Well, after much testing and trying and tweaking of parameters... Rusty and I were able to get a somewhat working Linux installation last night. This e-mail is kind of lengthy, but if you can read through it, and if you have any ideas of suggestions to try or know of software that would help, we would appreciate your time. Thanks.
Rusty's "spare" machine, was an older Dell OptiPlex GX110, had a PIII CPU reporting in at 531.6 MHz. 384MB of RAM, it came with an on-board 3COM NIC, on-board Intel VGA (shared RAM) and a add-on SBLive! (emu10k1) sound card in a PCI slot. Hard drive was a 10.2Gb Barracuda. things we discovered while testing things out... 1: newer builds are better. a distro that is even a couple of months old is probably using older versions of the accessibility software. 2: knoppix/live cd's have limited ability to configure things, we had more luck just doing a fresh install of regular Ubuntu to the hard disk than using Knoppix. 3: distro installers don't use the braille/speech devices, (but should soon) what we ended up with was this: - attached Rusty's BrailleNote (laptop-type device with a Braille cell "display") via it's serial port to the COM 1 port (/dev/ttyS0) on the Ubuntu machine - installed Ubuntu 6.06 onto the Dell machine. everything auto-configured successfully, and it obtained a DHCP address from the router, and automatically looked for security updates, etc... everything was A-OK at this point with Ubuntu. - edited /etc/brltty.conf to uncomment the entry for "braille-driver bn" (bn == braillenote which is Rusty's braille reader device) and uncommented the entry for "braille-device ttyS0" -- also uncommented the "contraction-table" section for grade 2 contractions (a braille type of english contractions) essentially, the command-line for brltty to start up at this point would look like: " /sbin/brltty -bbn -dttyS0 -cen-us-g2 " - commented out the "exit 0" line in the /etc/init.d/brltty startup script, which essentially was preventing brltty from starting. also created the symlink to /etc/rc2.d/S20brltty so it would startup automatically - at this point, rebooting ubuntu and brltty starts up, sees the BrailleNote as a remote terminal device. If the login process were to stop at a text console login prompt, essentially the BrailleNote would show "login: ", and if he were logged in, the BrailleNote would be displaying "ubu...@ubuntu:~$: " so the brltty software was working. (It was kind of fun watching the braille cells pop up and down when ubuntu was powering down. All those successive lines of "Stopping Printing System..... [ OK ]" were printing out to the BrailleNote as each app was being stopped, until the one which reads "Sending TERM signal to all processes..." of course brltty was killed at that point. - the chorded braille keys from the BrailleNote device to the Ubuntu system were not being interpreted by the text console. I think the BrailleNote is sending some kind of Unicode or something, and we didn't find a console keyboard driver that would accept the braille keys output. A standard PS/2 or USB PC keyboard works well, however, so using the two devices together, Rusty could do command-line Linux. It may also be able to configure the BrailleNote terminal application to send plain ASCII characters, but we don't know yet about that. - the graphical login prompt (gdm?) does not send anything to brltty, nor can you configure it to beep when it is ready for a user to login. Rusty is able to wait until the hard drive stops being accessed for a few seconds and type in his username, press enter, type in his user's password, and press enter, and it will continue on to the gnome desktop (you can hear the hard drive working again) - from this point on, the software on ubuntu may be less than perfect. On the gnome-panel, there is a "System" menu, and on there is an "Options" menu, and from there was the "Accessibility" options. I enabled the accessibility options, and then logged out of gnome-desktop to the gdm prompt, and then back in to the desktop. From there, we could configure the "Gnopernicus" application. Gnopernicus interacts with brltty through the brl_api, and is able to send braille output to describe what's happening on the screen. we were able to see strings of text in braille, such as "MNU SYSTEM (6 items)" when the System menu was selected. The BrailleNote navigation keys do allow for navigating through a list of items such as the menu items. Issue #1 is that the navigation changes the output on the braille terminal to the next item, but the "selected" item is not changing. So, navigating to the 3rd item in the list and pressing Enter, causes the 1st item in the list to be activated. For a description of the default key mapping, it is exactly like the second screenshot on this page: http://www.baum.ro/eng/products/gnopernicus/interface_braille.html - Gnopernicus was configured to use the "festival" speech engine and read text over the speakers at the same time as sending the text to the Braille device. - Ultimately, it would be nice is the BrailleNote terminal could select the Ubuntu ("start") menu, and allow for full application navigation. Some kind of custom key mapping may need to be developed. Currently to start an application, Rusty can press ALT+F2 on the PC keyboard, then type in a command like "firefox" and press Enter. - Sadly, when using Firefox, the Gnopernicus application didn't interact well with Firefox. It would read "interface items", such as toolbars, the "URL" bar, menus, etc... but in the reading of the actual HTML, it did not read the URL links. So, Rusty can see there are 40 checkbox items on the screen, but cannot get a description of the subject or sender of each item in gmail. I have found that there may be accessibility extensions for Firefox. One I found was "Fire Vox", which is a Firefox extension to voice out the rendered HTML contents. (Needs Java for Firefox) http://www.firefox.clcworld.net/installation_linux.html (download and tutorial links are on that page) TODO: at this point. 1: the firefox extension mentioned above 2: we should investigate LSR in comparison to Gnopernicus 3: we should find the other speech engines that are better than Festival 4: linux console key mapping/driver for the BrailleNote characters (for text mode console) 5: "Feisty Fawn" (Ubuntu 7.04) is promising much improved experience, including a blind-compatible installer process, and accessibility for Gnome out of the box. It will be fun to try that release when it is ready. Well, thanks everyone for reading this far... like I said at the top, suggestions and ideas and google searching by everyone is welcome! :) DK
