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,
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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&S 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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