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Linux Software

Zip Up: New Linux Distribution Speaks To Users 99

Posted by timothy from the user-friendliness dept.
LinuxNews.com Editor writes, "A new talking distribution makes Linux easy for visually impaired users to install." An amazing hybrid of a compact Slackware distro and a Linux speech synthesizer, this is an effort that deserves kudos not only because it helps blind and visually impaired users, but because it sounds like it could teach the big boys a few things about appropriate user interfaces. As a bonus, it's small and can run on relatively low-end hardware (though it requires a compatible speech synthesizer), and doesn't even require repartioning.
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Zip Up: New Linux Distribution Speaks To Users More

Zip Up: New Linux Distribution Speaks To Users

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  • >I disagree. Microsoft has made it exponentially easier for a blind
    >person to use Windows. You dont have to say "Left click coordinate (
    >832 , 005 )" You can simply say "Minimize." You can have it read all
    >text on the screen, as well as the many magnification/high contrast
    >features microsoft has built-in to Win2k, for those with some sight.
    >Linux is no less of a hardship to use for blind people than is
    >Windows, and in many ways, it's still leaps behind.
    So sayth the Microsoft Astroturfer. Come on, admit it. You don't the slightest clue about the needs of blind people do you? As it has already been pointed out, how can you/what's the point of "Minimizing" something you *CAN'T* see?
  • >the fallacie in your argument is that Windows is *not* a
    >graphical-only user interface. My point was is that you can already,
    >today, in Windows simply say "remove all" or The technology is already
    >there using plain simple English, without the need to learn cryptic
    >commands. Linux will never be able to compete with Microsoft in this
    >area until it too can offer *plain English* voice-activated commands.
    God. What an idoit you are. The *ONLY* thing in Windows that could be called non-graphical in windows is the MS-DOS prompt and losers like you want the idoits at MickeySoft to get rid of that. Get rid of the MS-DOS prompt and what do you have left? A crappy graphical-only user interface. And in case you didn't know there are already a number of voice-reconigtion software packages for linux. There's ViaVoice speech recognition SDK from IBM. Gvoice - Voice control for Gtk/GNOME is another. And then there's the The Open Mind Speech project and a whole host of others.
  • So, what you mean is that every time Windows format a persons C drive thanks to some mistake (oooh, what does this button labeled 'Format' do?), they can sue Microsoft?
  • You create an emmebedded device with this distro you might have winner maybe as a helper robot that you can call on certain commands or anything else think about some the possibiloties here we are all a creative bunch here lets come up with some ideas here

    http://theotherside.com/dvd/ [theotherside.com]
  • It seems to me that linux (or any unix) would be the way to go for the visually impaired. Coupled with voice recognition, the command line offers more ease and power than one would find anywhere. I mean, how would a blind person benefit from mac or windows gui? Notoriously cryptic? Not really. You'll need to learn syntax for any os - it seems to me that the most succinct one would be the way to go.....
  • Well, the most likely developers of an interface for the visually impaired is going to be someone that has to use the interface. This is a foothold so these people can get in and do more for it. Just like you need an initial top notch hacker to get in when a project is fragile and barely stable to improve it and make it more robust, you need an initial effort in order to build on and make improvements
  • EMACS is the way to go. A guy who works on hardware/software for sale to blind people showed up at a LUG meeting a couple of months ago. I recommended that instead of trying to shoehorn some stupid GUI and a screenreader into a handheld device (Graphical -> Blind ?? WTF. Doesn't make any sense to me) he should just use Linux as a microkernel for EMACS. EMACS can do everything you need it to do; web, email, news, text editing, file management and all the internals are exposed so you could write your own communications layer for hotsyncing and hooks for EMACSSpeak. I think the functionality gained by using an EMACS solution far outweighs the learning curve in getting there for an uninitiated user. EMACS is like having your own personal AI to help you.
  • BWAHAHAHAH!

    I have no idea why, but on that last line, I had a vision of Sam Kinison screaming: "Fuck you kernel! Remove Slash! AWW AUUUUGH!!!"

    :-)

    Oh well. Gotta lay off the Excedrin.

