[Hudlug] lug meeting

[MICHAEL WEAVER]

I am pleased that Hud Lug does know that Linux can be used with speech 
access hence the demonstration of Oralux and answers to my questions.
I think though Linux in general needs to do lots more work for the Blind 
community to give more of an alternative to Windows in the area of software 
speech because it has only been recently that Speakup has been given the 
ability to support software synths despite the fact I think that hardware 
synths are near to or impossible to purchase in the UK and Braille displays 
are quite costly.
I also think the range of supported applications needs expanding as most 
work seems to be concentrated on Internet browsing which in one sense is no 
bad thing but it does neglect work on other applications ie Gnucash. 
Hopefully the future ability of Gnopernicus to support both Gnome and KDE 
may help push things as I have read on a mailinglist that Gnopernicus may be 
being developed to run in both graphical desktops which may expand the 
number of applications it will speak.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ben Fowler" <ben.the.mole at gmail.com>
To: "HudLUG - Huddersfield Linux User Group" <hudlug at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2006 3:18 PM
Subject: Re: [Hudlug] lug meeting


On 1/24/06, Paul Brook <paul at codesourcery.com> wrote:
> On Monday 16 January 2006 17:59, MICHAEL WEAVER wrote:
> > Hi!
> > Does anyone know if there will be a meeting next month?
>
> Sorry about that. With Hindsight we should have officially cancelled the
> meeting.
>
> The next meeting is Monday 6th Feb. I should be there.

Yes, and I will be coming to it, as well.

Michael, do you think that Linux in general and Hudlug in particular
does enough for, or is frinedly towards the visually impaired?

Something which we ought to do over the course of the next year is to
list and evaluate software and techniques available in Open Source
software specifically intended for people with a handicap of some
kind.

I do know that SuSE used to come with an installer that could be used
by a blind person, and emacs, (as one might anticipate) has a complete
audio desktop exempli gratia http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ .

Do you think that this idea is a good one?

In theory one might expect that source available software would be a
natural fit for assistive technologies, but I am fairly sure that
vendors strongly prefer closed source platforms for the reason that
their margins will be a lot larger. This is obviously a disappointing
state of affairs even if not a cause for concern.

I am sorry if you had a wasted trip last month, which I suppose
answers my question as to whether you value Hudlug, but today's
meeting will be taking place as planned.

I will put a list of dates in the Wiki.

Incidentally, the IEEE, Digital South Yorkshire and/or Yorkshire
Forward are keen to have a central or aggregated calendar for
significant LUG events and until recently a gentleman at WYLUG used to
do this.

Ben

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