Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Hi Felix: Since you’re usig DOSBox, and the description of your setup, I think you have everything you need to run FreeDOS. If you want to try it, you can get VMWare Player for free and install it. I put together a version of FreeDOS 1.3 RC2 a couple months ago. Here is the instruction files I posted back then. If you’re using the Talking DOSBox package, I believe it is configured for com9 as one of the ports. If that’s the case, just substitute com9 for the reference to com3. Anyway, here is the instructions file I put together along with links that should get you on the way. You probably don’t need to download com0com or the virtual Braille ‘n speak program, but, it just depends on what you want. Reply to me off-list at: joseph.nor...@gmail.com if you have any questions: Title: FreeDOS live CD with ASAP + Welcome to the FreeDOS 1.3 RC3 release with built-in ASAP screen reader. You can download this CD-Rom image and run it using VMWare Player or another virtual machine environment that can direct serial output to a virtual comport pair such as the Com0Com package. On this page, I have included links to all the files needed to run this on a modern PC running Windows 10. You can also try this with Windows 7, but, I'm not sure how well it will work. First, here are the packages you will need. After each link, I'll give brief instructions for setting up the programs. Com0Com for Windows 64-bit. Note: If you already have Talking DosBox set up, you probably don't need this file. To set this up, run the executable and follow the prompts. If your system seems to freeze, alt-tab and look for a security dialog and click on "Allow" and it should install the program. By default, the program sets up 2 virtual pairs of serial ports. Out of the box, it sets up COM3 and COM4 as the second pair, and this setting can be left alone if your computer doesn't have those com ports installed. Many modern systems no longer come with serial ports. Note: If you already use the "Talking DOSBox" package, you probably set the second pair up as com8 and com9. If so, see below. Next, you will need a way to have the computer speak the output that comes from ASAP. Click here to download a virtual Braille -n Speak package. Unzip the file into your home folder, and you will have a folder under that called "vbns-espeak". Under that folder, you will find a program called "EMU.EXE". Find the file called "EMU.EXE" and press the applications key (or you can hit shift+f10 on it. Down arrow until you find Send to. Press right arrow and use the down arrow to find "Desktop, Create Shortcut" and press Enter on it. Now, close out of that window and go to your Windows desktop. On your Windows desktop, find "EMU Shortcut". Press ALT-Enter on it. You will be on a line with the path to the "EMU.EXE" file. Go to the end of that line and add a space, followed by COM3. Tab over to OK and press Enter on that. Next, you will need VMWare Player. Click here to download VMWare Player 15. Run the executable and follow the prompts. After you set it up, you will have a link on your desktop called "VMware Workstation 15 Player". it's not quite time to click on it. Next, you will need a copy of the FreeDOS installation CD-Rom with built-in ASAP. Click here to download the zip file containing the .iso image. Unzip the file and you will have a .iso file called "FD13LIVE.ISO" which is the CD image you need. Make sure you know the path to it, since you'll need to supply it shortly. Now, go to the desktop and find the VMWare Workstation Player shortcut and press Enter on it. Go ahead and accept the agreement that you are not a commercial user. You may be prompted for a download of the trial of WorkStation pro". Click "Skip this version" and you should go to the main screen. You should be in a dialog where "Home" is shown as the only entry. Press CTRL+N (for New Virtual Machine>. You will be asked where you want to install from. Select "Installer Disc Image". Tab over to where it asks for the filename, If you know the full path, you can type it here. Otherwise, tab over to "Browse" and press Space on that. You will be in a standard Windows file find dialog where you can find your .iso file. When you do, press Eneter on the .iso file you unzipped. Tab over to the "Next" button and press Space on it. VMWare Player will then ask you what kind of machine you want to create. select the "Other" radio button, tab over, and select "MS-DOS" and click "Next". you will be asked for a machine name. The default is MS-DOS, or you canchange it to what you want. You will also be able to specify the location for the virtual machine, which is usually a folder called "Virtual Machines" under your default Documents folder. Tab over to the Next button and press Space on it. Next, you will be given choices about the size of your hard-drive. By default, it will be 2gb in size, but you can change the size here. Press Enter
Re: [Freedos-user] OT: book reading via text to speech on e-book readers
On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 9:17 PM Eric Auer wrote: > PS: I believe Pocketbook uses Linux or Android based firmware. They > are known for NOT locking users to a shop and do well with PDF, too. IIRC. Android. The Kindle also uses Android, and because Android uses a Linux kernel and Linux is open source, so is Kindle firmware. (The vast majority of Kindle users aren't aware of it and could make use of it if they were.) At least one Kindle model - the DX - could handle PDFs. No surprise - it was aimed the education market, where if textbooks were available in electronic form at all, they would be PDFs. The DX bundled a mobile version of Adobe PDF reader, and had a larger screen size to allow viewing of PDFs because most were not built to reflow to fit the screen. I use a 7" Android tablet as eBook viewer, with eBook viewer software called FBReader for Android. FBReader displays AZW3, ePub, Mobi, FB2 (a popular Russian eBook format) and a few other things native, and can handle PDFs, DjVu files, and CBR/CBZ comics files via plugins. In practice, I prefer ePub and don't normally try to view PDFs on the tablet. Because they don't reflow to fit the screen, they can be actively painful to try to read on a mobile device. You can get Kindle apps for most platforms that can be used to buy and download from Amazon. Amazon doesn't care what you use to view books they sell. They just want to be the only place you get them. Because the carry everything and offer the best pricing, they largely succeed. __ Dennis ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
On 3/15/2020 4:16 PM, Karen Lewellen wrote: ...and you have discovered how many Linux distributions manage their screen reader and speech synthesis. It has not, as of yet, been done in DOS to my knowledge. One major major reason is the poor sound quality. Well, talking about "as of yet" in relation to DOS is a bit far fetched, after all, DOS (as far as a mainstream OS) is pretty much dead for 25 years. And with sound (driver) support in DOS being a matter of the applications running on top of it rather than the OS itself, there is very little chance that there is any major work done on a DOS screen reader with better sound support, even considering that it is all text based, which makes a good part of the screen readers work easier than in a GUI environment... Ralf -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] OT: book reading via text to speech on e-book readers
Hi! As inspired by the current thread about screen readers etc.: > One reason why those used to speech synthesis dislike tools l such > as Kindles though is because the speech quality is poor and the > pronounciation abilities reprehensible. [but Apple might be better?] Excuse the off-topic, but has anybody tested the text-to-speech of https://www.pocketbook-int.com/us/products/pocketbook-touch-hd-3 or other Pocketbook yet? It seems to have many languages and voices but a quick check on youtube brought up mostly slavic examples: It seems to read Russian quite well, for example. Another youtube had an odd English sample text where it was less fluent, but that might have been due to the strange test sentences used in that video. Of course people can also use mp3 audiobooks on such devices, but it would be nice to know whether they also work well for listening to books for which the user only has a non-audio version around. Eric PS: I believe Pocketbook uses Linux or Android based firmware. They are known for NOT locking users to a shop and do well with PDF, too. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
