This is the FAQ for the blinux-lists. If there's a question that you think should be on here, or if you want to add something in or correct something, send me some email. You can find the latest version of this FAQ at http://www.leb.net/blinux/blinux-faq.html.
A: Blinux-list is a list intended for discussion of Linux usage as it relates to the blind and visually impaired community, maintained by Hans Zoebelein <hzo@gmx.de>
A: All themes which are related to 'eyes free' access to the Linux operating system are on topic for blinux-list. Also themes like installing, configuring maintaining and improving blind related software or hardware. So is news related to software or hardware for the Linux user who is blind.
A: Blinux-list is not intended as a place to get answers for general Linux questions; there are plenty of resources available on the net for this. Typical off topic postings are general Linux questions, virus warnings, advertisements (spammers will be banned). If appropriate, use personal email when you want to communicate with a list member. This FAQ provides pointers to useful places where to search for information.
A: There are three different mailing lists.
A: To subscribe to blinux-list, send a message to
blinux-list-request@redhat.com with subject line: subscribe.
Send your posting for blinux-list to blinux-list@redhat.com.
To unsubscribe from blinux-list, send a message to
blinux-list-request@redhat.com with subject line: unsubscribe.
To subscribe to blinux-announce, send a message to
blinux-announce-request@redhat.com with subject line: subscribe.
Send your posting for blinux-announce to blinux-announce@redhat.com.
To unsubscribe from blinux-announce, send a message to
blinux-announce-request@redhat.com with subject line: unsubscribe.
To subscribe to blinux-develop, send a message to
blinux-develop-request@redhat.com with subject line: subscribe.
Send your posting for blinux-develop to blinux-develop@redhat.com.
To unsubscribe from blinux-develop, send a message to
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A: There are no fixed rules how to quote a posting in blinux-list.
Many people prefer to find the answer at the top in front of the quoted text
without going through quotes. Others prefer the quotes before the reply.
That seems to be sometimes the preference of people using only one incoming
mail folder and no threaded mail readers. Using procmail to sort
incoming mail might change that preference.
When quoting keep in mind that quoting intelligently speaks for the poster.
If you quote in a way that people stop reading the mail before they read your
contribution, you could make your life easier by not posting at all (if
the reason you are posting is to communicate and not the act of posting itself)
So show that you are a pro and quote intelligently.
A: To reiterate: footers also called signatures or simply 'sigs' are lines which are appended by the poster at the end of a posting. They usually contain contact info, famous last words or express how the author thinks about things in life etc.
A: In earlier times when bandwidth was much smaller than it is
today, people were greedy not to saturate the Net with "huge" footers.
Over the years people have agreed that up to four lines are a nice
size for a footer. So a footer length of about 4 lines is acceptable
for postings to blinux-list.
And since rules aren't complete without exceptions, here we go :)
For every 10000 lines of open sourced code a poster has written, an additional
footer line is welcomed.
A: One of the great achievements America can be proud of is the
First Amendment
which guarantees free speech. This is IMHO a good thing and I`m applying it
to footers (and postings) for blinux-lists. As long as content doesn't insult
other list members, there will be no censorship.
If you feel annoyed, you may use a tool like sed or awk to hide the part
of the posting which makes you wild or use a kill file to ignore those persons
whose postings make your blood boil.
A: There is no relation between Blinux and Red Hat besides that people from Red Hat were so kind and offered me to host blinux-lists on their fast and reliable Red Hat servers.
A: Go the the Blinux home page at
http://leb.net/blinux.
From there you can access the mailing-list pages as
http://leb.net/blinux/blinux-list.html
http://leb.net/blinux/blinux-announce.html
http://leb.net/blinux/blinux-develop.html
and can browse and search the mailing list archives.
