Domain: linux-speakup.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to linux-speakup.org.
Comments · 22
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Re:Gimme, Gimme, Gimme
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?
Some type of assistive technology (AT) is generally present which helps in providing access to the UI (Speakup for the Linux console, JAWS for the Windows GUI, Gnopernicus for Gnome (which is still in development as far as I know), etc.) If the appropriate AT is installed and working properly, tasks such as those listed above aren't an issue.
Interestingly enough, speaking as someone who is blind, it was much easier to install Linux given that Speakup can be made available as a part of the kernel providing speech almost from the moment it loads. Windows screen reading packages such as JAWS must be installed after the OS, and Narrator (a minimal screen reading tool built into Windows XP) isn't actually made available until 95% of the installation process has completed. -
sure, use Linux
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. -
Re:OS X and Linux are great alternatives.
Mod parent up!
Speak-up sounds to me like a very good solution. If I suddenly went blind one day, I'd use that. :-) -
Re:OS X and Linux are great alternatives.As well as SpeakUp (http://www.linux-speakup.org/) and EmacsSpeak (http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/) which give voice access to the Linux console and console applications, newer Linux releases include api-based assistive technology support for applications that use gtk+, mozilla, or Java... via an interface called "AT-SPI" (http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/at-spi/in
d ex.html) which very much resembles (but predates) the accessibility APIs used in OSX.
Support for AT-SPI in Qt is slated for a future release of KDE/Qt.
New versions of the Gnome desktop include the built-in gnopernicus screenreader and magnifier, which supports speech, braille, and magnification (http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html), and the gok suite of dynamic onscreen keyboards too (http://www.gok.ca./ There's also another free (as in freedom) screenreader available from ftp.gnome.org, called "orca" - it's a less full-featured offering, but it has scripting capabilities that make it interesting to hackers, and it's written in python.
There are also some speech and magnification utilities included with KDE, thanks to the "KDE Accessibility Project", though they are currently more limited in scope. When support for the AT-SPI is available for KDE apps, all the assistive technologies written to this api should interoperate nicely. I believe that there may be a talking version of konqueror already. There are also projects that provide talking plugins for Mozilla.
Since the GUI-based Linux [and Solaris :-)] accessibility technologies are still in their early days, end users are still likely to have a somewhat bumpier ride than users of established screenreaders like JAWS for Windows - but at last blind and low-vision users have significant access to the graphical Linux desktop. In particular, the web browsing experience requires a patched Mozilla for best results - Sun has produced such a version and makes periodic tarballs available.
Provided the distros recognize the value in all this, we can expect improved testing and support in upcoming Linux distributions.
There is a mailing list available for early adopters of this technology: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-acces sibility-list
Bill Haneman
Gnome Accessibility Project
FSG Accessibility Work Group
Sun Microsystems Inc. -
OS X and Linux are great alternatives.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/universalacc
e ss/ http://linux-speakup.org/ Both speakup and voiceover are free. Helps a lot when you can't afford the likes of Jaws. -
Re:Dude, you're gettin a Squeezebox!
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.
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Recording Realaudio, WMF, OGG & MP3 Radio stre
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... -
For the blind or near-blindFor some years now, there has been at least one Linux distribution. Zipspeak is a variant of zipslack (Slackware for UMSDOS)that supports several voice synth cards.
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.
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For the blind or near-blindFor some years now, there has been at least one Linux distribution. Zipspeak is a variant of zipslack (Slackware for UMSDOS)that supports several voice synth cards.
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.
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Re:It's not that there isn't work in IT...
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Re:You know what this means, folks...
Like Speak Up you mean?
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Free and Open Source Software for Blind people
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Command-line RealAudio player: Helix DNA ClientYour best bet for a command line player is "splay", which is available as part of the Helix DNA Client. Now that we have the Helix Player, we're not doing QA'd releases of splay, but there are nightly builds of it available. Information on building it from source is available here. I'm hoping that that player doesn't have any unnecessary dependencies on X. If it does, you may have to compile from source to get a player without that (we've got tons of build options to turn features off). Also, IIRC, we've even got a framebuffer implementation for video checked in somewhere, so video sans X may be possible.
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 -
Re:No, TivoRadio is what we need!
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TRPlayer?!?
TRPlayer
thor -
Speakup
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.
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Debian (Re:Any distro will do..)
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 timeBrlSpeak 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.
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Re:Why buy the book...
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.
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textmode realplayer for unixSince Real Audio is (apparently) the most common format
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
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Duh! use google.
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
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.
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Speakup?What about Speakup?
From the README:
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.
It's apparently included in Slackware 8 (Which is where I got this.)