One more very important point, especially for those who do not use tools of this kind. In many ways adaptive technology serves as an extension of, or even substitution for an individual's hands, or eyes, or brain, or ears, or even a combination of some of these. That means that a screen reader does more than just read the screen, and simply creating a talking tool is not a substitution for a screen reader, or voice browser, or augmented keyboard or whatever. Screen reading technology, at its best, stays the same regardless of the software being used. You do not use one computer monitor, or set of eyes, or hands to bank, another monitor to do word processing yet a third for shopping. Instead you expect to use the same monitor or pair of eyes or hands or whatever with your computer, regardless of task. An unfortunate problem in the development community is the tool for task one, then trying to apply that to adaptive technology...thereby creating far far more barriers. If one wants to incorporate adaptive access into freedos, then that adaptive access must function fully. its more than just communicating with the tool providing speech output, it is making sure that freedos commands likewise function with and can be interpreted by that speech. Speakup which is a popular screen reader for Linux allows the use of hardware synthesizer, via serial, USB, and internal products. it also allows for software speech, making Eric's odd idea rather nonsensical. However, the presence of speech does not make Linux easy to use or install, or maintain. therefore suggesting that someone seeking DOS solutions simply use Linux is counter productive since they may or may not have all the things needful to use the system. Voiceover incorporated into apple products is a better comparison since everything is incorporated into the operating system, including a way to learn the screen reader. In short, building access into freedos must mean into freedos, not under freedos, at least if one is going to actually create a substituting for real dos screen readers. Karen On Mon, 16 Mar 2020, Andrew Robins wrote: Thanks FreeDOS community for such a heartening, community-minded response to Felix's situation. It's amazing, well done team and I hope that one or multiple satisfactory solutions can be worked out for sight-impaired users. Imagine if the Aladdin's Cave of archived IF (interactive fiction) software for DOS could be turned into an interactive audiobook resource for *everyone* on the sighted spectrum, with the efforts of those mentioned in this thread. Felix, until a useful outcome is reached for you and others in the FreeDOS environment, can I also suggest to you the efforts of Tim Cadogan-Cowper on "Fabularium", an open-source IF reader and organization application tool for Android 4.1+ . Best, -- Web: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EMQxfgYJ http://uq.academia.edu/AndrewRobins https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrew_Robins2/ On Mon, Mar 16, 2020, at 8:20 AM, Karen Lewellen wrote: Again, ignore Eric, he has no first hand experiencing coding screen readers to do anything let alone using them.. One can resolve some of these issues by using the actual drivers provided by the actual programs themselves. My understanding from Joseph, is that he has coded the b which stands for braille and speak, to function using tinytype and asap screen readers as a out of the box install for Freedos. In fact he got permission on list. Karen, who is using a dectalk, right now. On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Eric Auer wrote: Hi Mateusz, Hello Karen, indeed the screen-reading protocols seem to be not as easy as I imagined they would be. Eric hinted off-list that they may work on a phonem-by-phonem base rather than being able to process "normal" written phrases. Also it seems each screen reader uses its own protocol. PROVOX claims to support things called ACCENT, AUDAPTER, BNS, BRLMATE, DECTALK, DTLT, DTPC, LITETALK, PORTTALK, PSS. Of course none of these names mean anything to me. A quick look at the rather exotic Assembly dialect sources of PROVOX tells me that there is no obvious text to phoneme translation algorithm but just tables on how to pronounce special chars or to spell out things char by char when the user requests that. There are tables for a large number of special chars which seem to vary across hardware speech synth brands but PROVOX seems to expect that the speech synth indeed has local CPU power and firmware to convert English text to speech inself, so the PROVOX code does not do that. This also means you can expect troubles with non-English text unless the synth firmware is multilingual. I predict the data protocol to the external speech synths to be reduced charset, plain English, with plenty of escape or setup sequences and in some cases one or two bits used
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Oh the audio book resource for everyone idea is fantastic. Most of those I know personally who use tts tools for reading on devices like Kindles do not experience sight issues. after all the audio book industry has been a multi-billion one for decades. One reason why those used to speech synthesis dislike tools l such as Kindles though is because the speech quality is poor and the pronunciation abilities reprehensible. That does tend to lower the Barr of a quality nature though. Granted I have not used the android item you reference, but I believe Felix has software goals in mind that are not coded for the Android operating system. Kare On Mon, 16 Mar 2020, Andrew Robins wrote: Thanks FreeDOS community for such a heartening, community-minded response to Felix's situation. It's amazing, well done team and I hope that one or multiple satisfactory solutions can be worked out for sight-impaired users. Imagine if the Aladdin's Cave of archived IF (interactive fiction) software for DOS could be turned into an interactive audiobook resource for *everyone* on the sighted spectrum, with the efforts of those mentioned in this thread. Felix, until a useful outcome is reached for you and others in the FreeDOS environment, can I also suggest to you the efforts of Tim Cadogan-Cowper on "Fabularium", an open-source IF reader and organization application tool for Android 4.1+ . Best, -- Web: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EMQxfgYJ http://uq.academia.edu/AndrewRobins https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrew_Robins2/ On Mon, Mar 16, 2020, at 8:20 AM, Karen Lewellen wrote: Again, ignore Eric, he has no first hand experiencing coding screen readers to do anything let alone using them.. One can resolve some of these issues by using the actual drivers provided by the actual programs themselves. My understanding from Joseph, is that he has coded the b which stands for braille and speak, to function using tinytype and asap screen readers as a out of the box install for Freedos. In fact he got permission on list. Karen, who is using a dectalk, right now. On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Eric Auer wrote: Hi Mateusz, Hello Karen, indeed the screen-reading protocols seem to be not as easy as I imagined they would be. Eric hinted off-list that they may work on a phonem-by-phonem base rather than being able to process "normal" written phrases. Also it seems each screen reader uses its own protocol. PROVOX claims to support things called ACCENT, AUDAPTER, BNS, BRLMATE, DECTALK, DTLT, DTPC, LITETALK, PORTTALK, PSS. Of course none of these names mean anything to me. A quick look at the rather exotic Assembly dialect sources of PROVOX tells me that there is no obvious text to phoneme translation algorithm but just tables on how to pronounce special chars or to spell out things char by char when the user requests that. There are tables for a large number of special chars which seem to vary across hardware speech synth brands but PROVOX seems to expect that the speech synth indeed has local CPU power and firmware to convert English text to speech inself, so the PROVOX code does not do that. This also means you can expect troubles with non-English text unless the synth firmware is multilingual. I predict the data protocol to the external speech synths to be reduced charset, plain English, with plenty of escape or setup sequences and in some cases one or two bits used for flags in each transmitted character. DECtalk is a real classic, the wikipedia page about it has some links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk My off-list description, by the way, was based on experiences with a phoneme chip for embedded computing. I was indeed unaware that speech synth hardware for PC has built-in computing power to speak plain text. There is also a quite small DOS TSR which can speak text on the internal PC speaker: The TSR contains phoneme recordings and has to be used with a separate command line tool to convert English text to phoneme speaking calls to the TSR. As PWM sound output was heavy work for ancient PC, the TSR is very bad in adjusting to modern CPU which are a lot faster. This is only interesting for the nostalgically inclined audience I would say. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Hi there,
Answering one point below.
On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Mateusz Viste wrote:
Well, Eric never claimed to be an expert in the subject, but nonetheless it
is always interesting to hear different hypothesis from peers. Even failed
hypothesis are valuable steps of the learning process. :)
Speaking personally, and far from objectively, these tools are how
millions of individuals interact with the world every day. Miss
information from an unqualified individual is part of how some have given
up before
actually finding existing tools.
>> One can resolve some of these issues by using the actual drivers
My current understanding is that these drivers send commands to the synth
about "what" to say and "how" to say it. I have dumped such communication by
abusing the JAWS software and I see human phrases ("what") paired with lots
of obscure control prefixes ("how").
Jaws, for many many reasons, is not the best example of screen reader
technology, although its marketing made it very popular.
As I said in a follow up post, there are some tools that indeed allow the
synthesizer to speak different languages, even sing in the case of
dectalk.
Now, there are free "Text-to-speach" solutions out there, so I wonder how
hard it could be to intercept instructions meant for a hardware synth and
translate them into something that eSpeak could process.
...and you have discovered how many Linux distributions manage their
screen reader and speech synthesis.
