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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>
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