All valid points, and nothing with what you're saying, I agree
completely that there *should* be more information available, but the
problem is that someone has to maintain that information, and that's
where the resources are scarce.
I wasn't saying his problems were not valid ones, only that his
statements weren't entirely accurate. When I first started with
linux, back in 92, it was *extremely* hard to find actual facts about
the various distributions. Asking around on which distribution
should be used (slackware and redhat were the two major centendors
then) generally met with answers like
"Use Redhat, it's better"
Nobody would take the time to explain *why* redhat was better.
Thus out of shere stubbornness, I went with slackware, and as it
turns out, as far as I'm concerned, it was the right choice. For
sighted folks, redhat definitely was the better choice, but for me,
slackware was better, because it didn't force me to use a gui out of
the box. I had the option to install the gui if I wanted to, which
obviously I didn't. Redhat did not offer this option, it simply
assumed I wanted it, and installed it without any regard for what I
wanted. Removing the gui from redhat was problematic, and would
break other things. It's of course much better now, but in 1992
these distros were fairly new, and the methods of installing were
different from how it all works now. The same is true when working
with talking distributions. Debian includes speakup now, and other
distros include speaking kernels as well. I do not know them off the
top of my head, because I no longer keep up on that kind of thing,
having gone almost entirely to the mac. i stilll have my linux box
here, and I still use it, though for considerably less than I used to.
Now, the point of all of this is that that there are choices, folks
don't know them all (hell, I don't know them all) and an article that
tries to point out the problems or benefits of access technologies
should take at least some time to point out these things. I'm sure
the two folks did the best they could, but there was no mention of
speech-up, emacspeak, or any of the various other speech solutions
such as festival or yasr (yet another screen reader) wich is a user-
space program usable by *any* user of a linux machine, regardless of
whether it's got speakup in the kernel or not.
And, yes, there is work now to use software synths in linux. I don't
know how it's going, as I personally am not a fan of software speech,
but since that's what we got on the mac, I use it, because the
usability and stability of the rest of the system allows me to work
without having to worry about the software synth contributing to the
crash count. *grin*
On Mar 20, 2006, at 2:45 PM, Kafka's Daytime wrote:
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
