----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Korn" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2003 1:40 AM
Subject: Re: is there a list for gnome and the screen reader
Hi Claus,
> Yes I know this is off topic, but it seems that the gnome 2.0 and the
> screen reader for it is now so much developped that it can be installed
> and tested by regular users.
> I would like to know if there is a list where blind users like me who are
> normally working in Windows can get help with installing a gnome system
> to test these things out?
> One of the problem I see is that I first have to install a basic
> operating system without speech and then do a lot of updating again
> without speech, then install the desktop and finally install the screen
> reader before I can get speech on. What I do not know if is any of the
> normal linux destributions include gnome and if they can be installed
> with speech. I have both an external dectalk and an external Apollo so
> the speech hardware is not a problem.
There are two mailing lists for GNOME accessibility:
[log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]
The first list is for folks using the accessibility architecture in GNOME,
the second for folks doing actual development on it. You can subscribe to
either or both of these lists through the web interface at:
http://lists.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo
As one of the folks intimately involved in the GNOME accessibility project,
I would not yet characterize it as ready for "regular users". We're getting
there, but not quite yet. That said, there are a handful of blind folks I
know who are playing with GNOME and Gnopenricus (having built it from the
source code on cvs.gnome.org). None to my knowledge are yet "living" in
it. Command line Linux is a place where quite a few blind folks "live" - it
being their computing environment 8 hours (or more) a day. The Blind Linux
users community is a good place to find assistance and advice. See
http://leb.net/blinux/ for the [log in to unmask] mailing list.
The general approach to getting an accessible GNOME desktop is to start with
a talking Linux distribution (e.g. RedHat 8.0 with Speakup or emacspeak
[using an external synthesizer] and Festival software TTS for use with
GNOME). Once you have that working for you (see the blinux community for
assistance there), you would probably get a GNOME 2.2 distribution (see
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.2/; you'll probably want the "GARNOME"
distribution for use with RedHat), then get the Gnopernicus source code from
cvs.gnome.org, build it, and run it. Note: this is not for the faint of
heart. As I said above, we're not yet ready for "regular users".
Looking to the future, Sun plans to ship our future Solaris desktop (our
variant of UNIX) with Gnopernicus and software text-to-speech bundled in.
It should be very easy for a system administrator to configure the system to
launch Gnopernicus at startup. Our latest shipping editions of Solaris
already come with both BrlTTY and Screader - two console screen reading
options - and also with emacspeak, and with FreeTTS (a Java platform edition
of Festival Lite, a software text-to-speech engine).
Regards,
Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team
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