It has not, as of yet, been done in DOS to my knowledge.
One major major reason is the poor sound quality. Espeak can talk yes,
but when compared to say a dectalk, being understood is something else
entirely.
If you want an example of what at least one dectalk voice sounds like
check out well anything from Dr. Stephen hawking.
That degree of understanding is what a screen reader or speech synthesizer
can and speaking personally, should sound like.
>
Such a hack would allow one to use a sceen reader inside a virtualized
FreeDOS install and actually hear stuff without the need to own a hardware
gimmick. Maybe I'm naive, but this doesn't look impossible.
Well, no its not impossible, having already been done using other tools as
expressed.
Still though, the goal from an end user standpoint is not does it speak,
but can I understand it, choose a degree of inflection, control the rate
etc. etc.
Which is also very possible.
I cannot find any
information about the (vendor-specific) protocols used by these oldschool
synth devices, though. This needs some research.
Some of the people who wrote those tools still exist. I know the person
behind ASAP and aSAW, is still around. That screen reader package
incorporates the synthesizers you reference, and others, including one
designed to talk with the sound chips built into laptops.
He would be the sort of person to contact.
I can find a name and e-mail, as both are escaping me as I write.
Karen
My understanding from Joseph, is that he has coded the b which stands
for braille and speak, to function using tinytype and asap screen
readers as a out of the box install for Freedos. In fact he got
permission on list.
Karen, who is using a dectalk, right now.
On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Eric Auer wrote:
>
> Hi Mateusz,
>
> > Hello Karen, indeed the screen-reading protocols seem to be not as
> > easy
> > as I imagined they would be. Eric hinted off-list that they may work
> > on
> > a phonem-by-phonem base rather than being able to process "normal"
> > written phrases. Also it seems each screen reader uses its own
> > protocol.
>
> > PROVOX claims to support things called ACCENT, AUDAPTER, BNS, BRLMATE,
> > DECTALK, DTLT, DTPC, LITETALK, PORTTALK, PSS. Of course none of these
> > names mean anything to me.
>
> A quick look at the rather exotic Assembly dialect sources of PROVOX
> tells me that there is no obvious text to phoneme translation algorithm
> but just tables on how to pronounce special chars or to spell out things
> char by char when the user requests that. There are tables for a large
> number of special chars which seem to vary across hardware speech synth
> brands but PROVOX seems to expect that the speech synth indeed has local
> CPU power and firmware to convert English text to speech inself, so the
> PROVOX code does not do that. This also means you can expect troubles
> with non-English text unless the synth firmware is multilingual.
>
> I predict the data protocol to the external speech synths to be reduced
> charset, plain English, with plenty of escape or setup sequences and in
> some cases one or two bits used for flags in each transmitted character.
>
> DECtalk is a real classic, the wikipedia page about it has some links:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk
>
> My off-list description, by the way, was based on experiences with a
> phoneme chip for embedded computing. I was
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Thanks FreeDOS community for such a heartening, community-minded response to Felix's situation. It's amazing, well done team and I hope that one or multiple satisfactory solutions can be worked out for sight-impaired users. Imagine if the Aladdin's Cave of archived IF (interactive fiction) software for DOS could be turned into an interactive audiobook resource for *everyone* on the sighted spectrum, with the efforts of those mentioned in this thread. Felix, until a useful outcome is reached for you and others in the FreeDOS environment, can I also suggest to you the efforts of Tim Cadogan-Cowper on "Fabularium", an open-source IF reader and organization application tool for Android 4.1+ . Best, -- Web: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EMQxfgYJ http://uq.academia.edu/AndrewRobins https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrew_Robins2/ On Mon, Mar 16, 2020, at 8:20 AM, Karen Lewellen wrote: > Again, ignore Eric, he has no first hand experiencing coding screen > readers to do anything let alone using them.. > One can resolve some of these issues by using the actual drivers provided > by the actual programs themselves. > My understanding from Joseph, is that he has coded the b which stands > for braille and speak, to function using tinytype and asap screen readers > as a out of the box install for Freedos. In fact he got permission on > list. > > Karen, who is using a dectalk, right now. > > > > On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Eric Auer wrote: > > > > > Hi Mateusz, > > > >> Hello Karen, indeed the screen-reading protocols seem to be not as easy > >> as I imagined they would be. Eric hinted off-list that they may work on > >> a phonem-by-phonem base rather than being able to process "normal" > >> written phrases. Also it seems each screen reader uses its own protocol. > > > >> PROVOX claims to support things called ACCENT, AUDAPTER, BNS, BRLMATE, > >> DECTALK, DTLT, DTPC, LITETALK, PORTTALK, PSS. Of course none of these > >> names mean anything to me. > > > > A quick look at the rather exotic Assembly dialect sources of PROVOX > > tells me that there is no obvious text to phoneme translation algorithm > > but just tables on how to pronounce special chars or to spell out things > > char by char when the user requests that. There are tables for a large > > number of special chars which seem to vary across hardware speech synth > > brands but PROVOX seems to expect that the speech synth indeed has local > > CPU power and firmware to convert English text to speech inself, so the > > PROVOX code does not do that. This also means you can expect troubles > > with non-English text unless the synth firmware is multilingual. > > > > I predict the data protocol to the external speech synths to be reduced > > charset, plain English, with plenty of escape or setup sequences and in > > some cases one or two bits used for flags in each transmitted character. > > > > DECtalk is a real classic, the wikipedia page about it has some links: > > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk > > > > My off-list description, by the way, was based on experiences with a > > phoneme chip for embedded computing. I was indeed unaware that speech > > synth hardware for PC has built-in computing power to speak plain text. > > > > There is also a quite small DOS TSR which can speak text on the internal > > PC speaker: The TSR contains phoneme recordings and has to be used with > > a separate command line tool to convert English text to phoneme speaking > > calls to the TSR. As PWM sound output was heavy work for ancient PC, the > > TSR is very bad in adjusting to modern CPU which are a lot faster. This > > is only interesting for the nostalgically inclined audience I would say. > > > > Regards, Eric > > > > > > > > ___ > > Freedos-user mailing list > > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > > > > > > > ___ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Oh, and while I cannot speak to other products, dectalk synthesizers can and do speak in multiple languages. french Spanish, Korean, and Hebrew to name a few. On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Eric Auer wrote: Hi Mateusz, Hello Karen, indeed the screen-reading protocols seem to be not as easy as I imagined they would be. Eric hinted off-list that they may work on a phonem-by-phonem base rather than being able to process "normal" written phrases. Also it seems each screen reader uses its own protocol. PROVOX claims to support things called ACCENT, AUDAPTER, BNS, BRLMATE, DECTALK, DTLT, DTPC, LITETALK, PORTTALK, PSS. Of course none of these names mean anything to me. A quick look at the rather exotic Assembly dialect sources of PROVOX tells me that there is no obvious text to phoneme translation algorithm but just tables on how to pronounce special chars or to spell out things char by char when the user requests that. There are tables for a large number of special chars which seem to vary across hardware speech synth brands but PROVOX seems to expect that the speech synth indeed has local CPU power and firmware to convert English text to speech inself, so the PROVOX code does not do that. This also means you can expect troubles with non-English text unless the synth firmware is multilingual. I predict the data protocol to the external speech synths to be reduced charset, plain English, with plenty of escape or setup sequences and in some cases one or two bits used for flags in each transmitted character. DECtalk is a real classic, the wikipedia page about it has some links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk My off-list description, by the way, was based on experiences with a phoneme chip for embedded computing. I was indeed unaware that speech synth hardware for PC has built-in computing power to speak plain text. There is also a quite small DOS TSR which can speak text on the internal PC speaker: The TSR contains phoneme recordings and has to be used with a separate command line tool to convert English text to phoneme speaking calls to the TSR. As PWM sound output was heavy work for ancient PC, the TSR is very bad in adjusting to modern CPU which are a lot faster. This is only interesting for the nostalgically inclined audience I would say. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Well, Eric never claimed to be an expert in the subject, but nonetheless
it is always interesting to hear different hypothesis from peers. Even
failed hypothesis are valuable steps of the learning process. :)
One can resolve some of these issues by using the actual drivers
provided by the actual programs themselves.
