[Wylug-discuss] Visually impaired newbie requests help

[Dave Fisher]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 11:02:24AM +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> At last night's Hudlug meeting we had a visually impaired newbie.  None of us 
> had sufficient knowledge to be able to help him much, and it was suggested 
> that he came to Leeds next Monday, which he hopes to do.
> 
> He used to have a hardware speech synthesiser, IIUC, but is hoping to work 
> with speech via soundcare/speakers.  Gnopernicus was mentioned, and oralux.  
> If anyone has knowledge of these or any other distro and/or technology that 
> can help, could you please be available to speak to him next Monday?  Thanks

Hi Anne,

I'll try to attend and to take a run through Oralinux and Gnopernicus
before doing so, but I've yet to see anything like a click-and-go
solution for Linux.  

I've done a bit of teaching and consulting on web accessibility, but I've
no great experience of driving Linux by sound (have done the usual Jaws
stuff on Windows).

It's something I've been trying to get into, but to tell you the truth,
it's been pretty difficult to even get started.  

I don't have access to a hardware speech synthesiser and I've yet to
find a software synthesiser approach which takes less than a weekend to
configure on my Debian or Ubuntu systems, i.e. I've not yet been able to
put aside an entire week to collate, then work through all of the
disparate scraps of 'notes' and bloggery that constitute the
'documentation'. 

I believe that there are RPMs for Emacspeak and the IBM Via Voice speech
synthesiser which can form the core of a sound driven system, but the
last time I looked they were packaged for ancient (pre-RHEL) versions of
Red Hat (no use to me, and maybe not much use to anyone else).

At the end of my last wasted weekend following the Emacspeak Howto, I
resolved to evaluate Oralinux before trying anything else.  Since I now
have a motivation to do so quickly, I'll try my best to bring something
useful to the meeting.

Both the Oralinux distro and, especially, the Gnopernicus interface for
Gnome are far from mature.  As usual, they are just 2 of the more
promising projects among a vast ocean of wheel re-inventing initatives.
What the community really needs are programmers who are clever enough to
integrate and package the useful stuff that already exists and works in
isolation.

If there is anyone else in WYLUG with an interest in doing something
about this stuff, please get in touch to see if there is anything
practical we can do to improve the situation.

Dave
http://training.gbdirect.co.uk/courses/web/website_accessibility.html