[laptop-accessibility] How can the XO be made accessible to blind users?

[Joe]

FYI: Someone is working on a screen-reading XO extension, but it seems to still be a work-in-progress:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Screen_Reader

The laptops currently ship with a rudimentary speech synthesizer, but there's currently no software on the XO that uses it:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Speech_synthesis

A Braille display would of course require an additional device, probably plugged in via the USB port.  The peripherals page doesn't mention one yet, but there's a guy listed on it who's interested in blind accessibility, so presumably he's considering this possibility:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals

It should be fairly easy for someone with Linux skills to hack the XO so that it goes directly to terminal mode -- if not in the customized Fedora that the laptop ships with, then certainly in another installable Linux like Debian:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Installing_Debian_as_an_upgrade