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Can a blind person install and configure windows, iis, SQL server, exchange, and active directory?

Once your favorite OSS tool is installed can a blind person use them?

For the people with hearing problems, I think a well designed GUI is the key. We take 70% of our input visually, so it should be easier to overcome the dificulties of a hearing impaired user than those of a user with vision problems.

For those with vision problems, I've found quite a few links on software that will definitely help out. I'd suggest going with Linux because you can write your own stuff or customize something that's already written much easier.
BLINUX
General
ORALUX
ZipSpeak

As far as making an OS from scratch for people with different needs, here's what I'd do: I'd make native support for ASP.net applications. The user would only get HTML output from any program they use, but with different interaction capabilities than the traditional web. HTML is already very sensitive to the needs of the visually and hearing impaired users, therefore, you'd be leveraging technology that already exists.

Mod parent up!

Speak-up sounds to me like a very good solution. If I suddenly went blind one day, I'd use that. :-)

Bill Haneman
Gnome Accessibility Project
FSG Accessibility Work Group
Sun Microsystems Inc.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/universalacce ss/ http://linux-speakup.org/ Both speakup and voiceover are free. Helps a lot when you can't afford the likes of Jaws.

Would it be possible with something like this? I've not played with either, so I don't know if this is a stupid question or not, just thought it was worth asking.

From a blog entry I wrote a few weeks ago:

I wanted to record a couple of radio shows so that I can listen to them later on my linux machine. Basically I would like to listen to a mix of realplayer, Windows Media, Ogg and MP3 streams and save them as mp3 or ogg files so I can listen to them later on my computer or iriver ogg/mp3 player.

First I tried mplayer's dumpstream command

1) mplayer -dumpfile cores -dumpstream http://wm.warnermusic.com/France/the_corrs/summer_ sunshine/video/Summer_Sunshine_video_458.wmv
(thi s will give you a file called "cores" in your home-directory)

2) mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm -aofile audio.wav cores
(this will convert the videofile to a wav audiofile)

3) lame audio.wav cores.mp3
(this will convert the file from wav to mp3)

However this process core dumped on realplayer recorder over 10 minutes. Also it doesn't know about ram files so you have to download them first (wget filename) and then open them to file the real link to the rm file. So I went on to look for some other tools.

Most of the tools seem to be wrappers around vsound and/or sox and lame/oggenc. Another tool I looked at is streamripper, which works for mp3 or ogg streams.

First I grabbed realcap which is a shell script front end to those tools. Downloaded, compiled and installed vsound.

Trick one - you have to ensure that realplayer is using OSS drivers
http://www.osl.iu.edu/~tveldhui/radio/

After that seemed to work I tried directly with vsound. vsound acts as a kind of virtual audio loopback cable ... it allows you to record the output audio stream of ... and line out jacks on the sound card.

vsound --timing -f myfile.wav realplay http://www.radio.org/ra/show.ram
oggenc myfile.wav

I also checked out the trplayer - which is a command line wrapper to realplayer. http://www.linux-speakup.org/trplayer.html

Got the error:
Failed to load rmacore.so.6.0: /usr/lib/RealPlayer8/Common/rmacore.so.6.0: Cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Well I figured out that they must be looking for the real player in /usr/lib when it was in /usr/local/ so I copied the directories over to where it wanted to find them and everything worked ok.

Also I tried out streamripper
http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/, which seemed to work fine ripping various streams. It didn't seem to be able to read the .m3u file so I had to download the m3u file with wget and look at it and then use streamripper http://url.ogg for it to work. Cool - now I can listen to the BBC and CBC and ABC (Australian Broadcasting) and Netherlands Broadcasting when I want to and where I want to.

Finally I had a look at mp3record - a bash shell wrapper for lame and sox
Basically it does this:
(sox -r $strFreqRate -t ossdsp -w -s /dev/dsp -t raw -c 2 -
| lame -s 44.1 -x -b $strBitRate -m s - $strFileName) &

Things to get working...
1) streaming directly to ogg with no intermediary wav step.
2) see if I can get this running from a cron job...

The Speakup Project produces a screen reader that is used in the above distro.

There is also a Knoppix based distro called Oralux, that will also support braille terminals (these are usually one line at a time vt100 emulators) connected to a serial port.

I know this does not solve the map problem, but this, along with Links, for example, will give any vision impaired person far more tools that are available in Windows, for instance.

The Speakup Project produces a screen reader that is used in the above distro.

There is also a Knoppix based distro called Oralux, that will also support braille terminals (these are usually one line at a time vt100 emulators) connected to a serial port.

I know this does not solve the map problem, but this, along with Links, for example, will give any vision impaired person far more tools that are available in Windows, for instance.

That's no excuse! There's now a speaking version of Emacs for the blind.

And for Vi users, in both Linux and Windows, there's screen reading software like Jaws and Speakup.

Blind != cut off from the text-based world

Like Speak Up you mean?

