Hi: Here's why I chose to include ASAP in my custom distro. It is true that the licensing model for Provox is probably the most compatible, as far as the distribution of packages with FreeDOS is concerned. Unfortunately, Provox's manual is sparse, to say the least. It's got the bare minimum, and, it throws around its terminology, such as the term "screen bank" without really explaining it, or, at least, you do get some explanation, but, you have to read through the manual. Version 6.71 is also available at: http://www.nfbnet.org/files/blind/PRVX671B.ZIP but, the source is not present in that package. Source is present in the v6.6 package here: http://www.nfbnet.org/files/blind/PROVOX66.ZIP I'm not sure what the differences in versions are, the only one that immediately jumped out at me was that the prefix key (slash) can now be assigned to either the Accent "`" key or the Escape key, whereas in version 6.6, you couldn't use the Escape key. This is another shortcoming of Provox. The use of a prefix key is not bad, but, putting it on a key like the Slash is going to throw a user if he has just installed Provox and decides to do a dir /b or something like that. JAWS, on the other hand, is freeware and I even have the original "jdosfree.exe" self-extracting file with PKWare's authenticity verification from Henter-Joyce. However, JAWS, I think, may use the most memory and I'm told uses a lot of overlays, so that can be a shortcoming. ASAP, while not released under GPL seems to be the best of both worlds. I still couldn't free enough memory to load it high, though I didn't try too hard yet. It's author, Larry Skutchan gave me permission to include it in my package, though I don't know how he would feel if it were built into the main distro as an option. It would be nice, because ASAP has an excellent manual and many loyal users. ASAP, also imho, has been the best overall experience I ever had with a DOS screen reader. ASAP is constantly examining the screen to see if anything changes and alerts the user by reading the change. While many screen readers can be customized, if one knows the row and column to expect certain changes, ASAP has consistently given me enough information to be able to figure my way around a lot of applications without resorting to writing complicated configuration files. The capability is there, but, I have rarely had to use it. ASAP has just worked for me over the close to 30 years I've used it, rather than me working for it. Cheers! Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: joseph.nor...@gmail.com Hi: Now, going back to FreeDOS: the only improvement I can think of is to include some sort of screen reader into the distribution. That is why I was interested in the PROVOX option, since PROVOX appears to have a license perfectly compatible with FreeDOS. Sadly, I was unable to make it output any sound, so I wonder whether it works at all. JAWS, Provox does work, but to install it you do two things. First, you need to run the provox.exe tsr. You can run it in fdconfig.sys, and if you do it after the memory manager loads, it will load high automatically. Or, you can put provox.exe in the fdauto.bat. You would need to do an lh on that to load it high. Next, at the end of the fdauto.bat, you place a pv.exe command with the synthesizer perameter after it, for example: c:\provox\pv.exe bns I think bns defaults to com1, but, you can put a space and com1 after the bns perameter. |
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