01:22:02 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <465FACF6.5010906@wallnet.com> Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2007 01:21:58 -0400 From: Tim Kellers User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.12 (Windows/20070509) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: questions@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Tim Kellers Subject: Accessibility hardware for the blind X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2007 06:09:14 -0000 I'm teaching the Open Source Unix certification track at NJIT (using FreeBSD 6.2) to a group of physically challenged students. Some of my current students have extremely low vision and I have several candidates for the next rotation of the classes that have similar low-vision problems or are completely sightless. I need to know if an audio solution exists (in hardware or software) that will speak monitor output. I need something that will work independently of X windows. I've tried using gnopernicus in both KDE and Gnome and I've never gotten its audio component to work. I can turn on KDE's talking tools, but it only speaks commands and entered text in specific applications (like Koffice). I need a screen reader that will speak the entire screen (and terminal windows). I haven't found a software solution that addresses all the needs of a spoken command line environment so I'm looking for a hardware solution (appliance or device) that will speak the screen, but I haven't found one, yet. One of my students was an employee of AT&T in their Unix division in NJ and is considering a job-offer from a consultant who will need him to administer servers using WebMin and a command line environment, but screen readers such as JAWS that work under Windows, do a poor job of interpreting WebMin and will not read the I/O from a terminal window created by Putty. So, in addtion to needing something that will speak console I/O, I need something that will properly interpret a Webmin environment. One portion of the course does teach using Lynx as a browser and Webmin (if one uses the simplest theme) will work in that environment. Any ideas, experiences, or recommendations that you have to share would be very much appreciated. Tim Kellers CPE/NJIT