Hi Mike, as you ask for a screen reader (read screen contents out loud, using e.g. the soundcard), I assume that you are not interested in Braille display support for DOS?
I think the easiest free screen reading method for you will be to use BLinux, which uses BrlTTY for general interfacing: BrlTTY can send text screen snippets to Braille displays, but it also supports voice output, e.g. with the free MBROLA system. You can navigate with the buttons on a Braille display or with your normal computer keyboard. The latter, in combination with voice output, should allow you to use a computer without any extra supporting hardware and without any extra software cost. Note that BLinux can only read text screen contents, while screen reader software e.g. for Windows ironically specializes to graphical browsers like MSIE and is on the other hand quite bad with text screens... The original distro is on http://leb.net/blinux/ but you have e.g. a BLinux version of or BLinux support in SuSE Linux (SuSE merged with Novell recently) and other better-known Linuxes. http://wwwcs.uni-paderborn.de/cs/heiss/blinux/index-en.html has a link collection about BrlTTY, Emaccspeak, MBROLA... I know that you asked on a FreeDOS mailing list: However, you can run DOS in a DOSEmu environment inside Linux to get the screen reader support. This would not work that well with plain DOS, as the screen reader is supposed to run at the same time as DOS, while DOS can normally only run one program at a time. Do not worry about hardware requirements - without a bloated graphical user interface, Linux can run quite okay on, say, a classic Pentium MMX with 16 megabytes or memory and a few hundred megabytes of disk space. Just for proof of concept, I once wrote a "screen reader" system for my LCD display for DOS. Actually the (20 by 4 character) LCD display is used to simulate a Braille display, and buttons connected to the display are used to navigate the window around in the 80 by 25 char sized actual screen space. Again, this shows that a DOS version of BrlTTY would be possible for simpler displays (no USB, no speech), but you specifically asked for speech. I also know that there are DOS versions of the MBROLA speech engine, and I once wrote a DOS program which translates text to speech engine commands. However, you can only run both my translator and MBROLA from the prompt, neither of the two can run in the background. So it would be quite pointless for you. Better use BLinux. Enjoy... :-). Eric > Hi I am a blind computer user. Does anyone know of a freeware software > package for dos. > This way speech could be obtained threw the sound card and a external > speech unit wouldn't be needed. ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