    ---
  • A point by point translation

    As an IT consultant working in the software industry I read /. to do research on the "freeware" community as exemplified by the Linux operating system. My opinion on this new package is mixed, and I'll share my thoughts on the matter.

    translates to:
    I have put all my eggs in the Microsoft basket. Free software worries me, and makes me defensive. Rather than broaden my options I will now spread some anonymous FUD in hopes that Linux will go away.

    and
    While this is a nice marketing move for Slackware and Speakup, obviously motivated by getting them "kudos" in the Linux-savvy crowd, I wonder if they've thought out some of the implications of this. I mean, if a blind Linux user running this package makes a mistake and formats their C drive, then who will they sue for damages? Slackware of course. The company could find itself on the end of a series of civil lawsuits by the visually impaired who were assured that this would be their "gateway" to the world of Linux.

    translates to
    I don't know that Linux doesn't have a C drive but that won't stop me from spreading FUD that applies equally well to MacOS or Windows.

    and
    I wish Slackware success in the marketplace

    translates to
    I will sleep better now, after having done my part for MotherSoft.
  • Of course the legions of visually impaired Linux hackers would wear the headphones. They're the ones with the talking computers.
  • Actually, a text based OS makes a lot more sense than a GUI.

    A GUI can be tweaked (with big fonts) for low vision people but is completely useless for the blind. The G in GUI refers to graphical. For blind people, the desktop is a step backwards. A text screen, on the other hand, can be scanned with a voice synthesizer.

    I imagine this distro includes Emacspeak, and emacs lets you do an amazing number of things, such as shells and file management. When properly set up, you don't have to fiddle with the notoriously cryptic Linux operating system.
  • These people could just use headphones. I doubt this would be even necessary, because they could just choose different voices. (Say male versus female).
  • If you've been reading /., you know that if you drop a load of FUD you will get a reply. You were spreading some extremely well-known FUD (who do you sue?). I just pointed that out. For reference, the MS EULA forbids you from suing them. So pointing this out as a Linux specific weakness is just plain FUD, and most people here know that.

    Semi-Anonymous FUDsters have been tracked all the way to Microsoft on various forums. e.g. Steve Bartko. But I never said you worked for Microsoft. Seeing as you are a reasonable person, do you now see how your anonymous posting could be seen in a negative light? I used to have very negative opinions of Linux, based on the zealotry of its users, so I apologize for my enthusiastic trashing.

    Unless you are just trolling. Then, okay, you got me. Damn.
  • My mother-in-law's eyes are failing, so I've been sensitive to the needs of the partially-sighted. Most "blind" people do have partial sight, and can often use a computer screen if the picture is modified for them.

    This is one area that the microsoft windows crowd have an advantage in - from my research the partially sighted find it easier to use a split screen to use the computer, the top half shows a normal view, which is good enough for seeing if something is flashing or a new window has popped up and the bottom half shows a magnified view area taken from the top.

    My opinion is that since so much content is produced for the sighted by the sighted it is often impossible to make a meaningful audio version of what is going on on screen.

    With respect to this article, audio prompts for the partially sighted on OS installation is probably not as useful as buying a pre-installed machine from VA or Dell which can also include support.

  • I'm all for more features for Linux but Installation? Isn't that one of the more complex things to do with Linux? I mean, I know some fully sighted people who can't do it.

    Maybe my point is if I was blind or had a seeing problem, either I would get a sighted friend to read to me what was going on or get a computer which had Linux and disablility software already installed.

    Of course, if you can do it, then hats off!
  • A few years back I worked on a system being developed for use specifically by blind and sight-impaired people. We also installed some off-the-shelf software. To say that I learned a lot would be an understatement. I spent quite a bit of time running software with my monitor turned off, trying to navigate using screenreader software and a voice-synthesizer. It's not easy. It's not easy even when you are using an app that you are familiar with. When faced with unfamiliar "screens" and applications, I would almost tear my hair out in frustration. I recall one application that required you to lookup records by clicking on a green field title. Doing that without being able to "see" was certainly a challenge.

    I've been told that the transition from command-line systems (DOS) to Windows was very difficult for blind people. I can understand why. I've also been told (but I havn't experienced) that Win 98 was an improvement over Win 95 because Microsoft put effort into accessibility technology. If someone wants to do the same thing with Linux, more power to them.
  • Actually, it is no longer true that everything can be done through a text interface under Linux, especially as more proprietary applicatiosn appear. Screen reading technology for the GUI under Windows has gotten pretty good, and I know some blind people use Windows very productively. We don't have anything like that under X, and the fact that X uses multilple GUI toolkits doesn't help. This is something I'm concerned about, and I'd like to work on a solution, but I don't yet know enough about programming under X to do it.
  • Most, if not all, speech synthesizers will let you plug in headphones and listen privately, so that nobody else has to hear your computer talk.

  • Timothy's summary of the article refers to Speakup as a "Linux speech synthesizer". Actually, it's a screen reader. A screen reader looks at the contents of the screen and sends them as text to the speech synthesizer. And Speakup only supports hardware speech synthesizers at the moment, so you can't use Speakup (and therefore ZipSpeak) with just a sound card.

