Karen, I was not aware that Linux screen reader voices trigger seizures. Nobody is forcing you to use those, or even to use Linux at all.
Not sure why exactly mentioning Braille is evil. The underlying software infrastructure task is the same: Take text from an app and transform it to another output modality. Even back in the days of CTTY COM1 with DOS, the problem existed that not all apps are using the proper interfaces to be redirectable and between the lines, I also wanted to express my doubts that Blue Lion would be part of the solution, as proposed by Liam, but I have no OS/2 adaptive technology experience myself. My reference to text oriented browsers was based on the assumption that in DOS, adaptive technology would NOT have a standardized interface to communicate with graphical applications, because DOS does not provide graphical building blocks to the apps. So if you use Arachne or Dillo in DOS, there might be problems which you could avoid by using a text based browser in DOS. If there are NO problems with your DOS drivers, great, please let us know! Just mentioning that DOS apps with GUI may have issues. Of course Linux does support connecting texts used by graphical applications, at least from more widespread GUI frameworks, to be processed by adaptive technology. As you write, there also is the problem whether the output side of that can work with the style, brand or hardware you prefer to use. My impression was that Liam's suggestion to use OS/2 or Blue Lion was not solving the task at hand either, so I focused on which browsers could be suitable in DOS. Knowing that you had explicitly asked for a DOS based solution. > Links for DOS, for what it is, opens some doors, but not all Which features are useful in Links, which are missing? > if Linux is such a grand solution, why cannot a graphical > installation be configured so it can communicate with physical > speech hardware? You mentioned having no Linux driver for your speech hardware, so I expect that problem to be not limited to the installer. Support for hardware speech devices in Linux is quite limited: Knoppix, which explicitly supports the ADRIANE Audio Desktop Reference Implementation and Networking Environment starting at the installation itself, uses ELINKS as browser with both javascript and multimedia support. It also uses ORCA OCR to fetch text from graphical applications IF those fail to have adaptive access to text fields and espeak for text to speech (quality varies a lot depending on installed voices). https://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html According to the German SBL (used by Knoppix) documentation, the system supports Papenmeier, Handytech, Baum, Alva, Tiemann and Blazie Braille devices. For text to speech, Apollo2, Vox700, Festival, TTSynth, Speechd and MNROLA are supported. Of course, none of this is relevant for DOS browsers. I do not expect graphical DOS apps to have good compatibility with anything beyond VGA, but of course I am happy to hear about DOS GUI apps which do support more output modalities. I do have some experience with writing a simple adapter for Dutch text to speech long ago, so I am actually aware of the limitations of the technology. Even now, youtubers who prefer to stay anonymous use annoyingly artifically sounding speech engines. I think I even have a chip from back when it was important to offload speech output from the CPU to dedicated hardware somewhere in my collection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Instrument_SP0256 That thing sounded quite bad even for English. Luckily, hardware speech output devices today just contain their own computers, with dedicated optimized TTS software. > If freedos is never going to provide a proper browser, > how can it claim to be a fully functional operating > system where networking is concerned? Actually DOS does not claim to be a networked operating system at all. There are some de facto standards for network drivers for DOS which are in turn used by DOS applications which implement their own networking, but this is not something provided by DOS as the operating system. So I think it would not be better or worse if you were to find a way to use a Windows browser with low enough system requirements to run it on Japheth's HX RT and HX GUI which lets you run some Windows apps directly inside DOS. Of course this would depend on whether HX can connect to your adaptive technology. In any case, using the world wide web in DOS is something which can be quite frustrating for everybody, but then DOS does not make any promises about networking either. Regards, Eric PS Liam: I am surprised that you have so much experience with screen readers, so maybe you could share some ideas about which of the free Linux TTS engines have which strengths and weaknesses based on what both you and the users you know think about them in recent years? And assuming that Knoppix is quite "German", which Linux distros are your users using with which text output path? _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
