Thanks for the clarifications. From what I understand so far:
1. You run Windows
2. You'd like to play some old DOS text-based games
3. You have software able to read text aloud from a virtual serial port
4. You own a TSR that is able to read screen and output text to RS-232
5. You currently use DOSBox, but find its compatibility limited
I find it surprising that DOSBox isn't working for you - in my
experience it works extremely well. But I don't play text games from the
eighties, so perhaps that's some niche DOSBox is unable to cope with.
It sounds to me that you'd need a "drop-in" replacement for DOSBox. This
replacement would have to contain FreeDOS (or some other DOS), and make
it possible to load a TSR that performs the screen-reader magic,
outputting stuff over the virtual RS-232 port, so it could be catched by
the Windows talking thing.
If that's all correct, then I'd suggest trying out VirtualBox.
VirtualBox is a hypervizor that allows to run any kind of operating
system inside a window. Given your situation, you won't be able to
install FreeDOS yourself, since FreeDOS installer comes with no support
at all for sight-impaired people. This means that you'd need to load a
custom VirtualBox image that would contain DOS, some very basic
configuration and - most importantly, this famous screen-reading TSR.
I could, if you'd like me to, prepare such image. But you'd need to
provide me with the magic TSR, since that's not something I have nor I
would know where it could be obtained from.
best,
Mateusz
On 15/03/2020 18:48, Felix G. wrote:
Sorry for the double-post, but I forgot to mention one detail:
The old DOS screen readers worked in two ways: (a) by hijacking
interrupt 21h so they'd be the first to know when a program wrote to
the screen, and to grab (and act upon) keystrokes. (b) by directly
accessing the video buffer to enable browsing screen content,
independently of whether or not it had gone through int 21h or had
been mov'd there directly.
I hope I'm making any sense. I'm more of a mathematician than a
programmer, but I'm doing my best to use the terminology correctly,
and I feel this is very old code we're talking here.
Best,
Felix
Am So., 15. März 2020 um 18:35 Uhr schrieb Felix G.
<constantlyvaria...@gmail.com>:
Hello Mateusz,
there is no such thing as a dumb question when asked in the spirit in
which you are asking. Let me clarify inline below:
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.
And neither do I, which is why I chose to run Dosbox and redirect its
serial port output to an emulated speech synth on the host. Were I
given a way to browse the VGA buffer in some VM, I would be overjoyed.
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?
Most operating systems have built-in accessibility features
accomodating for blind users. For example, during Windows setup one
could press ctrl+Windows+enter to start Narrator, the native Windows
screen reader. On MacOS you would bring up VoiceOver with command+f5.
And on Ubuntu you would press alt+super+s to start Orca. Pretty much
every operating system that's been around for more than two decades
has evolved some way to do this. I was actually hoping FreeDOS could
be counted among that lot.
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?
There are screen readers for Windows, most kinds of Linux, as well as
MacOS, and they all use software speech synthesizers which are
accessed through dedicated APIs. On Windows this API would be called
SAPI, while on Linux it is the so-called Speech Dispatcher which is
part of BRLTTY. DOS didn't have memory-resident software speech
synthesizers, which is why people connected hardware ones to RS-232
ports just as you assumed, and used special TSR programs to grab text
as it was displayed, and to browse the VGA buffer. The installation
itself wasn't accessible, of course, but then again this was the 20th
century, and now we can do better, or so I hope.
All the best,
Felix
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