Hmmm.
I am not sure.
I have been able through public and other means to access manuals on
disks, the net and other computers I was able to get access to over the years.
The dos readers were mostly tsr shells that simply ran over the
command prompt but allowed it to run.
The screen itself was read directly via device con which was a direct
screen port, probably there was or were irqs and ports for various devices.
or memmory addressing.
It would only read text modes supported by the video card and culd
read lines and symbols and other stuff.
info was directly input via a direct link to the keyboard device.
For most there were no drivers though there were configurations
simular to scripts at least in mastertouch which were like our say
application settings in control panel would be now.
Ofcause the reader could only do 1 thing at once but dos could only
do one thing at once.
I should imagine there was some buffer in memmory, though vertual
buffers were configured at startup as well as file handles and stack addresses.
Sertainly I don't think things were ever created on the fly.
Most synths well actually the keynote gold were supported directly
with a driver the reader ran itself.
any intercepts would be started and stopped when reader launched and
were part of the startup program.
I have read that some synths like the dectalk all versions the
keynote pc card and a few others like accent and maybe artic needed 1
or more device drivers to init them.
Ofcause we can't exactly do that in windows.
I used to use a keynote on windows and it worked fine.
However I tried dectalk with hal and the system failed.
I reformatted about 10 times or so.
each time the system other got the wrong language, or its video card
chain broke.
My theory was but never proven that it tried to directly access a
memmory address or port.
Due to security reasons just after win95 was released, ms blocked
direct access to hardware to prevent memmory address stealing like
happened in windows 3.11.
It does mean though that you can't traditionally read the screen
without mangling something.
At 01:06 a.m. 17/10/2012 -0400, you wrote:
Hi Shaun,
I'm not aware of any open source screen readers for Dos. We are just
lucky to have NVDA for Windows which wouldn't work for our needs
because it relies on specific Windows APIs to report back what is on
screen.
The main reason NVDA doesn't require video intercept drivers etc is
because a lot of the onscreen information can be obtained directly
via the Windows API or U.I. Automation found in Windows 7 and Windows
8. Obviously, that wasn't available back in the Dos days so I'm not
quite sure how they managed it back then. Probably rigged a video
intercept driver to take a snapshot of the screen and then stored it
in a virtual buffer and the screen reader read from that virtual
buffer.
Bottom line, worrying about what TTS Engine to use is the least of our
worries. The real issue is how to expose the text onscreen to the
screen reader or speech system given that there were probably not a
lot of APIs developed to expose this kind of information twenty-some
years ago and screen reader developers were forced to develop an
off-screen model, a buffer, to store the state of the screen at any
given moment in time.
At this point the best thing I could do is look at YASR, a console
screen reader for Linux, and see how the author obtained information
from the shell. Perhaps the same concept would apply here. Although,
theway YASR works is it creates a virtual terminal that runs over top
of the current shell, and essentually runs programs like Nano, Alpine,
and so on inside YASR rather than from the shell itself.
On 10/17/12, shaun everiss <[email protected]> wrote:
> not that its worth much, but I was talking to morrice slone one of
> the managers of humanware group, formally pulse data internation inc
> about that vary thing.
> Without the synth its useless and they don't make them anymore.
> However due to this and the fact that that they have sifted to
> windows ce and other junk, old versions of the keysoft 1x and
> mastertouch 2 and 1 are technical freeware.
> You can't get them from humanware though.
> I assume that you could distribute them but without the synth you
> couldn't run them.
> keysoft 2 has copy protection and you would have to crack that but
> thats also technically freeware now pc development has stopped.
> All of that is useless now they stopped making synths I guess keeping
> those things copywrited just made no sence.
> Was there ever an dos screenreader that had source code or a way
> someone could contact someone with that?
> the easiest thing would to add espeak as a synth.
> would even be better if there was a blind friendly version of dosbox
> with the kernal rigged for speach, obviously it would need its own
> updates, etc, and you would have to use espeak or something but it
> could be a complete windows kit.
>
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