How can the XO be made accessible to blind

[Hemant Goyal]

Hi,

We have been working on a simple screen reader for the XO and have made some
headway. We have ported and customized eSpeak for the XO. A text to speech
server has been written and methods exposed through Dbus . I have documented
the work done till now at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Screen_Reader. The DBUS
api may be changed in the future. However, we still need to do some
extensive testing and refine the structure of the speech server.

We had initially planned to provide a simple highlight and speak option for
the xo. We now think that we should scale up and structure the project to
use eSpeak in a much more effective manner to provide accessibility to
blind/low vision students.

I think it would be brilliant if activity developers could exploit the
underlying speech server to write accessible activities. For example, an
activity at present can connect to the speech service through dbus and send
it strings of text to be spoken. We hope to prepare some guidelines for
activity developers to write accessible activities that could use the speech
server. What would be best way to do this?

We are also planning to explore Orca.  We dont want to rush into development
now, and would like to take some time in properly planning our approach and
creating some design documents first.

It'll be nice if experts could share their ideas and provide us with some
direction for this project.

Thank you and wishing you all a very Happy New Year.

Warm regards,
Hemant Goyal

Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:57:38 +0000
> From: "Gabey8" <accessibility at lists.laptop.org>
> Subject: [laptop-accessibility] How can the XO be made accessible to
>        blind   users?
> To: accessibility at lists.laptop.org
> Message-ID: <1198857458.m2f.4754 at olpc.osuosl.org>
>
>
> I have some deaf-blind friends who use braille attachments to access their
> computers.
>
> What needs to be done in order to permit the XO to work with a braille
> terminal or notetaker? What screen reading programs are available for Linux?
>
> And if said screen reading programs don't like working with Sugar (yet,
> anyway), is setting the XO up to boot to the terminal screen and going with
> text-only a viable solution for braille users?
>
> Donna
>
> ------------------------
> Donna -- purple outline with orange fill color. If you see me in the
> Neighborhood, say hi! :)
>
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