[laptop-accessibility] Screen reader software -- any progress?

[Tim hobbs]

Screen reader software has never been standardised.  Not even on
windows :(  There is an API(an Application Programing Interface, the
little bank tellers window through which a program slips little pieces
of text for the screen reader to read, otherwise how would the
software know what to say?  The most major problem in this area is
getting every program to slip text under the window, that's a lot of
work, changing everything you know.  We have dirty hacks to get around
this like taking any text the program draws onto the screen, but if we
watch the pencil and the program uses a pen, or we watch the pencil
and the program draws from the bottom up...  well there's lots of
problems with the non explicit paper slipping approach) for gnome(one
major desktop environment), a different one for KDE(another major
desktop environment) but neither of these are currently
acceptable(neither major desktop environment even pretends to be ADA
about keyboard accessibility.  So currently the best screen reader
setups are the TTY ones, and emacspeak.  emacspeak is used with the
popular emacs "text editor" which has special "modes" for email, web
browsing.
You can install emacspeak with in the Terminal activity type:
sudo yum install emacs emacspeak w3m
Select espeak backend
type then after that's done type
emacs -nw
I haven't tested this yet.  But hopefully emacs will talk to you and
give you some instruction.  Unfortunately, emacs is a *very* difficult
environment to set up and learn(though I use it daily, it's like being
ninja you can't learn it overnight(well I did, but with 4 years of
programming experience and no sleep)).  You *Will* need help in using
it.  The start page should guide you to a tutorial.  And once you're
done with that.  Press Alt-x and type rcirc and then press enter if it
asks you anything press enter. THEN... type /join #emacs and press
enter. And you should now be able to IM with a host of very
intelligent and experienced emacs fanatics.

However, this is not the route we want our poor children in where is
it, Peru, Mongolia?  Somewhere outside my greenlawned suburb to take.
I have written up a proposal
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Accessibility_Line_Based_Interface but this
is no more than a proposal as I am a full time college student and
don't have time to program right now.  So... While I am very Utopian
and stand behind my proposal as the end all and be all of sugar
accessibility solutions, I have nothing to present to you but
emacspeak for the moment.

Oh I mentioned that there where other TTY screen readers, you might
research this, but you will find them rather boring to use as the
command line isn't really optimised to display small amounts of text.
"/home/olpc/ foo blaa" "lengthy output of foo blaa" /home/olpc"  And
pretty soon it all gets strung together and you can't think strait or
pick out the few relevant lines of text.

I hope this wasn't a total waste of your time.

Timothy


-- 
-
Tim
tim.thelion at gmail.com