  • But you don't hear speech on the built-in PC speaker under Linux. If you use Speakup, then you use a separate speech synthesizer device, which is either a card that you install in the computer or a device that you attach to the serial or parallel port. The speech synthesizer has its own speaker. If you use Emacspeak, then software synthesizers are also available (MBROLA, IBM ViaVoice Outloud, and probably Festival sometime soon).
  • The only reason why there is an "approved list" of speech synthesizers is that the people working on Speakup haven't written drivers for all known hardware synthesizers yet. If your company makes a speech synthesizer that isn't yet supported, you could make it supported by writing a driver for Speakup, and I will put out new releases of ZipSpeak as Speakup is updated. Neither I nor the original creators of Speakup meant to lock people into an inferior synthesizer. By the way, if you happened to be referring to the DECtalk speech synthesizers, the author of Speakup is working on a DECtalk Express driver, and I'm sure that will be in the next release of Speakup.
  • I also have a friend who uses Emacspeak and loves it, but as someone else has mentioned, there's a lot of learning involved. For someone who's already familiar with an MS-DOS screen reader, Speakup is a lot more familiar than Emacspeak. I know some people are coming over to Linux from DOS, and they want to run PINE, Lynx, and whatever else they used on their shell account at their ISP. While Emacs has a terminal emulator, Emacspeak has poor support for it in my opinion, so if you're going to use Emacspeak exclusively, it's much better to learn to use VM (the mail reader), W3 (the Web browser), and so on under Emacs. So for people who are laready comfortable with a DOS screen reader and a Unix shell account, Speakup would be the best option, in my opinion. Also, you can't run Emacspeak on a Linux boot/root disk, so unless a blind person has a screen reader like Speakup, they need someone who can see to help them with the installation. The same thing applies if something goes wrong in the boot process and they can't get to a login prompt.
  • I was tempted initially to flame you or ignore you, but you have a point, not about the Emacs interface, but about the fact that they are stuck with it. I like Emacs. I've been using it for well over a decade and it is comfortable and automatic for me. And I recognize that there are people who prefer other interfaces. As my boss put it, "Editing text is not my job. Writing code is." Emacs provides a lots of power, at the expense of a long (not necessarily steep) learning curve. I would rather not present it to anyone as their only choice. That is just a quick way to make enemies.

    As for editor holy wars, part of what I love about free software is the number of good choices I have for various kinds of tools. They adhere to published standards and they interoperate. In order to use LaTeX or groff, I am not stuck with the editor that comes with either of them. I can use what I like. For that, I am thankful for the diversity, even the tools I would hate to use myself. They help to enforce open standards in free software by ensuring that they continue to be necessary.
  • One thing you have to understand is that blind people are blind, not stupid, because of their lack of vision they learn to make up for it in other ways, such as hearing more efficiently. If I were blind I would far rather use Linux than a strictly GUI interface like Windows, on which I cant see the GUI interface anyway ( Which, may I remind you, is only this way because we're not blind ).
  • Err first you dont have to listen through the inbuilt speaker, second if you're blind, WHO CARES if it's more colourful.
  • I agree wholeheartedly, how much more 'mature' and 'stable' can Unix get?? It was there WAY before Windows was even a wet dream. Ahh but what kind of post would you expect from Microsoft pushers.
  • I've heard there are several out there working on it. Now, that this has in the media, I'll at least pose the first of several extensions to this, you can expect to see within a year: digital voice identification and, of course, the corrolary; speech to text.

    All of the pieces have been in the public domain for ages. It's only natural that an easily customisable OS would allow creative sorts to assemble the pieces correctly.

    Much, much more to come. Not evn vaporware.
    Linux rocks!!! www.dedserius.com [dedserius.com]
  • Does this come with speech recognition software? If so, very cool! What is the progress on speech recognition in linux, anyhow? I haven't really looked into it or heard much about it. Thanks..


    Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net [mailto]) - AOL IM: MicroBerto

  • What? Why does "Linux is for geeks, not domestic users" imply that "Linux is not for visually impaired people"? Surely visually impaired geeks can now use linux like all other geeks, and visually impaired domestic users can use Windows if they want?

    It seems like you're implying that visually impaired people are never geeks, which is a load of rubbish. If I lose my sight tomorrow I would still like to use Linux, thankyou very much. In fact it would then (even more so than now) be easier for me than windows, since i'm sure it's easier for software to read out my command line session than a lot of pointy click business.

