That was the Screen Rover system a long time ago marketed by a Canadian company. Company is defunct and maybe you find one of those in an accessibility technology museum exhibit along with emacspeak running on another computer.
On Wed, 24 Jul 2019, Martin McCormick wrote: > Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 12:48:27 > From: Martin McCormick <marti...@suddenlink.net> > To: debian-accessibility@lists.debian.org > Subject: Re: Can grub be made to talk? > Resent-Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 16:48:44 +0000 (UTC) > Resent-From: debian-accessibility@lists.debian.org > > I can't count the number of times I have said, to myself, > "Speech/Braille/you name it; should be in some kind of low-level > jail on a computer that starts before anything else does and is > the last thing to go dark before the power goes off." > Petitboot is what I was thinking of even if I can't claim credit > for any of these ideas so I am very happy to see that the experts > are thinking along these same lines. > > We have a form of this functionality but it keeps getting > trampled by the entropy of progress. > > Linux kernels have had serial tty's for as long as they > have existed. One could get command-line control of a unix-like > system by making a serial terminal talk or emboss Braille. > > In the older days, maybe that was all your serial > terminal could do but as long as the serial connection was up, > one had control and feedback from lights on to lights out. > > Modern computers routinely do not have native serial > ports any more so that's one complication. > > Also, computer users who are blind need a whole other > system to get that functionality, the old terminal connected to > main frame model with smaller parts. > > The classic computer science definition of input, output > and control are ignored at great peril because trying to put > alternate access back together is like cranking the sausage > machine backwards and wondering why live animals aren't jumping > out of the other end. Cows that have become hamburger meat have > 0 milk production so one needs to plan ahead. > > Not in a million years am I suggesting we go back to > talking dumb terminals and RS-232 cables that are always the > wrong gender or should be a null-modem when all you have handy is > a straight-through cable, but machine-processable I/O should > always be there in some form. > > The only real solution may be absurdly complex and that > is a super version of that one more computer we all need to make > this or that accessible. > > It would consist of a video frame grabber, software to > decode text and make sense of it fed to speakup or a Braille > terminal. I'm not holding my breath. > > As it stands, the petitboot idea is modular and feasible. > For those who don't think much about the insides of a computer, > that loopback ip address of 127.0.0.1 is one way that processes > sharing the same chassis communicate even if their parents are > different. > > It might even be that petitboot with speakup could be > self-contained enough to be added separately and independently of > other software which might even work down to the bare metal such > as settup of the BIOS but there probably isn't a standard way to > grab that text and use it. > > Just some thoughts. > > Martin > > Samuel Thibault <sthiba...@debian.org> writes: > > Hello, > > > > In addition to what was said: > > > > - grub is in C, so no need for learning assembly to contribute sound > > drivers to it :) > > > > - the plan was to add sound support to grub, and pre-synthesize boot > > entry texts for grub to play. This plan is still only in todo lists, > > though. > > > > - petitboot is an interesting approach: you boot a Linux kernel that > > only runs petitboot, and there you can run a screen reader such as > > brltty. That can then boot the real kernel for the targetted system. > > > > Samuel > > > > > > --
