Fair enough. Marini is a newbie though, and you're a sophisticated
and experienced developer/technologist who can discover or cook up a
solution if a more obvious, well-documented one is not readily
available. You also have access to a second PC. There needs to be
some effort put into serving/supporting a broader community rather
than just those who already have access to certain occult information
(or those who are willing/able to put in the time and effort to dig
that information up). There also seems to be a problem for Marini
booting with Italian speech synthesizers (it's apparent he speaks
exclusively Italian). [Incidentally, speakup used to require a serial
hardware synthesizer...is that still true?]
One of the nice (and I think revolutionary) things about Mac OS X is
that you don't necessarily need to be a developer-type/technologist/
power-user to get up and running...whether you're blind or not.
Joe
On Mar 20, 2006, at 2:05 PM, Travis Siegel wrote:
Linux *can* be installed w/o sighted assistance. I've done it
dozens of times. And, there's several options for doing it too.
Speakup works, as does a second pc used as a terminal to the box
you're installing to. I generally use slackware when doing my
installs, but other folks have done the same thing with other
installs. Debian even includes a speakup kernel in their main
distribution now, so his statement that he needs sighted assistance
is not quite accurate.
On Mar 20, 2006, at 11:44 AM, Kafka's Daytime wrote:
Hi Folks,
Link to an interesting Newsforge article below. This article is,
perhaps, not strictly related to the use of Mac OS X by the
blind...but it speaks to some broader accessibility issues which
affect us - developers and end users alike. Also valuable,
perhaps, for purposes of drawing some comparisons between the
state of accessibility in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and
commercial solutions like Mac OS X (the Mac OS being an
interesting nexus of the two).
Here's an interesting excerpt from posted comments on the article:
--begin clip
"While proud of his accomplishments, Marini also feels that the
situation is far from optimal. For instance, he has not found "a
distribution that boots" and detects "Italian speech synthesizers,
or Braille terminals with the brltty driver." For now, Marini says
that the only solution is to find somebody without impaired vision
who is willing to help install Linux."
Interesting but can any of the other OS's out there be installed
without the assistance of an unimpaired user?
--end clip
I know of at least one. Anyway, here's the link:
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?
sid=06/03/13/1628249&from=rss
Joe