The following programs make the console accessible for blind people worth downloading. One of the administradors of the FreeNode is legally blind and use the first one:

SpeakUp
EmacSpeak

Actually, what occurs to me is that we should probably be including it as part of the Helix Player.

splay is admittedly pretty rudimentary player. There are better options if you don't mind doing a little work. A long time ago, trplayer, which is a more advanced commandline player for use by blind users and others with no need for graphical user interface. It's a little rusty, though, as it needs to be updated to use the latest interfaces. The author, Matthew Campbell, is no longer interested in developing it, and would happily turn it over to a new maintainer if someone emerged.

Hope this helps,
Rob Lanphier
Helix Troublemaker
RealNetworks

I've been doing this with a combination of trplayer and vsound for Real media programs. You can also buy content at audible. I've used them in the past, and it's a good service. If they supported Linux, I'd still be using them.

TRPlayer

thor

A group of individuals has put together a kernel-based speech output system that works with several distros and is available precompiled on bootable floppies and CD's. The installation will speak provided their is a supported hardware synthesizer present. Check the Speakup Homepage for more information.

I myself was thinking of using Debian, but I never heard of Festival... I'll definately look it up though.

Festival is a speech synthesis system. Under Debian, just type "apt-get install festival festival-doc" (and festival-dev if you want to use it in your own programs). It has a nice built-in Scheme-based command interpreter.

I think Debian is a great choice for vision impaired users. Take a look at the Debian Accessibility Project and Accessibility HOWTO. There are even speakup enabled boot floppies for Woody (Debian 3.0, the current stable version).

Also, take a look at BrlSpeak, a Braille and Speech Mini-Distribution of GNU/Linux. It is based on Debian, developed by Osvaldo La Rosa, visually impaired Debian user. Let me quote the website:

Objective:
BrlSpeak is here to make life easier for blind people who wish to install a GNU/Linux distribution on their computer WITHOUT ANY assistance from a sighted person. The objective is to create and develop a blindfriendly GNU/Linux distribution enabling a blind user:
a) To preconfigure the braille driver config file before running GNU/Linux
b) To compile the braille driver without having to see (or to hear)
c) To have the braille display immediately operational when booting GNU/Linux for the first time

BrlSpeak can be installed on a FAT partition. There's a 36MB .zip file or CD ISO9660 image for download.

There's also Free(b)deb, a Free(b)soft's specialized linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux. From the website:

The goal of the Free(b)deb project is to provide a specialized distribution of complete Debian GNU/Linux operating system including specialized software, which enables blind and visually impaired users to work with computer.

However I'm not sure how to install it and where to download it from.

(I don't talk about Blinux, as it has already been mentioned in the story.)

Good luck.

For some free options, the IBM Home Page Reader has a free 30 day trial. Also, there's the Speakup Project which works for linux; I'm not sure how it works for web browsers... There's also BLYNX, and many others you should be able to find with google.

The Text-Mode RealMedia Player (TRPlayer) is a RealMedia player for Unix which has a command-line interface. It can play RealAudio, RealVideo, MP3, and all other media types supported by RealPlayer under Unix. TRPlayer was designed especially for blind Unix users, who don't yet have access to the graphical user interface. However, it is also useful to others; it is a good tool for background audio playback and for use on low-end hardware, such as Intel 486-based PC's.

Simply pipe this thru your favorite mp3/ogg encoder. You may need to use a cheap x86 Linux box, as OS X isn't supported by Real (yet).

next

I've been somewhat in disagreement with the "google trolls" in the past, but this askslashdot is rediculous, you could even use a lame search engine. There's support for a talking linux console for blind, and let's face it, a GUI isn't the best way to go for blind people.

What Is Speakup?
As mentioned previously, Speakup is a screen reader for the Linux operating system. One of the things which makes Speakup different from more traditional screen readers is that it is patched into the kernel. To explain what this means, Speakup is an integral part of the operating system. This means that when you turn on your computer and Linux starts, Speakup also starts, meaning you can hear all boot-up messages, and resolve any problems related to the computer not reaching the login prompt. In addition, when you shutdown your system you will receive speech feedback right until the message "Power down" is given, indicating you should turn off your computer.
The official Speakup home page is at linux-speakup.org

Deaf people? give me a break, scince when did computers need hearing? Sound is cool, but not at all nessesary.

Linux Speakup is an organiztion of blind folks who 'like to mess around with linux'. This is one type of software to help the (visually) impaired. A gentlemen on one of the mailinglists I subscribe to uses this package, and claims it works well. It must work at least half way decent if he's able to be on a mailinglist, and offer all the knowledge that he has, which is quite extensive.

What Is Speakup?

As mentioned previously, Speakup is a screen reader for the Linux
operating system. One of the things which makes Speakup different from
more traditional screen readers is that it is patched into the kernel. To
explain what this means, Speakup is an integral part of the operating
system. This means that when you turn on your computer and Linux starts,
Speakup also starts, meaning you can hear all boot-up messages, and
resolve any problems related to the computer not reaching the login
prompt. In addition, when you shutdown your system you will receive speech
feedback right until the message "Power down" is given, indicating you
should turn off your computer.