From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Sep 25 16:13:54 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id QAA20682 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 25 Sep 1997 16:13:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: from dcarmich.pr.mcs.net (dcarmich.pr.mcs.net [204.95.63.202]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA20676; Thu, 25 Sep 1997 16:13:47 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from dcarmich@localhost) by dcarmich.pr.mcs.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA00219; Thu, 25 Sep 1997 18:16:56 -0500 (CDT) From: Douglas Carmichael Message-Id: <199709252316.SAA00219@dcarmich.pr.mcs.net> Subject: Some ideas for accessibility in FreeBSD To: jkh@freebsd.org Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 18:16:55 -0500 (CDT) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL31H (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk (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. 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) 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) 3) Changing the X server to accept text from a non-keyboard input device (i.e. alternate keyboard, etc.) 4) Patching the console drivers to allow larger text for people with vision problems. 5) If the user selects it, use either simplified boot messages or sounds to signify which stage of the boot process has been reached. (Any more ideas?)