Speech in Linux

["Brian L. Sellden" <Brian@henge.com>]

>-- K.C. wrote...
>I am new to this list, and to Linux.  I am very excited about Linux, and
>recognize it as possibly the best option for visually impaired people such
>as myself. It
>offers the power and flexibility of UNIX (far beyond that of 95) and a
>text-based environment.  I was disappointed to discover that there has
>been little response by the visually impaired community to this option,
>and that there
>has been little development in the way of screen readers (to my
>knowledge).

Ultrasonix is a screen reader for the X Window System.  It is being
ported (albeit slowly) to Linux.  It was initially developed for
Sun SPARCs at Georgia Tech.  It was released for public development
some time ago.  Check out the Ultrasonix port home page -

http://www.henge.com/~brian/ultralin.html

>  The only project that I have heard of is Emacspeak, and I
>wonder why people would put all this hard work into developing a product
>specifically limited to one application, when Emacs is but one program
>among many that can run on the Linux platform.  I do not feel that
>Emacspeak could by nature give users the power and control that a sited
>user has over his Linux environment and system (system administration,
>network setup, programming etc).

I gather from your comments that you are not an emacs user.  I am
doing *all* of my Ultrasonix work with emacspeak.  Linux
is my primary OS.  In emacs, I -

) Surf the web
) Write software in c, c++, java, tcl, perl, ...
) Operate with multiple shells and terminals
) Telnet, ftp, nntp
) Loads of other stuff I'm forgetting.

>  I had been expecting something more
>along the lines of a UNIX port of an existing screen reader, such as
>Vocal Eyes.

See above remarks about Ultrasonix.

>I would greatly appreciate it if someone could let me know of any
>developments of which I am ignorant, as I am new to this, and I hope that
>we can work toward making the world of powerful computing more available
>to people with visual impairments.

(much head-nodding)

Regards,

Brian.
-- 
---------------
Brian L. Sellden - brian@henge.com, brians@usa.net
User of Emacspeak 7.0,  making Unix talk.
http://www.henge.com/~brian
	      What on earth would a man do with himself
		if something did not stand in his way?
		-- H.G. Wells

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