Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1998 01:08:00 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith) Cc: pvernon@purdue.edu, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, max@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Accessability (was Re: question) Message-ID: <199807240108.SAA22750@usr06.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199807232134.OAA01224@dingo.cdrom.com> from "Mike Smith" at Jul 23, 98 02:34:30 pm
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> Max; I copied you on this because if anyone knows about how to make this > happen, you do. > > > I want to install 2.2.7 on one of my machines. I have to install it over a > > serial port because I am blind and need to read the screen during install. > > My speech software runs under dos. Thus, i must install it on my new > > machine from my dos box. I'm not sure how to install it on a machine im not > > physically at. > > FreeBSD supports using the first serial port on your system as the > console port. If you don't have a video card in the system, it will > use the serial port instead. > > Then you simply connect the serial port from the FreeBSD system to your > DOS system, and use a DOS terminal program to provide you with a > console. It seems that it would be a good idea to provide some way to invoke this with as little work as possible from a boot floppy. It would also be a good idea to start thinking in terms of accessibility functions for the console, the keyboard driver, and Free-B.S.D. in general. One project might be a text to pc audio speech tool. The ones which are freely avilable tend to sound like Norwegian fisher-men, but would be years better than what we have now, which is nothing. Another project might be adding code to the sys-cons driver so that when a shift or alt or control key is held down a long time, the user is asked if they want to turn on accessability options. For the keyboard driver this would be sticky modifier keys for shift or alt or control. This would allow people with limited ability to use a keyboard to use Free-B.S.D.. Other options would be to ignore brief keystrokes, or repeated keystrokes which occur within a time window that makes it likely the repetition was a mistake, or even toned when caps lock, num lock, scroll lock, or a sticky key is toggled; perhaps rising tone on enable, falling tone on disable. Or it could speak the state, like "caps lock on". For the hearing imparied, support for a visual bell is necessary. For focal impairment, pan-and-scan magnification and high contrast such as high intensity white (15) instead of normal intesity white (7) would be helpful. For color impairment, and to aid in contrast for focal impariment, the ability to use the software without any color would be useful. You could also automatically disable the accessibility options after a set period, such as when the screen saver kicks in. Notification messages and tones or speech when features are enabled and disabled would be generally useful. As icing on the cake, the "SerialKey" standard specifies a method of accessing keyboard and mouse controls through a designated serial port, usually at 300 baud. Finally, a number of blind programmers I know use pin-reader devices which are optically coupled to allow them to use X windows. It would be useful to provide some mouse-based access to a magnified pin frig region under the mouse cursor for these devices. The devices can also be serially interfaced. The method of connection would have to be a daemon on the serial port the device is connected to that has access to the linear frame buffer. Because X allows X-Grab-Server(), it is not sufficient for this to be a normal X application, since it would need to work for user login, etc.. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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