My current understanding is that these drivers send commands to the
synth about "what" to say and "how" to say it. I have dumped such
communication by abusing the JAWS software and I see human phrases
("what") paired with lots of obscure control prefixes ("how").
Now, there are free "Text-to-speach" solutions out there, so I wonder
how hard it could be to intercept instructions meant for a hardware
synth and translate them into something that eSpeak could process.
Such a hack would allow one to use a sceen reader inside a virtualized
FreeDOS install and actually hear stuff without the need to own a
hardware gimmick. Maybe I'm naive, but this doesn't look impossible. I
cannot find any information about the (vendor-specific) protocols used
by these oldschool synth devices, though. This needs some research.
Mateusz
My understanding from Joseph, is that he has coded the b which stands
for braille and speak, to function using tinytype and asap screen
readers as a out of the box install for Freedos. In fact he got
permission on list.
Karen, who is using a dectalk, right now.
On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Eric Auer wrote:
Hi Mateusz,
Hello Karen, indeed the screen-reading protocols seem to be not as easy
as I imagined they would be. Eric hinted off-list that they may work on
a phonem-by-phonem base rather than being able to process "normal"
written phrases. Also it seems each screen reader uses its own protocol.
PROVOX claims to support things called ACCENT, AUDAPTER, BNS, BRLMATE,
DECTALK, DTLT, DTPC, LITETALK, PORTTALK, PSS. Of course none of these
names mean anything to me.
A quick look at the rather exotic Assembly dialect sources of PROVOX
tells me that there is no obvious text to phoneme translation algorithm
but just tables on how to pronounce special chars or to spell out things
char by char when the user requests that. There are tables for a large
number of special chars which seem to vary across hardware speech synth
brands but PROVOX seems to expect that the speech synth indeed has local
CPU power and firmware to convert English text to speech inself, so the
PROVOX code does not do that. This also means you can expect troubles
with non-English text unless the synth firmware is multilingual.
I predict the data protocol to the external speech synths to be reduced
charset, plain English, with plenty of escape or setup sequences and in
some cases one or two bits used for flags in each transmitted character.
DECtalk is a real classic, the wikipedia page about it has some links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk
My off-list description, by the way, was based on experiences with a
phoneme chip for embedded computing. I was indeed unaware that speech
synth hardware for PC has built-in computing power to speak plain text.
There is also a quite small DOS TSR which can speak text on the internal
PC speaker: The TSR contains phoneme recordings and has to be used with
a separate command line tool to convert English text to phoneme speaking
calls to the TSR. As PWM sound output was heavy work for ancient PC, the
TSR is very bad in adjusting to modern CPU which are a lot faster. This
is only interesting for the nostalgically inclined audience I would say.
Regards, Eric
___
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https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
___
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Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Again, ignore Eric, he has no first hand experiencing coding screen readers to do anything let alone using them.. One can resolve some of these issues by using the actual drivers provided by the actual programs themselves. My understanding from Joseph, is that he has coded the b which stands for braille and speak, to function using tinytype and asap screen readers as a out of the box install for Freedos. In fact he got permission on list. Karen, who is using a dectalk, right now. On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Eric Auer wrote: Hi Mateusz, Hello Karen, indeed the screen-reading protocols seem to be not as easy as I imagined they would be. Eric hinted off-list that they may work on a phonem-by-phonem base rather than being able to process "normal" written phrases. Also it seems each screen reader uses its own protocol. PROVOX claims to support things called ACCENT, AUDAPTER, BNS, BRLMATE, DECTALK, DTLT, DTPC, LITETALK, PORTTALK, PSS. Of course none of these names mean anything to me. A quick look at the rather exotic Assembly dialect sources of PROVOX tells me that there is no obvious text to phoneme translation algorithm but just tables on how to pronounce special chars or to spell out things char by char when the user requests that. There are tables for a large number of special chars which seem to vary across hardware speech synth brands but PROVOX seems to expect that the speech synth indeed has local CPU power and firmware to convert English text to speech inself, so the PROVOX code does not do that. This also means you can expect troubles with non-English text unless the synth firmware is multilingual. I predict the data protocol to the external speech synths to be reduced charset, plain English, with plenty of escape or setup sequences and in some cases one or two bits used for flags in each transmitted character. DECtalk is a real classic, the wikipedia page about it has some links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk My off-list description, by the way, was based on experiences with a phoneme chip for embedded computing. I was indeed unaware that speech synth hardware for PC has built-in computing power to speak plain text. There is also a quite small DOS TSR which can speak text on the internal PC speaker: The TSR contains phoneme recordings and has to be used with a separate command line tool to convert English text to phoneme speaking calls to the TSR. As PWM sound output was heavy work for ancient PC, the TSR is very bad in adjusting to modern CPU which are a lot faster. This is only interesting for the nostalgically inclined audience I would say. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
On 15/03/2020 23:06, Eric Auer wrote: A quick look at the rather exotic Assembly dialect sources of PROVOX tells me that there is no obvious text to phoneme translation algorithm but just tables on how to pronounce special chars or to spell out things char by char when the user requests that. There are tables for a large number of special chars which seem to vary across hardware speech synth brands but PROVOX seems to expect that the speech synth indeed has local CPU power and firmware to convert English text to speech inself, Yes, that's what I have found in the mean time as well. I also installed "JAWS" (another screen reader, not open-source but freeware) and with JAWS I am able to get actual human phrases being sent to my linux loopback from a VirtualBox-ed FreeDOS install. There is a lot of control codes as well, but that was to be expected of course. I guess that the trouble I have with PROVOX is simply my inability to use it. Whatever I try to do, it just "beeps" at me, probably holding text to be said in some buffer that I am unable to release because I miss some expected key combination or so. Anyway, I will probably fiddle with this in the coming days - at least to understand how this all works under the hood. Mateusz ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Hi Mateusz, > Hello Karen, indeed the screen-reading protocols seem to be not as easy > as I imagined they would be. Eric hinted off-list that they may work on > a phonem-by-phonem base rather than being able to process "normal" > written phrases. Also it seems each screen reader uses its own protocol. > PROVOX claims to support things called ACCENT, AUDAPTER, BNS, BRLMATE, > DECTALK, DTLT, DTPC, LITETALK, PORTTALK, PSS. Of course none of these > names mean anything to me. A quick look at the rather exotic Assembly dialect sources of PROVOX tells me that there is no obvious text to phoneme translation algorithm but just tables on how to pronounce special chars or to spell out things char by char when the user requests that. There are tables for a large number of special chars which seem to vary across hardware speech synth brands but PROVOX seems to expect that the speech synth indeed has local CPU power and firmware to convert English text to speech inself, so the PROVOX code does not do that. This also means you can expect troubles with non-English text unless the synth firmware is multilingual. I predict the data protocol to the external speech synths to be reduced charset, plain English, with plenty of escape or setup sequences and in some cases one or two bits used for flags in each transmitted character. DECtalk is a real classic, the wikipedia page about it has some links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk My off-list description, by the way, was based on experiences with a phoneme chip for embedded computing. I was indeed unaware that speech synth hardware for PC has built-in computing power to speak plain text. There is also a quite small DOS TSR which can speak text on the internal PC speaker: The TSR contains phoneme recordings and has to be used with a separate command line tool to convert English text to phoneme speaking calls to the TSR. As PWM sound output was heavy work for ancient PC, the TSR is very bad in adjusting to modern CPU which are a lot faster. This is only interesting for the nostalgically inclined audience I would say. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
