On Mon, 24 Mar 2003 08:02:16 -0500 (EST), Patrick Wiseman wrote: > > On Mon, 24 Mar 2003 at 7:34am, Karsten M. Self wrote:
[...] > >BTW, my understanding of emacspeak was that it required a > >voice card -- hardware to actually generate the output. The > >nice thing about festival is that it works with a standard > >audio card. > > The current version of emacspeak, 17.0, supports the DECtalk > software, which speaks through a standard sound card. That > much I have working. Maybe I just have to bite the bullet and > tell Dad he's going to have to learn emacs! Unfortunately, > that might be enough of a barrier to dissuade him. [...] A free software voice synthesizer comes with debian: eflite. It's an emacs enabled version of the flite program, which itself is the "lite" version of festival. I've read an article by a blind Linux user/developer (his name seems to escape me ATM) which states that a command-line based program is better for blind users than (most obviously) WIMP programs like MS Word [1] or even "graphical" console programs like emacs or mc, where feedback may be embedded in ways that aren't accessible to the blind user. For instance, how does a blind user hear the status bar? Maybe you could arm your dad with a command-line web-browser, editor (ed) and mail client (e.g. mailx for sending mail). These can then be run in an emacs shell, with emacspeak doing the audio feedback. [1] windows, icons, menu and pointing device -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]