On 14/10/2024 17:37, Mike Coulombe via Freedos-user wrote:
Hi, That distro sounds interesting, but I need to run free dos on
different computers. If it had speech accessibility free dos would be
very useful to blind people world wide considering all the free dos
programs you can get and the amount of old computers many of can be had
for free or next to nothing. Do you think it would be worth asking about
this on the developer list or is that only for developers?
Running espeak as a TSR might be technically possible, but it would
certainly be bound to many limitations. I doubt anyone will want to
invest time into this, given that the result is likely to be of a
limited usefulness for any practical purposes.
Having a DOS distribution with a preinstalled screen reader that outputs
speech commands to the computer's serial port is a much more realistic
goal. I implemented this in SvarDOS today, so now the SvarDOS system is
available also as a version that "talks". It does require a Braille 'n
Speak synth to be connected, though:
http://svardos.org
I tested it on VirtualBox with an emulated BNS (emubns), and it seems to
work, assuming one knows how to use provox hotkeys to "explore" the screen.
Hardware PCs require a hardware BNS, obviously, but a cheap solution
could be to run emubns on a Raspberry Pi connected to the PC with a
USB-to-serial cable.
Mateusz
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