On 19/08/11 06:39, Lisi wrote: > On Thursday 18 August 2011 03:55:30 Scott Ferguson wrote: >> As Martin isn't going to >> use a Live CD approach - it's a moot point. (though Knoppix Adriane will >> probably do the job, and includes parted) > > I understood (possibly erroneously) that Martin's problem wasn't that he > doesn't know about about Live CDs intended for those of us with less than > perfect vision, but that he can't, without the help of a sighted person, use > any of the tools available on the BIOS of the machine he is using to > set "boot from optical drive" because only visual information is available > prior to booting. > > Lisi > >
You are probably correct Lisi - I'm (reluctantly) new to the reduced vision thing, and have yet to learn the basic skills (I still prefer the headaches from squinting over using a screen reader). Surely someone has thought to market a BIOS for the unsighted? I vaguely recall an addon for the Spectrum (Currah), but the only PC BIOS I can remember was a Phillips (or Panasonic?) from the early 80s (it announced BIOS settings, can't recall if it aided navigation). Lernout & Hauspie were working on similar project (or collecting money under those pretexts) - hopefully that is amongst the technology that was aquired by Nuance/Visioneer/Scansoft. It's big technical documents and completely new interfaces that cause me the most hassles. For me the biggest problem is CD labels - my writing makes the reading even harder. Now if someone created a simple system that announced the title of any cd placed in the drive based on information burned to the CD.... Unfortunately most of the Live CDs I've come across require a full desktop just to get reader for CLI tools. The latest Knoppix for instance, requires the noudev boot parameter to run on many of my machines - which leaves me with no gui or screenreader! What I'd prefer is a sort of Tom's Root Boot disk with voice support (and parted). Knoppix Adriane is very good - I've also heard good things about ArchLinux for the Blind. But most of the recommendations I get are from sighted people ie. Vinux is "supposed" to be good... maybe if I came from a Gnome background I wouldn't find it unusable - or fail to understand why a desktop built for the sighted has to be adapted for the blind (ugh). Cheers -- "I love the Pope, I love seeing him in his Pope-Mobile, his three feet of bullet proof plexi-glass. That's faith in action folks! You know he's got God on his side." ~ Bill Hicks -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4e4db0a2.5000...@gmail.com
