On Thursday 01 January 1970 12:00 am, Allen Ahoffman wrote: > Hi: > I am blind and work in a small data center. > Since I can't read screens I need to get sighted people to read for > me. I know what I'm doing on the systems but need readers to tell me > whats happening. > I'm looking for suggested hardware to allow me to easily in realtime > send the screen images from the console screen to a remote user so > they can read it for me or just tell me the keystrokes to do. What operating system are we taling about: Windows / Linux? Any chance of a couple of specifics??
if Windows: there are specialist text-speech readers and also Braille text readers that do 80 characters at a time. Very expensive: several thousand $ for a reliable Braille display.. Not very reliable: it's a very small market so the software can be highly priced and buggy and there's too few users to complain :( If Linux - do you need X?? > I need at least 640.b480 but would like 1024x768 resolution and > 30fps. 4 or 5 fps would do really for this application. VNC server on your machine : VNC client on the co-workers machine. > remember this has to be usable for only one screen but that screen > gets connected to many systems during its lifetime. > > > I have a beklin video extener to let one coworker stay elsewhere and > read but thats only helpful for one person. > What would really be nice is somehting I can just plug the video out > cable from the monitor port on the computer into and it doees the > work, like frame brabber / distribution. There are Keyboard Video Mouse switchers that will allow you to switch more than one machine to share one set of keyboard/mouse etc. There is also an exterder kit for one of them which will allow you to remote it over Cat. 5 Ethernet to any point on you LAN. This is straightforward hardware but expensive. [I have some at work to allow workers to log in to the computer lab racks of machines from their desks in another room.] This ought to be feasible in Linux. Text-speech using an editor / text only Web browser and either doubletalk (for dedicated speech synthesiser) or Festival. Braille terminals are supported out of the box by S.u.SE because they have a visually impaired main programmer. The SuSE installation installs text mode apps if a Braille terminal is detected during initial boot-up. This is a very limited subset of the whole SuSE distribution. It may also be hardware specific to a few terminal types. A programmer for the RNIB has open-sourced a Braille formatter which reads text and outputs contracted Braille for a specialist Braille printer (essentially the core of the RNIB Versabraille software IIRC) Look also at the Ocularis project who are trying to sort the whole problem out. My interest: I'm not profoundly visually impaired - but I help a deaf-blind lady who is struggling with the idiosyncracies of a Windows based computer, text to speech, Braille display and email. She hasn't tried for Web access yet. Windows 98 and Word 2000 minus mouse and with text-only keyboard shortcuts is HARD. I have suggested to Deafblind UK thtat they look at Linux but they haven't time/specialist expertise available to do so - though they were interested in the possiblilties. HTH, Andy