    I'd like to think that with this distro and a Linux job, I could lose my sight and still work just as effectively as before. As it stands, I couldn't.

  • I mean, if a blind Linux user running this package makes a mistake and formats their C drive, (...)

    I think what you really mean here is /dev/hda. :)

    (...) then who will they sue for damages? Slackware of course.

    But I'm pretty sure that there's a license somewhere -- as in almost all GPLed software -- excluding them from this kind of responsability.

  • I disagree. Microsoft has made it exponentially easier for a blind person to use Windows. You dont have to say "Left click coordinate ( 832 , 005 )" You can simply say "Minimize."

    What good does that do if you have no idea what window is on top? How does that help you making any sort of use of all the pretty icons?

    Face it, Windows is a graphical-only user interface, and therefore essentially not the right thing for people for whom the "graphical" part is useless. Windows is useless for blind people, and Linux is not, period. Your example does not prove the opposite: "Minimize" is a function that is only necessary because you have a graphical user interface in the first place. On the other hand, please tell me how windows "exponentially easier" supports the functionality offered by, for example telling Linux to "rm *.jpg".

  • Not really. This is a well known slashdot troll. He starts all his posts with "I am a [insert important position in the field being talked about]", thats how you recognize him.
  • The parent post isn't insightful but plain wrong.

    Also, you should learn the difference between posting as an AC or under a registered account. Hint: it can be expressed with the number "1".

  • This is pathetic. And here I thought you were a troll with standards...
  • Say a bad thing about a Linux product on slashdot and get censored immediately?

    Nope, it's "make a stupid troll post and get moderated down immediately". His intentional misspelling alone proves that he's a troll trying to disguis as someone with a point (which he hasn't: if synthesizer producers what their hardware supported, it's their job to open standards so that drivers can be written! Actually, no-one stops them from writing their own ones)

  • Wouldn't it be great if Linux could recognise what YOU were saying? hmmm...I just realised something, if you keep talking to your Linux box, wouldn't be a higher chance of buffer overrunning?

    me:"cat /dev/firstpost double right bracket www.slashdot.org"

    Linux:LAMER ACCESS DENIED

    me:"flame newbie-disto lovers on slashdot"

    Linux: "Are you sure? Yes/No."

    me:"yes"

    Linux: "LAMER ACCESS DENIED. Now flaming localhost. Reason: you are too lazy to use bash.Therefore you are Lamer."

    me:"cat 'fuck you' >> kernel; rm hyphen rf slash"
  • Excuse me, but a _Linux_ speech synthesizer? What do you mean with that?

    Tommy

  • You're taking an example and using it as a boundary. Remove all is obviously not the extent of one's ability to delete items w/ Voice recognition.

    By 'plain English,' I simply meant that commands such as 'remove' are indeed English words that are intuitive for people to learn. I hold no illusions of being able to interact with my computer in a conversation.

    Contrary to your steadfast beliefes, which many others seem to strongly hold, Microsoft is not so terrible. If you have only used Windows9x then your lacking the experience to pass judgement on the Windows family. WindowsNT is in fact a very solid OS, with many many more features than most flavors of *nix. Command-line grep just happens to be one of them. If you happen to have an NT CD lying around, its in the resource pack - You'll find it in every single professional edition of Win2k, and I'm pretty sure its on the WinNT4 CD, though I can't recall for sure, and I dont want to make an ass of myself. But aside from that, I dont see why its any more difficult (for those of us with our powers of sight intact) to click a mouse button a total of three (3) times to access teh very functionality of grep.

    As I've said time and time again, Linux is a great OS that deserves the praise of many, but what it DOES NOT need is to be placed on someones malinformed pedestal and touted as a Windows killer when it is indeed a far ways off. I hope that it someday does dethrown Microsoft - or at least encourage them to work a little harder - but we don't need MS-pundits to read posts like these and think about how silly we sound for believing the Linux hype. Sorry if that sounded harsh, it's 5am and I only got a couple hours sleep:) Sorry:)

    signature smigmature
  • the fallacie in your argument is that Windows is *not* a graphical-only user interface. My point was is that you can already, today, in Windows simply say "remove all" or The technology is already there using plain simple English, without the need to learn cryptic commands. Linux will never be able to compete with Microsoft in this area until it too can offer *plain English* voice-activated commands.

