How can the XO be made accessible to blind

[Duane King]

Espeak works fine, the XO just did not have the correct sound system config 
installed because somebody forgot to enable OSS emulation in ALSA. 

I hope you did not waste a lot of time editing the code for Espeak to get 
around this bug, I hope you did not edit it to make it pipe out sound data to 
be plaved via another utility, as espeak does all that by itself much faster, 
direct to the sound card without pipes, once the OSS sound system it requires 
is fully emulated in ALSA and it can use the required /dev/dsp and related 
file devices that it requires.

I actualy files some bugs on this; Look for keyword 'espeak'.

- Duane King

On Sunday 30 December 2007 09:52:16 am Hemant Goyal wrote:
> 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! :)