hi, disregard anything Eric says off list, he knows nothing about the way these tools work and should not be considered an expert. His description is totally wrong. As I stated at the start another freedos member Joseph already has a talking edition of freedos working. Likewise as Felix pointed out, dos box is not dos meaning the goal he has of simulating via another simulator is not giving him the satisfying experience he can have. I have written to Joseph directly privately and intend connecting them off list. also, I am going to take a look at the screen reader you found, I did not realize it was open source. What you are discovering are the drivers dedicated for specific synthesizers. However, some screen readers include generic ways to access speech, tinytalk for example, and if one has the talent, one can write a driver that takes advantage of the screen reader's abilities for more open tools. Karen On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Mateusz Viste wrote: Hello Karen, indeed the screen-reading protocols seem to be not as easy as I imagined they would be. Eric hinted off-list that they may work on a phonem-by-phonem base rather than being able to process "normal" written phrases. Also it seems each screen reader uses its own protocol. PROVOX claims to support things called ACCENT, AUDAPTER, BNS, BRLMATE, DECTALK, DTLT, DTPC, LITETALK, PORTTALK, PSS. Of course none of these names mean anything to me. Anyway - unless I misunderstood something, Felix was saying that he already has a way to make DOSBox speak, so I guess he has some kind of TSR and software (Windows-based, I think) synth already. Perhaps he could provide more details about his DOSBox setup, that would probably make it easier to figure out a FreeDOS alternative. Mateusz On 15/03/2020 22:18, Karen Lewellen wrote: Hi mateusz, First profound apologies for messing up your name. You know, I bet Joseph the person behind the talking freedos did not even consider that one. I have a copy, and if it is indeed open source that might be worth exploring. Granted I would have to read documentation again, but yes absolutely both screen reader and speech synthesis is a Tod more complicated. You should end up with understandable spoken words, but that depends on where you are writing the output to, and what is managing that output. Felix's claim that speech hardware is a challenge to come by is not completely true, one must know where to look. Further one can use software sources to create speech, again depending on the structure involved, with mixed results. karen On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Mateusz Viste wrote: > 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
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
On 3/15/2020 9:11 AM, Felix G. wrote: 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? Well, if you do not have hardware that allows for access to a speech synthesizer, that you are severely limited in your options right from the start. I know there is (or was?) one more or less regular here on this mailing list that was using a screen reader in DOS. Maybe (s)he chime in if still around. Personally, I can't be of much help, as that is one topic I have never dealt with seriously in the (almost) 44 years I am playing/working with computers... Ralf -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy saga...
>> I bet Freedos could be in place of MS-DOS if you only use HIMEMX. Q-Soft for the Tyco QSP-2 installs to MS-DOS 5.22 and is a real time system on the DOS side. It installs via actual floppy disk. If you are running the GUI computer (Windows 9x) on say QEMU and emulating the floppy... but that would involve reengineering the system. The real time system for example uses ISA heavily. There are PCI variants of many of the cards where four ISA cards are replaced by say one PCI card, but that would involve reengineering of a 20 year old system. > Which reasons do you have to use MS DOS instead of FreeDOS? > Reasons to use FreeDOS could be to have more free RAM and > the FAT32 support. You can use most FreeDOS drivers together > with MS DOS if you like, too. Q-Soft is available as an executable designed to run on MS-DOS 6.22. May work just fine in Freedos, may not, have not been able to try it because of floppy disk issue. > Floppy drives do not break easily and most have the same > geometry and interface, so finding one might be easier > than finding any supply of still working disks for them. Understood, but I'm pretty sure my Teac USB floppy drive has failed. I fished a disk cover that came off out of it and there could be a smaller part loose still inside the drive. The drive simply does not work now. I doubt that disks that are generally new are suddently all bad let alone that sector 0 is magically unwritable on all of my disks. > Regarding your security concerns, you are right that flash > chips make it hard to securely wipe data due to built-in > distribution of writes to load-balance. You could avoid > the problem by having only encrypted files on the portable > drive. Then destroying the key effectively zaps the data. > DOS versions of infozip at least support some encryption > and you can use other tools such as 7zip for DOS as well. If I run Linux and KVM I can emulate the floppy on a flash drive. Sadly, that won't work well on an old Pentium 4 where it would work much better on say a modern i7. Going from PICMG 1.0 though to PICMG 1.3, forget about the ISA shared memory card. The real time system which is ISA only would have to be completely reconsidered. A Tyco QSP-2 is a 20 year old system now that depends on MS-DOS and Windows 98SE or Windows ME. You don't just replace the two computer heads with one without a lot of reengineering. PPM owns the system now and has reengineered it around Windows 7 and possibly Windows 10... different system with different bugs. Considering that this is a $30k plus piece of equipment for placing small electronic components on a circuit board, surface mount packaging, fixing the old system makes more sense than switching to the newer variant. You can't just upgrade the heads either as computers have changed so much in twenty years. Most people don't even know what a floppy drive is anymore. For the color computer 3 there is a floppy replacement that uses a 2GB flash memory card and stores 360k images on it. That device could be adapted I bet to work with an SBC that has a floppy controller. No emulation needed, direct hardware replacement. As far as DOS is concerned, that is a floppy disk in a floppy drive. In reality, it's flash memory holding multiple disks. > Eric > > ___ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user Oh, the EVOC board lacks a floppy header. It has 3 USB 2.0 channels and of course it expects you to plug in a USB floppy drive if you need one. Sadly, I don't think Freedos 1.3 RC2 can use a USB floppy drive even on an EVOC supported through some weird AMI BIOS. I tried an ISA multi I/O plus floppy card, but without BIOS support for it I don't think that will work either. I currently have the disable jumper set for the floppy controller. If only I could get the source code for the AMI BIOS on this thing and add support for the ISA floppy controller... ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Hello Karen, indeed the screen-reading protocols seem to be not as easy as I imagined they would be. Eric hinted off-list that they may work on a phonem-by-phonem base rather than being able to process "normal" written phrases. Also it seems each screen reader uses its own protocol. PROVOX claims to support things called ACCENT, AUDAPTER, BNS, BRLMATE, DECTALK, DTLT, DTPC, LITETALK, PORTTALK, PSS. Of course none of these names mean anything to me. Anyway - unless I misunderstood something, Felix was saying that he already has a way to make DOSBox speak, so I guess he has some kind of TSR and software (Windows-based, I think) synth already. Perhaps he could provide more details about his DOSBox setup, that would probably make it easier to figure out a FreeDOS alternative. Mateusz On 15/03/2020 22:18, Karen Lewellen wrote: Hi mateusz, First profound apologies for messing up your name. You know, I bet Joseph the person behind the talking freedos did not even consider that one. I have a copy, and if it is indeed open source that might be worth exploring. Granted I would have to read documentation again, but yes absolutely both screen reader and speech synthesis is a Tod more complicated. You should end up with understandable spoken words, but that depends on where you are writing the output to, and what is managing that output. Felix's claim that speech hardware is a challenge to come by is not completely true, one must know where to look. Further one can use software sources to create speech, again depending on the structure involved, with mixed results. karen On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Mateusz Viste wrote: 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