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  • I will use the preview button one day soon, and incomprehensible garbage such as my reply above will never again be posted;) To clarify - What I meant to say, was that Windows is much more than a group of 32x32 pixel icons that those with perfect eyesight find hard to see. For every icon, there is a keyboard command, and since Win2k was released, Windows has included simple-english commands for those with visual impairments. Hope this is a bit clearer:)

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  • What good is ANYTHING by that logic? Minimizing would serve the same purpose depsite a person's blindness - to change the active focus. Let's say a blind person is writing a paper on dog poop...he or she needs pertinent information on dog poop for the pape, so like any normal person, they multitask. "Run Internet Explorer" "Goto w w w dot dogpoop dot com" They...listen...to the info on dogpoop, then "minimize Internet Explorer" so as to return the active focus back to their paper on dogpoop. It's that simple.

    That being said, I was simply making a point with the minimizing. I could have just as easily said "They don't have to say 'Goto coordinate 001,001...left click.' They could simply say 'Save.'" :P

    signature smigmature
  • You might want to try INSTALLING it before you try it at a command prompt:P Like I said, NT Resource Kit. Its not included in a general install.
    signature smigmature
  • I disagree. Microsoft has made it exponentially easier for a blind person to use Windows. You dont have to say "Left click coordinate ( 832 , 005 )" You can simply say "Minimize." You can have it read all text on the screen, as well as the many magnification/high contrast features microsoft has built-in to Win2k, for those with some sight.

    Linux is no less of a hardship to use for blind people than is Windows, and in many ways, it's still leaps behind.
    signature smigmature

  • Forget the blind people for a sec. What about an in car linux box? No need to work a keyboard when you're hurling down the interstate at excessive speeds!

    Now if someone would hook this up to text mode quake we could really have some fun!

  • >>THEY should wear the headphones >Brilliant idea! I wonder why no one thought of that! /me is getting _really_ tired of our anonymous cowards...
  • Like seriously, who is going to want to say, "rmdir dowhat?" Linux is way to difficult to use with something like a voice input and output, and who is going to want to hear it say "bash: minicom: command not found?" I think this would be much more frustrating, even for people who have no other choice
  • Do you really think a point-and-click interface would be easier for someone that is blind, than something where everything can be done either on the command-line or inside emacs (where you have emacspeak). So yes, someone really has thought this through. If you are blind, you want a textbased interface, not WIMPy things which really really really are for people who can see what they are pointing at with the mouse. Linux is ideal for blind users in this respect.
  • My worry as a big fan of Linux is that this early initiative may put people off using Linux. They should wait until Linux is more stable and mature before going after the domestic user. The visually impaired would be better off with Windows or whatever using the accessibility extentions.

    Linux/UN*X is already more stable than MS Windows, and the average user has accepted it. How much more stable do you want? My FreeBSD machine at home runs 24x7, i.e. around the clock, without a flinch, and it is performing ten times more work than the MS Windows machines that we use at work. The longest I have seen a MS Windows machine run without crashing, is about three days. The MS Windows machine that I use at work, crashes at least once daily.
  • I can't get the link to work. is http://linuxmall/news/features/000322zipspeak correct?

  • ...how this distribution of Linux compares to Wintendo or other platforms as a usable interface for blind people.
    Linux is often criticised for its lack of usability for the average man-on-the-street; is it likely to suffer the same criticisms from the blind..?
  • Microsoft *does* make good software for blind people - one of my better friends is blind, and she is often saying how much easier microsoft programs are to control with voice commands.

    It's important to remember that lack of sight doesn't stop people from typing - indeed, she's a better typer than I am, because she *has* to touch type properly. The key is, proper shortcut keys to control everything you need to do, and designing interfaces so they work with screen readers - something which Microsoft has more incentive to do than, say, linux, because *more blind people use windows*.

    Linux has the potential to be a very good platform for the blind, and I think this new distribution may be a big step forward - in fact, I noted down the URL for this when it appeared on freshmeat a couple of days ago to pass it on *grin* - but it's not there yet.

    I must start looking into a blind-persons interface for the irc lcient I was working on one of these days. A "good" interface for a blind person is *very* different to one for a sighted person, simply because you have to work with the screen reader.
  • I'd call lynx a mature util for visually impaired. A text shell is also very mature and more suitable than any graphical interfaced OS'es. What if it would really be a non-graphical operating system, that would make more sense than any windows extension. I want a wearable computer without screen that talks to me!

  • I'd like to know the answer to this question, too. (BTW, this is my first Slashdot post -- sorry if I break some convention. ;-) )

    I've been looking for OSS speech recognition, text processing, and speech synthesis tools for quite some time now and haven't found anything that is royalty-free and subscription-free.

