Eric Auer wrote: > Hi Karen, > > >> it can take say two or three screen readers to equal the >> functionality of one Dos based one. > > Interesting, what makes the DOS ones so user friendly? > >> screen readers for windows >> are in the dictionary for richly problematical. > > In what way? I remember them often being commercial > and pricy. Which is why indeed I was talking more > about Ubuntu, free system with free screenreaders. > >> screen readers problematic in DOS? > > What I meant is that with multitasking, you can > have one program running, a second collect the > screen contents, a third transforming them into > speech and a fourth sending that to your sound > card or even USB sound device. In DOS, you have > one program running and the screen reader TSR or > driver has to do all other tasks. This means if > you have a nice DOS version of, say, MBROLA or > festival text to speech systems, you cannot use > them "in the background" for your screen reader. > > Instead, you can only use the voice system which > is built into the screen reader already, if any. > > > Never mind that tsrs even for dos programs have been moot since windows > > 3.0, with dos applications, including screen readers employing > > alternatives for task management. > > I agree that with Windows 3.0 you can indeed run > several things more or less at the same time and > I even once had voice input and output software > for Win 3 which came with my Soundblaster AWE32 > but I would not call that DOS voice software then. > > As somebody else already said, playing audio on > a CD is something the drive does almost fully > in hardware, so it does not need multitasking. > I even once wrote a tiny DOS tool to play CD in > a simple command line way, or stop, eject etc. > > I am impressed to hear that not only ISA sound > cards and serial port devices but even USB voice > synths come with DOS drivers, if I understand > you correctly? Is this only for dedicated voice > hardware or are there also screenreaders which > can output speech via any AC97, HDA or USB sound > card, with "one size fits all" hardware drivers? > > The problem with ISA is that only computers until > the times of Pentium 3 and AMD K6 routinely came > with ISA slots. Newer computers only have ISA if > you use special mainboards, for example industry > and PLC oriented ones. Similar for laptops and of > course for netbooks. Which by the way run FreeDOS > okay: It does not care if the disk is flash and > the display is LED... However, sound and network > will be problematic on a netbook for DOS, wireless > network being the worst as far as DOS drivers are > concerned. A potentially interesting URL about the > driver issue: > > www.georgpotthast.de/computer/cindex.htm - has some > older USB driver, AC97 sound driver and the Sioux > web server which also has a number of third party > network drivers linked from the page. > > By the way, I agree that recent Ubuntu versions > have a bad reputation about sound. I think this > started between half a year and two years ago... > > However, this is not because it is Linux. Instead > it is because Ubuntu designers made a bad choice > in making things based on a weak pulseaudio driver > on top of the more stable ALSA driver. So you can > delete the extra layer in theory - in practice, it > takes extra effort to get back simultaneous output > of multiple sounds with DMIX while you got it for > free with pulseaudio.
Hi Karen, Eric, I can confirm that there where problems with PulseAudio in previous Ubuntu releases. Currently I am testing The Beta of Lucid Lynx, which will become Ubuntu 10.4 on April 29'th. The problems with PulseAudio are solved in this version. I for one can use skype now, which I could not use under Ubuntu 9.10. Another interesting project is Adriane Knoppix: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knoppix#Adriane_Knoppix Cheers, Marti ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
