Linux for vissually impared people

[brauckzilla]

Hey guys, I am new to the forum and Linux in general...so be gentle.

So, I am an IT professional and have been for about 20 years now. I've loved computers pretty much since birth. My first was a Commodore VIC 20 with an earth shattering 3K of user RAM. I upgraded to the 64 and was in heaven.

I got my degree from the prestigious DeVRY Institute in Los Angeles. Hey, its an accredited school and I got my BS in under 3 years.

I've been a Windows user since there was Windows. I've dabbled with MAC and loved DOS. Hell, I even played with an old TRASH 80.

Anyway, that is my background. Now, I am legally blind and can get around on most systems as long as I drop the resolution to something around 1024x768 depending on the size of the monitor. My brother on the other hand is totally blind. I set a computer up for him about a year ago. Its an XP box. Dell Dimension with a 1.8 GHz processor with 768 MB of RAM.

The pisser thing is that I had to install JAWS (a screen reader). That POS takes up a couple hunder megs on its own and kills the machine. But, its really the only choice he has.

So, my question to the community: Is there an equivalent product to JAWS or WINDOW-EYES for Linux (commercial or F/OSS)? I've looked at ORCA and really didn't get it working on my Ubunto 8.10 install. Seems a bit clugey to me anyway.

I'm going to take a look at LSR, but I was curious if anyone has any first hand experience with any of them and can provide feedback.

I love the podcast and have been catching up. I started listening to the casts about 1 month ago and have listened to about a dozen of them going back to the 250s.

Keep up the great work guys.

Thanks for the help

Brauckzilla

[mowestusa]

One of the best interviews I have heard with a blind user was on bsdtalk.

Here is the link: http://cisx1.uma.maine.edu/~wbackman/bs ... alk143.mp3

They are talking about BSD but I think that what they talk about is very applicable to Linux as well, because there are many programs that are the same.

Julien Claassen is an amazing Linux user who is blind, and he contributes tons of great information to the Linux audio list every week. I would encourage you to send him an email and ask for his advice on what to do for your brother. I know he has a tutorial on how to set up a complete text based audio studio under Linux which is cool all by itself. Here is his email: julien@c-lab.de

I hope some of these links help you out. I continue to be amazed at the ways in which blind users contribute to the Linux world and how they coop with their limitations and exceed anything that I have been doing with Linux. It has me thinking about the best way to design my website, and how I should use my computer.

Take care.

[eddie]

That was an excellent interview by Will.He also did another interview with a completely blind female unix admin. I do not have the link at hand but you could do a web search for it. Linuxreality also has an interview or two and suggestions of software for visually impaired persons.
Several quickie tools till you get everything set up te way you want:
You might want to research "festival" (text to voice) utility. One thing I do to reduce my having to read so much is take pdf2ascii and espeak so text files can be converted to a sound files I then can later listen to them on my podcast player. I suppose you could also do the same thing with ascii email file output from alpine? Espeak does require a bit of tweaking to get the voices the way you want. You even can go one step farther and use lynx, your favorite web search engine, and some bash code to automate web searches to extract articles that are worth reading (listening) to. "wget" and "tree -H" are such wonderful tools.
Please forgive my rambling. i flunked english.......

[dann]

The speakup Kernel and Orca are two technologies geared towards Visually impaired users. If you hop on IRC - freenode and pop into the lottalinuxlinks or linuxcranks channel there is a guy usually in there, kajarii who is blind and uses Linux. He could probably answer your questions very succintly.

[eddie]

Possible useful links.
http://live.gnome.org/Orca
http://www.linux-speakup.org/speakup.html
http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/2 ... /2718.html
http://www.linuxreality.com/forums/inde ... 674.0.html
http://www.linuxreality.com/podcast/epi ... th-watson/