On 15/03/2020 21:34, Karen Lewellen wrote:
Including on board dos screen readers ASAP and Tinytalk.
Interesting. After a short search I found a TSR screen reader called
"PROVOX", which appears to be open-source. Is this something worth
looking at? So far I was able to load it under FreeDOS within a
VirtualBox instance, and I am able to receive "something" on the host
(through a virtual COM port). Unfortunately I am unable to figure out
the meaning of what PROVOX outputs - I was expecting some human phrases
meant to be read aloud, but apparently the protocol used by synthesizer
is more complex than that.
Mateusz
On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, 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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