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Mateusz I just really screwed up your name, I apologize. Do not hold that against me in writing privately, I do have a question for you. I will answer a couple of questions for you below though, stating firmly that they do not apply to freedos. In context. On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Mateusz Viste wrote: questions. I am not blind and I have no experience whatsoever in this area. There is no such thing as a dumb question. Perhaps if more software developers asked more of them, a greater degree of inclusion would currently exist. > 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. While to be sure at their most basic screen readers speak the screen their functions are, at their best, far more than that. 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? That depends on the operating system in question. For example there are several Linux distributions that allow for out of the box access, this is because the screen reader and synthesis are built into the operating system itself with a hot key pressed to facilitate the access. With pure dos, one can simply include a very small screen reader on some install media, at least on a floppy. Might be interesting to discover if the same can be incorporated into a pure dos image, cannot see why not though. Of course apple products have the screen reader, voiceover, built into most every item apple produces these days, again with a command starting speech. > 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 - Actually, one simply needs to know where to look. Additionally, there are USB editions of hardware synthesizers, as well as internal cards to serve the same goal. Well developed screen readers include in their install process commands to select which synthesizer will be used, and its location. there are even a few that can use soundblaster cards for the speech. what are the current ways that blind people use for interacting with computers? Are there some software standards or APIs for screen reader emulation? Depends on which type of computer, and yes there are standards. Mateusz The questions deserve detailed answers so again I invite you to write off list if curious. Karen On 15/03/2020 17:11, 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 Gr??tzmacher. 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
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Hi mateusz, First profound apologies for messing up your name. You know, I bet Joseph the person behind the talking freedos did not even consider that one. I have a copy, and if it is indeed open source that might be worth exploring. Granted I would have to read documentation again, but yes absolutely both screen reader and speech synthesis is a Tod more complicated. You should end up with understandable spoken words, but that depends on where you are writing the output to, and what is managing that output. Felix's claim that speech hardware is a challenge to come by is not completely true, one must know where to look. Further one can use software sources to create speech, again depending on the structure involved, with mixed results. karen On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, Mateusz Viste wrote: 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 > > > ___ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
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 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Hi Felix, My name is karen lewellen, and I have used DOS the real thing, not a simulator, for approximately 32 years. while I have never used freedos, I can tell you that A member here, Joseph has recently created a fully functional and talking edition of freedos. Including on board dos screen readers ASAP and Tinytalk. I am guessing he has not noticed this thread. Write me privately and I will connect the two of you. to be sure I cannot speak to its quality, perhaps because I am rather resourceful, i can still find hardware synthesizers, and computers with serial ports. My current machine has close to a gig of memory, with a p4 awaiting DOS installation. Again, write me off list, and i will both provide hardware ideas and connect you with Joesph. make no mistake, you need not endure poor quality Linux options and speech instead of enjoying DOS as you desire. Eric, the invitation for private questions applies to Felix. Nancy I can answer some of our questions off list too, as I have one about a tool of yours. Karen 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 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy saga...
Hi Michael, > I'm working with an EVOC brand SBC on a PICMG 1.0 backplane. That sounds exotic, but still your BIOS has a menu item where you can enable an on-board hardware floppy controller. Do you imply that there is no header on the board to plug a classic floppy to that classic controller? > I know USB 1.1 isn't part of the DOS specification Correct, but often the BIOS supports storage USB media. In older BIOS, this only works if you boot from the medium in question, such as a flash drive / USB stick, but it is clearly better than nothing. USB flash sticks are usually supported better than USB floppy by BIOS! There also are very few USB drivers for DOS which you can load after booting if your BIOS lacks support. In general, those also are better with USB sticks or USB harddisks than with USB floppy. So the question would be why you prefer floppy over other media? I actually have booted DOS and started Windows 3 from USB stick many years ago. It was horribly slow but the BIOS already had the feature :-) > Another thought, if building a USB device with a 34 pin > floppy output for legacy 1.44 m floppy drives... You mean an USB case / housing for classic floppy? That is how most USB cases work, also for IDE and SATA disks. > Why not emulate a floppy drive if desired as well? Well, why yes? Other media have so much more capacity. > I'm thinking a CF to usb adapter with a 34 pin floppy connector. Your problem is that your mainboard has no floppy connector if I understand you correctly. So you need a CF to USB and not a CF to 34 pin. The name for CF to USB is cardreader ;-) > DOS if I'm not mistaken expects the floppy support to be in the BIOS. Usually yes. That means you can also simulate floppy using anything which takes over from the BIOS. The famous memdisk (often used with GRUB and similar boot menus) does exactly that: Put a floppy disk image on your boot medium (harddisk, USB, CD, DVD, many types supported) and load memdisk. This pretends that the floppy image is an actual BIOS floppy disk and boots it :-) > The advantage of floppies is they are easily destroyed. > > Try destroying a USB flash key How about breaking the silicon chips into pieces? Silicon is very brittle. You can also use high voltage to break things. > with Linux and Microsoft moving away from floppies, should > Freedos support emulated floppies? See above, there already is memdisk for that. Note that it does not usually write changes back to disk, but if you want persistent storage, you can just use any normal disk anyway. About your ATAPI ZIP question: I think some BIOSes support booting from that and using that as well. They are a bit weird because they mix floppy use style and harddisk size. DOS might treat them as normal harddisk and get confused when you try to swap disks. > bet Freedos could be in place of MS-DOS if you only use HIMEMX. Which reasons do you have to use MS DOS instead of FreeDOS? Reasons to use FreeDOS could be to have more free RAM and the FAT32 support. You can use most FreeDOS drivers together with MS DOS if you like, too. Floppy drives do not break easily and most have the same geometry and interface, so finding one might be easier than finding any supply of still working disks for them. Regarding your security concerns, you are right that flash chips make it hard to securely wipe data due to built-in distribution of writes to load-balance. You could avoid the problem by having only encrypted files on the portable drive. Then destroying the key effectively zaps the data. DOS versions of infozip at least support some encryption and you can use other tools such as 7zip for DOS as well. Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy saga...
