Hello Felix,
I am sorry that I will provide no helpful advice here, only (probably
dumb) questions. I am not blind and I have no experience whatsoever in
this area.
FreeDOS - and DOS in general - is a text-based system, hence one could
technically imagine that a virtualization platform could be able to
provide an embedded screen reader that reads whatever is present in the
VGA buffer. Whether such a contraption exists I have no clue.
Questions: how can a blind user install any operating system at all on a
PC? Are there some tricks that allow such feat, or is this a step that
always require sighted assistance?
You are mentioning serial port and hardware speech synth. I can only
suppose that blind users would connect such synth to an RS-232 port and
provide appropriate instructions to the program or OS so they output
meaningful descriptions over this port. But you say these hardware
gimmicks aren't in sales any longer - what are the current ways that
blind people use for interacting with computers? Are there some software
standards or APIs for screen reader emulation?
Mateusz
On 15/03/2020 17:11, Felix G. wrote:
Dear FreeDOS community,
it's great to be here, and amazing that a project such as FreeDOS
exists, preserving access to some of the greatest software ever
written.
My name is Felix Grützmacher. I am 39, I work as a software developer
in assistive technology, and I was born blind. In my spare time I play
such video games as are accessible to me, my blindness restricting
this set of games to mostly text adventure games from the 80s and
early 90s, a fact which I don't find restricting at all because some
of the best games are contained in this descriptor.
... Which brings me to my question.
A substantial subset of these games don't run natively on Windows,
which is the platform I mostly use. I can run some of them with the
help of Dosbox, but this approach requires that a native DOS screen
reader be running in the Dosbox environment, sending its output to a
serial port which I redirect and pass to a speech synthesizer emulator
running on the host computer. It sounds just as messy as it is, and it
is slow as ... well, let's just say it does not exactly qualify as a
walk in the park as it relies on an impressive chain of components. As
soon as one of those stops working, I am literally left in the dark.
Without speech output, that is. To make matters worse, I have grown
rather disenchanted with Dosbox recently as it seems to have emulation
problems which surface in some of the games I'd like to run, in some
instances leading to garbage output. It's not really DOS, after all,
but a thin layer atop Windows to run DOS games.
FreeDOS to the rescue, or so I thought, but I have yet to find any
documentation on how to create a blind-friendly environment with it.
A native install seems to be out of the question: neither does my
computer hav a serial port, nor am I in possession of a hardware
speech synthesizer. The former might be acquired, but the latter,
alas, is no longer on sale.
So I guess what I need is a virtual machine running FreeDOS, but I
have no idea how to install FreeDOS on a virtual machine without
sighted assistance, and even if this could be accomplished, how would
I then install a screen reader into that virtual machine, or for that
matter, how would I get any files downloaded from the net into that
virtual environment?
If you have come this far in reading my ramblings, I hope you will be
so kind as to offer some advice.
And if the last few paragraphs have made no sense whatsoever, consider
my question to be as follows: What is the established route by which a
blind user may install and use FreeDOS?
All the best,
Felix
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