    If I can't find it, maybe I'll try building it myself. I have been toying with the idea of starting a project to create a natural language toolkit. I envision a set of modules like the following:

    • Audio sampling
    • Speech to phoneme conversion (probably outputs IPA codes with extra duration and pitch information).
    • Multi-lingual dictionary (with spelling, pronunciation, language-neutral definition, etc.) project that is expandable to an arbitrary number of word senses and languages and dialects.
    • Software that matches phonemes to word senses in the dictionary. (Each sentence is mapped to a sequence of actions and actors in a multi-dimensional co-ordinate space.)
    • Software that matches written text to word senses.
    • Software that is able to ouput text or speech based on the internal language-neutral format.

    Putting together these kinds of tools, things like bidirectional speech interfaces, real-time translators (on PDAs?) and a lot of other things are theoretically possible. (I would like to have my cell phone automatically translate any calls I get that aren't in German or English to English, automatically, for instance.) As an OSS project, it could make speech-enabled applications really cheap and ubiquitous.

    I've been reading every book I have been able to find lately to understand the problems and solutions that have been tried. I think this is a good fit for an OSS project because the hardest parts (the dictionary and the grammar rule system) are so amenable to being done in parallel. I have done a few calculations and feel that the amount of work to do a project like this is in the hundreds of man-years to get hundreds of thousands of word senses and thousands of grammatical rules. This may have been what has put people off up to now. ;-)

    However, if the work were shared by 10-100 people, or even more, it could actually happen pretty quick. And any way, good interfaces may only need a few hundred words in certain specialized applications.

    Does anyone have any idea how many people might be expected to contribute to a project like this? If it is on the order of hundreds, worldwide, then this could work. In fact, if it were thousands of contributors, it could gain enough critical mass to outpace other similar pure-commercial developments.

    Comments?

  • Um, let me get this straight:

    Someone puts a lot of effort into writting software that is avaiolable for downloading free. And because it doesn't promote a product that costs a lot of open money they are bad?

    I would love to know what product Mr Mundy is refering to. How much effort has his company put forth to provide a compatible set of drivers? Or is he too busy spending the money he makes selling adaptive technology to invest in those he earns money from?

    I say that if he is so concerned, he should contact the developer and offer his product free and help make it supported. Stop leaching off blind people! There is too much of that already.

    Now put up or shut up. If you need contact information I can help there. A valid email address to offer assistance to is pda@1tree.net. It will be posted here for the world to see if this is a true desire to help the blind, or a blatent attempt to get their money.

    1Tree

  • Actually, I have to point out that minimising windows is important for blind people. Windows screen readers, like human beings, need to be able to see what they are trying to read. If a window is partially obscured by another one, then the screen reader will not be able to read all of it. So minimising and maximising windows are very necessary for blind people who use windows.
  • I don't know whether you are seriously miss-informed or just spouting hot air. I could assume the latter and just ignore your post, but since it has a great potential to seriously misseducate the general public, I will address every point in your comment.

    Zipspeak is a version of the zipslack minidistribution which incorporates the speakup kernel patches. Speakup is a screen reader project headed by a blind hacker named Kirk Reiser and assisted by speakup users and other interested people. Therefore, it is not a threat to independant producers as it is itself an independant product. It is always open to new people to get involved, it is released under the GPL, and it therefore is also free.

    Since speakup is a product written by the people who wish to use it, the aim is, in fact, to be as compatible with as much hardware as possible. The list of synthesisers supported in zipspeak matches those supported at the time of the last speakup release. Since then, more drivers have been written and driver code is constantly being worked on. As some of these drivers are not to a satisfactory standard, they were not included with zipspeak. I dare say that zipspeak will be updated upon the next speakup release, which by the way will only be version 0.09.

    Kirk is always keen to add more synths. I needed a specific driver written for my particular hardware. He began writing it one Saturday morning, and by Sunday night, I was running it. Talk about service.

    We are curious to know about your speech synthesiser. All Kirk needs to write a driver is a spec sheet listing the commands and the lend of a unit to test the drivers with. Even if your speech is in software, we are interested in knowing about it. Feel free to drop Kirk some mail.

    I can't emphasise the independence of this enough. This is free software! There is no FDA approval, tax exemptions or any such things, it's just plain hard work and satisfaction in the result. I know little about Apple's standards, but none of their operating systems are particularly usable, in fact, I'd say that linux is much more usable than any apple OS ever was or, quite probably, ever will be.

    If you would like to know more, you can visit the speakup webpage at http://www.braille.uwo.ca/speakup/ [braille.uwo.ca] where you can also check out the speakup mailing list. In addition, you may also contact Kirk Reiser, head of the speakup project at kirk@braille.uwo.ca [mailto].

