That would be wonderful! And let's add to that: the box could be hooked up
to anything that had a screen that needed to be read, provided that there
was an appropriate connection. Pam.
-----Original Message-----
From: David via Talk
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2016 6:14 PM
To: Dave ; Window-Eyes Discussion List ; Kevin Minor
Subject: Re: Reminiscing about old Screen Readers and Synthesizers
Well, would be a great thing for the VFO team, to get their resources
together and make such a thing possible. Let's get a box that you
connect to the external display connector on the back of your computer.
Let the box have something like 4, or even 8 GB of RAM, enough to hold
your screen reader, all apps and settings, and if necessary a secondary
screen reader. Let the box have a USB connectorr, for updating the
onboard software, when new releases come out.
Now, feed the box with all the info from the screen directly, and let it
process that info. Gone would be all the internal conflicts with
Windows, Office or any other software not leaving the screen reader
access to the screen content. The box would basically just be operating
like an OCR of the screen content, at any given moment. All controlling
could either be done by dedicated keys on the box, or you could (first
the OS is loaded), let the user control it by keystrokes on the
keyboard, which would be send to it either wirelessly, or through an USB
cable.
You now could operate the Bios, fool around with cheap alternatives to
Office, like modern versions of WordPerfect (which many of us old-timers
enjoyed). Or, you could finally go free, and install things like
OpenOffice. Should you, for whatever reason want to go for any other OS
than Windows, you just run Linux or whatever. Since the box would
interpret signals sent to the display, it would no longer depend on one
OS in particular.
OH, WELL! Still dreams of tomorrow are permitted, ain't they? Trouble
is, if they invented such a unit, they would have done something really
great. And that is not going to happen, my guess goes.
I do know, that at least one of the German Braille displays, back in the
late 80's/early 90's - the Braillo display - had a board inserted into
the computer, and would be up running even at BIOS level, long before
anything booted. Used to have that one, numerous years ago, and was
able to set up computers from scratch for my customers. Then came all
the laptops, with no wa of installing such an extension board, and gone
was the whole idea. Today, with fast processors, well-established OCR
technology, and cheap memory - a Screen Connector-based box, should be
possible for the dreamers. And maybe would have boosted the market for
the screen reader industry.
y
David
On 10/25/2016 11:14 PM, Dave via Talk wrote:
Hi Kevin,
So there was a way to get to the BIOS. Since my first PC back in the
mid 80's I've wanted to be able to get in there to make changes. Still
would in fact.
Would be very nice to Update, Fix, and Repair my own Hardware, all with
Speech.
Grumpy Dave
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