Hi Karen,
> it can take say two or three screen readers to equal the > functionality of one Dos based one. Interesting, what makes the DOS ones so user friendly? > screen readers for windows > are in the dictionary for richly problematical. In what way? I remember them often being commercial and pricy. Which is why indeed I was talking more about Ubuntu, free system with free screenreaders. > screen readers problematic in DOS? What I meant is that with multitasking, you can have one program running, a second collect the screen contents, a third transforming them into speech and a fourth sending that to your sound card or even USB sound device. In DOS, you have one program running and the screen reader TSR or driver has to do all other tasks. This means if you have a nice DOS version of, say, MBROLA or festival text to speech systems, you cannot use them "in the background" for your screen reader. Instead, you can only use the voice system which is built into the screen reader already, if any. > Never mind that tsrs even for dos programs have been moot since windows > 3.0, with dos applications, including screen readers employing > alternatives for task management. I agree that with Windows 3.0 you can indeed run several things more or less at the same time and I even once had voice input and output software for Win 3 which came with my Soundblaster AWE32 but I would not call that DOS voice software then. As somebody else already said, playing audio on a CD is something the drive does almost fully in hardware, so it does not need multitasking. I even once wrote a tiny DOS tool to play CD in a simple command line way, or stop, eject etc. I am impressed to hear that not only ISA sound cards and serial port devices but even USB voice synths come with DOS drivers, if I understand you correctly? Is this only for dedicated voice hardware or are there also screenreaders which can output speech via any AC97, HDA or USB sound card, with "one size fits all" hardware drivers? The problem with ISA is that only computers until the times of Pentium 3 and AMD K6 routinely came with ISA slots. Newer computers only have ISA if you use special mainboards, for example industry and PLC oriented ones. Similar for laptops and of course for netbooks. Which by the way run FreeDOS okay: It does not care if the disk is flash and the display is LED... However, sound and network will be problematic on a netbook for DOS, wireless network being the worst as far as DOS drivers are concerned. A potentially interesting URL about the driver issue: www.georgpotthast.de/computer/cindex.htm - has some older USB driver, AC97 sound driver and the Sioux web server which also has a number of third party network drivers linked from the page. By the way, I agree that recent Ubuntu versions have a bad reputation about sound. I think this started between half a year and two years ago... However, this is not because it is Linux. Instead it is because Ubuntu designers made a bad choice in making things based on a weak pulseaudio driver on top of the more stable ALSA driver. So you can delete the extra layer in theory - in practice, it takes extra effort to get back simultaneous output of multiple sounds with DMIX while you got it for free with pulseaudio. Best, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