    Geoff.

  • I admitedly have not read to the end of this thread but I do currently have the time to do so. Firstly, there is NOT a keystroke for every windows icon. Oh that there were. The user-friendliness of a given windows application is defined by the thoughtfulness of the particular programmer. Some programs lack many conventional windows keystrokes and also lack meaningful labels on icons so that alternate methods for using the program also do not work. I also need to stress that speech recognision is of no use to blind people on its own, and is only useful at all if there are other reasons why they cannot type. As a blind person, this would seem self-evident, but it comes up time and again. The is not putting data in, the issue is getting information out. The best typer in the world will have problems if they don't know where they are typing. Strides are being made in access to windows and its applications, but the best solutions cost the better part of a thousand U.S. dollars. For this reason, many blind people continue to persist with DOS, believe it or not, and dialup shell accounts. Because both DOS software and shell accounts are becoming scarce, linux provides a real alternative. I have been using linux for around 14 months and wouldn't give it up. I do still have a windows machine at my disposal for doing certain tasks, but its main use is as a terminal for my partner to telnet into our linux box. I look forward to the day when I could, if I wanted to, uninstall windows completely. Geoff.
  • I know several people who much prefer *nix systems (they tend to use emacsspeak, as another poster pointed out). It's much easier to interface with a computer on the command line where you can have your command line read back to you then try to deal with a GUI.

    From what I understand, it's that the concept of having an ``area'' .. your desktop area where things are arranged in different places... isn't the most native way to interface with things for the blind. Having a stream of sound, and then sending input, and getting more audio feedback is much more natural. It's the way that they interface with most other things in real life.

    A lot of clunky windows solutions exist for reading different parts of the screen. For the most part, they're horrible. Because they have to try to figure out how to deal with areas. I mean, I'm looking at this posting window right now, and if I was a program trying to read the screen, I'd have to figure out the difference between the stuff in the boxes on the left frame and the stuff on the right. Not to mention I'd have to figure out that the left hand parts of the main table were labels for the text boxes on the right hand part. Things like that. It's much easier when it's a stream of text.

  • You may find the following more useful... http://linuxmall.com/news/feature s/000322zipspeak [linuxmall.com]
  • Why use voice readback?

    Idea: AN 80x25 array of 2 by 3 bobbles connected to the serial port of the computer like a wyse terminal. Each bobble can rise or fall depending on a signal (e.g., when 'A' gets sent to the terminal, it forms the braille 'A' shape in the bobbles.) That way, you can have a braille view on a text terminal... Maybe the device could be pressure sensitive as well - press down on a braille character is like mouse clicking on that character in a terminal.

  • You're absolutely right..

    I've never understood why people argued for removing the creative expresitivity possible via a CLI. What other place can you speak in english (older Sierra games), or even abreviated english (your favourite /bin/sh derivitive or replacement ;-))? A GUI as a complete, and only, computer interface is the equivalent of reducing your vocabulary to pointing and grunting (with one grunt for Mac users, two for Windows users, and 3 for X11 :)). This also places the onus on the user for doing a simple action to multiple files. Sure, it might be easy to drag a selection of files from one folder to another, but it is very hard if your regexp for the move includes anything other than files of one type (cp a*d[ea]d*.txt /text/sorted/a cannot be done easily in a GUI).

    Anyone who argues against a richer, fuller user interface (once past the initial, and short, time as a newbie -- I only spent a few months learning Linux related things, but I have spent years using those skills effectively) for one that is 100% GUI is obviously not thinking in terms of the big picture..


    ---
  • I have a blind friend using Emacspeak [cornell.edu] who absolutely loves it. I have heard it myself. It is not merely a screen-reader. And it doesn't require special hardware. She has an ordinary sound card. I think it's great that the free software community is giving attention to blind users. I can't say that I'm surprised. Free software as a development model is clearly superior in serving smaller niche markets.
  • > This is one area that the microsoft windows
    > crowd have an advantage in - from my research
    > the partially sighted find it easier to use a
    > split screen to use the computer, the top half
    > shows a normal view, which is good enough for
    > seeing if something is flashing or a new window
    > has popped up and the bottom half shows a
    > magnified view area taken from the top.

    This could be a good application of multi-head technology, such as XFree86's new "xinerama": "Overview" desktop on the left, "magnified" desktop on the right.

    Slightly more expensive than splitting a single monitor, but possibly more comfortable?

    Sounds good to me, anyway!

