From owner-freebsd-multimedia Tue Aug 5 18:36:43 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA18432 for multimedia-outgoing; Tue, 5 Aug 1997 18:36:43 -0700 (PDT) Received: from fallout.campusview.indiana.edu (fallout.campusview.indiana.edu [149.159.1.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA18423; Tue, 5 Aug 1997 18:36:36 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (jfieber@localhost) by fallout.campusview.indiana.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id UAA09671; Tue, 5 Aug 1997 20:36:03 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 5 Aug 1997 20:36:02 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber To: "Julian H. Stacey" cc: freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: blind In-Reply-To: <199708052117.XAA00893@wall.jhs.no_domain> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Tue, 5 Aug 1997, Julian H. Stacey wrote: > A retired ex programmer (Joe McB.) in Munich has gone blind ... > Does FreeBSD have any software available to let him work on a Unix box ? Check the mailing list archives. I believe the topic came up at some point in the past, but I only recall the discussion of theoretical software solutions (plus a sound card) as opposed to anything concrete, or anything employing specialized speech hardware. Hmm.... here is something if you don't mind living in emacs... http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/raman/emacspeak/emacspeak.html http://leb.net/blinux/ If you know *what* needs to be done (i.e. what constitutes a useful screen reader), actually implementing it shouldn't be that difficult. It seems to me that it should be possible to hack up window(1) or GNU screen to communicate with speech synthesis software or hardware. -john