From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (qmail 6638 invoked by uid 0); 10 Oct 1996 21:40:20 -0000 MBOX-Line: From nn201@cus.cam.ac.uk Thu Oct 10 23:39:21 1996 Received: (qmail 6459 invoked by uid 504); 10 Oct 1996 21:28:29 -0000 Received: (qmail 6445 invoked from smtpd); 10 Oct 1996 21:28:25 -0000 Received: from cublx2.cube.net (root@194.97.64.61) by goldfish.cube.net with SMTP; 10 Oct 1996 21:26:54 -0000 Received: from ursa.cus.cam.ac.uk ([131.111.8.6]) by cublx2.cube.net with SMTP id <24651-380>; Thu, 10 Oct 1996 16:58:12 +0200 Received: from nn201 by ursa.cus.cam.ac.uk with local (Exim 0.562 #1) id E0vBMVZ-00019R-00; Thu, 10 Oct 1996 15:54:45 +0100 Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 15:50:39 +0100 (BST) From: Nikhil Nair X-Sender: nn201@amasis.trin.cam.ac.uk To: michael malver cc: blinux-list@goldfish.cube.net Subject: UltraSonix scope and screen-reader issues (was: Re: UltraSonix screen-reader for X-windows available at BLINUX site) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII List-Id: On Wed, 9 Oct 1996, michael malver wrote: > pardon my ignorance. I am glad to see that we can use x-windows, > but will this program also support standard unix shells such as bash, or > tcsh? First, I'm no expert on UltraSonix, so take this with a pinch of salt .... My guess would be `no, unless you run them from inside X'. The reason I say this is that the techniques needed for the physical screen-reeading part are very different - on Linux you would use /dev/vcs* to read the screen outside X, but this varies between different platforms. They must have thought of this problem, though, so maybe I'm just being pessimistic ... > Also, are there plans to support other synthesizers? I use a > keynnote gold internal. I am pretty sure humanware would give the > documentation out to a programmer willing to attempt the task. I think this is the idea, once the port is done. Again, I'm not really in touch with the current project, but I can say that UltraSonix was designed to make this easy. > also, I have heard work of trying to make a talking shell for the > blind. This bothers me. I like bas, other may like tcsh, ksh, or whatever. > Why can't a screen reader be written that is independent of the shell? I'd be inclined to agree with you - IMHO Braille/speech access software should be completely independent of applications, shells etc. (not meaning to take anything away from EmacSpeak, but that may not help vi users much). Again, though, I'm afraid I don't actually know about this project ... Can someone else be more helpful here? Nikhil. -- Nikhil Nair Trinity College, Cambridge, England Tel.: +44 1223 368353 Email: nn201@cus.cam.ac.uk nnair@debian.org