> I'm working with an EVOC brand SBC on a PICMG 1.0 backplane. > I have not been able to get floppy disk support in Freedos 1.3, period. as far as I understand it, you have been working with MSDOS 6.x for the last 25 years. I recommend another 20 years. the alternative would have been to a) send the hardware to my home adress, with exact and complete description of symptoms and wanted outcome, and ~5000USD attached. no warranties, unfortunately. > I know USB 1.1 isn't part of the DOS specification that freedos is > targeting, but a USB floppy driver is needed since that is what this > particular SBC offers. > I'm wondering if freedos could be reasonably modified to support a USB floppy > drive as A drive? > Another thought, if building a USB device with a 34 pin floppy > output for legacy 1.44 m floppy drives... Why not emulate a floppy drive if > desired as well? > I'm thinking a CF to usb adapter with a 34 pin floppy connector. Yep. Sure. great idea, but not entirely new. IIRC that was ~5000 EUR per adapter. in ~2007. Tom ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Can't install FreeDOS
Is the problem not having floppy capability on real hardware? Maybe you have USB but not ATAPI cdrom? Freedos as far as I know does not support USB let alone USB floppy drives. If you don't have IDE or you have an external USB drive such as a DVD burner... that doesn't help you get it installed. Floppy drives are gradually being abandoned and unless you are a pro at fixing them when they break and you have a manufacturer making new floppy disks, not old stock sitting in a warehouse somewhere... What implications does modifying Freedos to support USB floppy drives have? How about using a Zip Atapi or USB drive as a floppy drive? I think BIOS support of floppy alternatives is spotty at best. DOS environments typically expect BIOS to provide floppy support. If you intend to replace floppies with what you have, say a USB floppy drive, you need a software driver for Freedos, MS-DOS, DR-Dos, PC-DOS... ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Can't install FreeDOS
On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 7:28 AM ZB wrote: > On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 12:47:33AM -0500, Rugxulo wrote: > > > It's amazing to me that so many people still use 486s with FreeDOS. > > For most DOS applications 486 is kind of "numbercruncher" - and, besides, > if you use Intel 486 CPU you'll get fanless "silent PC" (AMD 486 requires > fan; I mean at least these faster 100/120 MHz versions, nut sure what about > slower ones). Having, say, 32 MB RAM at your disposal - what more you can > need for DOS? IIRC, the 486 was essentially a 386 with floating point math processor added on the same die, instead of having to use a separate chip in separate socket. (And if memory serves, there were cheaper 486 models that disabled the FPU and what you had was essentially a 386. Many folks simply didn't need on-chip floating point. The calculations could be done in software, and hardware just made it quicker.) You certainly don't need 32MB RAM for DOS itself. If you have the software, you can use some of the RAM for disk cache and RAMdisk, but most will be untouched. > Today typically we've got around 32 GB RAM in our machines - 1000x more - > just to move bloat, created using "modern technologies", back and forth > within that vast space I'm not sure how typical that is. I'm configuring a new desktop at the moment, and it came with 16GB. It can be *expanded* to 32GB, but I have no need. (The machine it replaces had 8GB, expandable to 32GB, and I didn't use all of that.) If I were a developer trying to build from a large local source tree, and wanted the build to complete in a reasonable time, I'd certainly want 32GB RAM, or even more (but I'd need a fancy motherboard to do it.) Likewise if I was doing demanding stuff in Photoshop, which wants all the RAM you can give it, or video editing. The sweet spot for Win10 appears to be 6GB RAM. It will use more if you have it, but 6GB is where you start and performance on basic tasks will be reasonable. But depending upon what you do, much of that stuff is *not* bloat. DOS grew up in the days when hardware was expensive and machines it would run on would be limited. Hardware is now cheap and getting cheaper. Lots of things can be done now because of that. The previous limits were cost based, and there were things you might like to do but simply couldn't afford to. Now you can. (A correspondent elsewhere talked about migrating a database server he administered from 16TB of SATA HDs to 16TB of SSDs. He saw an order of magnitude performance increase. The DBMS *screamed* through queries and updates. The significant point was that costs for NAND Flash and the SSDs that used it had dropped to the point that he could *afford* to make the switch. We are only seeing the tip of that iceberg.) Software growth is a part of that. Because hardware is cheap, there isn't need to optimize for *size*. And optimization is what the compiler does for you, and does it better than you can. Overly clever programmer attempts to optimize their own code can fool the compiler and result in bigger, slower code. There are folks still concerned with size, but they are developing in the embedded space for IoT devices and the like, and using a different set of toolchains, provided by the HW vendors for developing on their devices. The scarce resource is developer time, and anything that can make developer's jobs easier and them more productive is looked on with favor. I date from the days when the original IBM PC with (up to) 640KB RAM, CGA graphics, and dual 5" 360KB floppies were first appearing on corporate desktops as engines to run Lotus 123. I learned a fair number of tips and tricks to wring the most of of the machines I used. I'm *very* happy to live now and not have to do that any more. I play with DOS and DOS apps for fun, as a hobby, in spare free time. Actual work gets done elsewhere. Most of what I do on a daily basis simply can't be *done* in DOS. And none of what is on my machine can be classified as "bloat". It needs to be that big to do its job, and I have the resources to support it and don't care. > Zbigniew __ Dennis ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] USB floppy saga...
I'm working with an EVOC brand SBC on a PICMG 1.0 backplane. I have not been able to get floppy disk support in Freedos 1.3, period. I know USB 1.1 isn't part of the DOS specification that freedos is targeting, but a USB floppy driver is needed since that is what this particular SBC offers. I'm wondering if freedos could be reasonably modified to support a USB floppy drive as A drive? Another thought, if building a USB device with a 34 pin floppy output for legacy 1.44 m floppy drives... Why not emulate a floppy drive if desired as well? I'm thinking a CF to usb adapter with a 34 pin floppy connector. Another option, MicroSD card like the ones used on the Raspberry Pi. DOS if I'm not mistaken expects the floppy support to be in the BIOS. It also expects IRQ 6, DMA 2, I/O address something... The advantage of floppies is they are easily destroyed. Try destroying a USB flash key, they are more resilient than floppies and much higher capacity, but they are NOT easily destroyed. What I'm asking is with Linux and Microsoft moving away from floppies, should Freedos support emulated floppies? If say you are connecting via USB 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, or 3.1 that is different than what traditional DOS expects. Modern PCs lack the traditional floppy controller. Can freedos be tweaked to work around the no floppy controller issue in a compatible fashion? I'm thinking ATAPI devices such as Zip drives can be a floppy replacement, but can they be pointed to as the A: drive? I have a Zip 750 Atapi drive coming tomorrow and 3 sealed 750 meg zip disks. Atapi zip drives work in Windows XP and Windows 9x, but they don't work in MS-DOS and they don't work in Freedos unless I'm mistaken. I may be stuck with MS-DOS 6.2 for the real time system that the Tyco QSP-2 uses. I bet Freedos could be in place of MS-DOS if you only use HIMEMX. Haven't had a chance to test the real time system on freedos because I don't have floppy support unless the SBC in question that I'm testing with has a real floppy controller and a real 1.44M floppy drive in working condition is available. I'm not an EE, but I know someone who is and I would like to contribute an open hardware and driver specification for a floppy replacement that is compatible with MSDOS, Freedos, Linux, Windows... Magnetic media is easily disposed of, but it less than reliable in many cases and the capacities tend to be low. Something modern that is higher capacity and that can replace what came before is needed. Something that is easily destroyed like floppies but readily available and higher capacity. CD-R media is great, but it isn't as rewriteable as floppies. I'll be testing my Zip750 disks to see how destructible and how reliable they are and I'll be looking to see if I can replace A: with them. As far as using a USB floppy drive, I think I broke mine. Even so, I don't think freedos is able to use USB devices let alone floppy replacements. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Can't install FreeDOS
Hi, On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 6:28 AM ZB wrote: > > On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 12:47:33AM -0500, Rugxulo wrote: > > It's amazing to me that so many people still use 486s with FreeDOS. > > For most DOS applications 486 is kind of "numbercruncher" My 486s, back in the day, were quite slow and underpowered (Sx/25 with either 4 or 8 MB RAM and small hard drives [170 MB or 250 MB or such]). In some ways, I wish I had one again (in fully working order), just to benchmark stuff. Oh, have you seen this? I haven't tried it, but it sounds cool: * https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer > if you use Intel 486 CPU you'll get fanless "silent PC" (AMD 486 requires > fan; I mean at least these faster 100/120 MHz versions, nut sure what about > slower ones). There's many low-powered (but powerful) cpus nowadays, too. So it's not just old 800 Mhz VIA cpus or Geode or even ARM or whatever. This (Intel) Chromebook is fairly cool (compared to my much older laptop). I'm no engineer, but die shrinks in cpu processes have shown great benefit. (But there are way too many cpus, it's hard to know which is optimal for certain tasks.) > Having, say, 32 MB RAM at your disposal - what more you can need for DOS? Very naive (no offense). But I agree that you shouldn't need gigs just to crunch some numbers. I can easily use that much in DOS (and much more). Whether it's a good idea or not is a different problem. > Today typically we've got around 32 GB RAM in our machines - 1000x more - > just to move bloat, created using "modern technologies", back and forth > within that vast space Actually, I keep seeing 4 GB RAM machines for sale. I guess it's to keep costs down? I wouldn't go below that, especially for x64. Maybe that's a good thing? Maybe it helps us optimize instead of always wasting. It's not that I demand more, but having an underpowered machine is annoying. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