    -Andy
  • I'm a WinDoze (no flames please) engineer and I work on reading software for the blind and learning disabled (the Kurzweil 1000 and Kurzweil 3000 [lhsl.com] products offered by Lernout & Hauspie [lhsl.com]). One of the nice parts of writing such software for Windows is that the off-screen model is fully documented and available for your use. A couple years ago Microsoft added a set of API's called Active Accessibility which at first were so-so, but which have improved over the last two revisions. Windows may not be the greatest OS, but it does offer the programmer some very nice accessibility features. I know many blind people that have grown to really like Windows because of the products available to them. In my experience, the blind computer users I've run into tend to be very technical and understand the issues surrounding their use of a computer. Most choose Windows because of the effort that has gone into making it accessible.

    Please note I'm not trying to pump up Windows. I use both Linux and Windows at home and both are useful for different purposes. I did send this article on to a few blind people I know. Hopefully one or more will try this distro out and let me know how well it works.
  • Like seriously, who is going to want to say, "rmdir dowhat?" Linux is way to difficult to use with something like a voice input and output, and who is going to want to hear it say "bash: minicom: command not found?" I think this would be much more frustrating, even for people who have no other choice

    Since you made the assertion that it's difficult to use, I assume you've tried it...?

    In the past, I've created books-on-tape for a blind acquaintance. This person has a tape playback mechanism which speeds the playback up to something like 8x the original speed, and they can still understand what's being said. Once someone is used to something like that, they can easily comprehend a long error message in no time. If non-blind people can read it with no problem, then, in my experience, blind people can hear it with no problem.

    There's even a significant precendent for blind developers. Even Microsoft Visual Studio has an "Optimize menus for screen readers" option (or something like that).

    Herbie J.

  • I am amazed by this thread. First, there are blind hackers out there. They are the primary force behind the distribution. Second, M$ is not the blind person's friend. Microslop revealed their true color with Internet Explorer 4. The product broke almost every screen reader on the market. I know of only one company claiming to not have suffered. They didn't suffer because they don't use the "off screen model." M$ will break the thing again when it is expediant. Also, many items are NOT accessible to blind users. There are numerous programs that sort of are accessible. I live with a blind person. There are buttons in a large number of programs that are not accessible, and or don't read. And some of them are needed to make setting changes. Third, for those who don't know, blind people are making use of XWindows programs even without having access to X. But most things use X only as a front end to a program that can otherwise work. This fact makes it a better platform. Lastly, at least in Linux one can access the code. If something doesn't work, then the people doing development can go in and find why and work on that. Speech in Linux is going into the kernel. That has never happened in the M$ world. 1Tree

  • Re:Has anyone really thought this through ? (Score:3)

    by -brazil- ( 111867 ) on Friday March 24, 2000 @03:41AM (#1177488) Homepage
    The fallacy in your argument is that you assume one can really work with a computer using "plain English". Linux can't do that, and Microsoft can't do that either because computers are still a long way from being as intelligent as humans, which is what it takes to understand human speech. Pretending that this is not the case is pure Marketing, i.e. a lie.

    Besides, whats so cryptic about usind "rm" instead of "remove" and "*" instead of "all". The Linux version is way more flexible about the "all" part (not that my example does not delete all files, just JPEG images!), and no-one prevents you from setting up "remove" as a alias for "rm" (which is used merely because it's quicker to type).

    When a Windows program wants to offer the functionality of complicated (and yes, cryptic) Unix commands like "grep", it needs a screenful of menus, checkboxes and radiobuttons which is totally unusable for a blind person and still not as powerful as the Linux command.

  • Re:Has anyone really thought this through ? (Score:3)

    by RyanShelswell ( 162335 ) on Friday March 24, 2000 @02:24AM (#1177489)
    You're assuming that anyone who's visually impaired is a "domestic user" and not a "hacker or nerd". I've taught comp. sci. students with pretty serious visual impairments, it's not necessarily a show-stopper.

    RyanS

  • Re:Has anyone really thought this through ? (Score:4)

    by -brazil- ( 111867 ) on Friday March 24, 2000 @02:24AM (#1177490) Homepage
    Without taking anything away from this effort, don't the visually impaired have enough problems without attempting to use the notoriously cryptic Linux operating system ?

    No. For them, Linux is a much better operating system than Windows or Mac OS for one simple reason: under Linux, everything can be done through a text interface. How do you expect a blind person to use a graphical user interface? If it's text, it can simply be displayed on a Braille terminal.

    I mean, it's a really cool tool for hackers and nerds, but for normal use

    That's the keyword: normal. A blind person can simply not use a computer the same way everyone else can.

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