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. : 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 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
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. : > > 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 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Hi Felix, actually Linux and Windows are rather similar to use for sighted people, just click around in menus. While it is possible to have speech or Braille (if you use that?) already on during the install, I would feel a lot safer with having separate machines for separate operating systems. Or at least separate harddisks. Another option would be to install Linux inside some virtual machine in Windows. That way you avoid stress regarding the risk of damaging your Windows and you can use the Windows speech output during the install in case it is hard to enable the Linux speech output early enough. However, I see no general problem with running dosemu2 inside Linux inside a virtual machine inside Windows. Dosemu2 is between a virtual machine and a specialized environment for DOS, so you get more realistic results compared to Dosbox which usually simulates even DOS and at the same time you get less troubles with DOS because dosemu2 already includes custom tricks to help with the integration. So it is both better than dosbox and easier than using a complete virtual machine. For example, you can use a Linux directory as dosemu drive, while virtual machines only allow disk images. Of course dosemu also allows disk images, you can mix both styles. Virtual machines usually come with drivers for guest operating systems to improve integration, but those are not usually available for DOS. We do have a small number of drivers for DOS for selected virtual machines and maybe somebody else can post an overview here. I think it is easier to use Linux as guest in a virtual machine in Windows: Then you can have some virtual drive and network sharing (drivers for Linux exist) to make Linux easier to use. From there, you can run DOS inside dosemu2, which as far as I know is not directly available for Windows. I would not exclude the possibility, though. You can also try a variety of virtual machines for Windows: Some may work better for running DOS and some may connect better to your Windows speech synthesizer and if you are lucky, some have both advantages at the same time. Maybe somebody else can share some thoughts here. Dosemu2 is not an alternative to FreeDOS: It just is some environment optimized for running DOS. It usually comes with a version of FreeDOS pre-installed, along with some dosemu-specific drivers. Of course you can and should extend and upgrade the installed FreeDOS from there on. Classic dosemu is usually available pre-packaged in your software management in Linux. Because everything is free and open, you basically just check the checkbox in the list of available packages to install it. In text style, things could be "apt-get install dosemu" or similar. A default configuration file will be created in your home directory when you start using dosemu. You can edit the file to add drives (disk images or Linux directories) or modify settings (for example sound or net related). Note that dosemu originally has been using vm86 mode in 32 bit Linux, which gives good performance. Because vm86 is not easily accessible in 64 bit systems, it uses built in CPU emulation there. The use of vm86 interfaces and similar goodies also is the reason why I expect dosemu to not be available as app for native Windows, but I might be mistaken. You say you redirect the serial port of DOS inside dosbox to a Windows simulation of a serial port speech synth. Is that for nostalgic reasons? I would expect it to be easier to tell any Windows speech synth to read the text shown on your DOS text screen in dosbox? At least for dosemu, as said, you can use it in a plain text mode which even works over telnet or ssh connections so it should be easy to let a speech Synth read those. As you mention Orca in Ubuntu: That would be a Linux which has dosemu in the list of default available apps. Regards, Eric PS: Do I understand you correctly that there are DOS TSR which analyze graphical DOS screens, extract texts and then output those on the serial port for speech synths? ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
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 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Hi Eric! Thank you for your helpful suggestions! While they may ultimately come in handy if all else fails, I was actually hoping, coming from operating system A, that I would not have to familiarize myself with operating system C first in order to then use operating system B. In fact, since I don't really feel confident enough to install Linux natively on my machine alongside Windows 10, again I would need to go the virtual route, only now with an additional step of indirection, namely, Dosemu2 running on Linux running on Windows. Is that even viable, by the way? On a related note, how does Dosemu actually stack up compared to FreeDOS in a virtual machine? Is Dosemu2 considered mature enough to be an alternative to FreeDOS, or is it, like Dosbox, an attempt at getting DOS-like behavior from a non-DOS machine without doing actual deep virtualization? Can FreeDOS genuinely run inside Dosemu2, and is there any documentation on how to get it up and running on an existing Linux system? All the best, Felix Am So., 15. März 2020 um 18:04 Uhr schrieb Eric Auer : > > > Hi Felix, welcome to FreeDOS! > > If you do not like dosbox, you may want to try > dosemu2 in Linux. That way, you can use Linux > audio drivers and speech synthesizers, which is > probably easier than using DOS ones, while still > being able to switch away from dosbox. > > While dosemu2 is more modern, you can fall back to > a pre-packaged dosemu which various Linux distros > have available. It can be run either in a plain > text mode or graphically and the plain text mode > can be used in terminal or console, which should > make it convenient to use with standard speech > output functionality in Linux graphical desktops. > > Ironically, I do not know how to enable speech > in non-graphical Linux, but probably other users > here can make suggestions. Linux also has BRLTTY > support for Braille displays, which in turn can > be connected to speech software which might be > easier to use in non-graphical contexts. > Regards, Eric > > > > > ___ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Hello Felix, I am sorry that I will provide no helpful advice here, only (probably dumb) questions. I am not blind and I have no experience whatsoever in this area. 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. 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? 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? Mateusz On 15/03/2020 17:11, 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 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
Hi Felix, welcome to FreeDOS! If you do not like dosbox, you may want to try dosemu2 in Linux. That way, you can use Linux audio drivers and speech synthesizers, which is probably easier than using DOS ones, while still being able to switch away from dosbox. While dosemu2 is more modern, you can fall back to a pre-packaged dosemu which various Linux distros have available. It can be run either in a plain text mode or graphically and the plain text mode can be used in terminal or console, which should make it convenient to use with standard speech output functionality in Linux graphical desktops. Ironically, I do not know how to enable speech in non-graphical Linux, but probably other users here can make suggestions. Linux also has BRLTTY support for Braille displays, which in turn can be connected to speech software which might be easier to use in non-graphical contexts. Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Introducing myself, and inquiring about using FreeDOS as a blind user
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 ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Can't install FreeDOS
On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 12:47:33AM -0500, Rugxulo wrote: > It's amazing to me that so many people still use 486s with FreeDOS. For most DOS applications 486 is kind of "numbercruncher" - and, besides, if you use Intel 486 CPU you'll get fanless "silent PC" (AMD 486 requires fan; I mean at least these faster 100/120 MHz versions, nut sure what about slower ones). Having, say, 32 MB RAM at your disposal - what more you can need for DOS? Today typically we've got around 32 GB RAM in our machines - 1000x more - just to move bloat, created using "modern technologies", back and forth within that vast space -- regards, Zbigniew ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Can't install FreeDOS
I booted from floppy On Sun, Mar 15, 2020, 02:45 tom ehlert wrote: > > Regrettably, I ran into another problem: apparently the CD I burned was > > roughed up too badly for the installation to complete. It died while > > trying to install UDVD2, due to a read error. And that was my last > > CD-R. > as you don't describe in detail what you did we can only guess :<< > > most likely you try to boot from the CD, where the BIOS provides > access to the CD. > > during boot, you load UDVD2, and get this read error. > > this is normal. UDVD2 (and any other DVD driver) kills the BIOS > driver, and the DVD is no longer accessible. > > no need to burn another CD-R; you will get the same result > > Tom > > > > > ___ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Can't install FreeDOS
> Regrettably, I ran into another problem: apparently the CD I burned was > roughed up too badly for the installation to complete. It died while > trying to install UDVD2, due to a read error. And that was my last > CD-R. as you don't describe in detail what you did we can only guess :<< most likely you try to boot from the CD, where the BIOS provides access to the CD. during boot, you load UDVD2, and get this read error. this is normal. UDVD2 (and any other DVD driver) kills the BIOS driver, and the DVD is no longer accessible. no need to burn another CD-R; you will get the same result Tom ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