A: Linux-l@mana.landofhaze.com (mail listserv@mana.landofhaze.com and type
subscribe linux-l to subscribe) and linux-newbie@vger.rutgers.edu (mail
majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu and type subscribe linux-newbie to join) are two
general-purpose mailing lists. Comp.os.linux.setup and
comp.os.linux.hardware are good newsgroups to try. If you are wondering how
to set something up under Linux, there may be a HOWTO that explains it (see
below). There is a wealth of information available on the Web. Check out
T.Pospisek's howto-find-answers.html
to learn where to find what you are searching for.
Most of general questions are already answered and are posted to
UseNet news groups. You simply can harvest them using the
Deja.com.
To search for files you may go to www.freshmeat.net
or use ftpsearch
Excellent general search engines are Google and
Yahoo
A: You can get an MS-DOS version of Lynx from http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/bobcat.htm Lynx you can browse HTML files. --Matthew Campbell <mattcamp@feist.com>
A: It should be readable with a web browser, like the text mode "lynx" browser. Lynx is part of linux, but a DOS version is available: check at http://lynx.browser.org/ --L. C. Robinson
A: There is a whole library of documentation, including whole books,
available at many FTP and web sites, and their mirrors, in multiple formats,
including ASCII text. These are products of the "LDP" (Linux Documentation
Project), which is mirrored from metalab.unc.edu (formerly known as
sunsite). Good starting places for web based documentation are
www.linuxnow.com and www.linuxresources.com.
To read HTML files under DOS, you can get an MS-DOS version of the Lynx
browser from http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/bobcat.htm --Matthew Campbell
If a very cheap CD library is desired instead, go to one of the cheap Linux
CD distributors (see the question on cheap cdroms). For example, CheapBytes
puts a snapshot of much of the Linux Documentation Project archives on each
CD, in the "doc" directory (actually, this is fairly traditional for linux
CD's, no matter where you buy them).
Don't overlook the archives for blinux and leb.net, etc, from the end of the
blinux mailing list messages:
Blinux software archive at ftp://leb.net/pub/blinux
Blinux web page at http://leb.net/blinux
See also the Reading-List HOWTO, which references many of the resources by
name, that you will find in the places mentioned above.
O'Reilly also publishes books on a wide variety of computer-related topics,
and their books are available from Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic in
audio form or as html or sgml documents.
Once you have access to an installed Linux system, you should be able to
access lots of documentation in the /usr/doc directory and it's
subdirectories, including just about everything from the Linux Documentation
Project, if it was selected for installation, or installed later. There is a
whole beginners book about Linux, in HTML, for instance. These same
documents are all available from the ftp mirrors mentioned above, and from
many linux web sites.
There is a text based web browser called "lynx" (type "lynx" at the command
prompt), that is set up with a default opening page in Red-Hat installations,
with links to just about all the documentation you could ever want, much if
it on your local hard disk (other distributions probably have a similar
default page). --L. C. Robinson
Where do I start?
A: Heh, heh. Treat it as a resource. Look up what you need, when you need
it. No one learns it all: most only need a small part of it. There are very
few questions that can't be answered this way. There are some great
searching utilities that can help in accessing this stuff: see, for
instance, www.htdig.org, or use the search engines on the LDP web sites.
Of course, you'll want to survey it, look at the indexes, etc, so you'll
know what's available.
A very good starting point is Matt Welsh's excellent "Linux Installation and
Getting Started" guide. -- L. C. Robinson
A: First try the following, from the command prompt: [this should be
augmented with instructions for Emacspeak, particularly for Emacspeak help
-- I am not qualified to write that part, because I don't use it] man man
man apropos
info
lynx
Hopefully, your linux distribution has set up lynx with a default page that
will bring a lot of the LDP stuff to you in a convenient way (Red Hat does
this).
Be sure to read the Emacspeak HOWTO and Access HOWTO right away. All HOWTOs
are available via ftp in text form from metalab.unc.edu in
/pub/Linux/doc/HOWTO.--L. C. Robinson
A: Because there are many very cheap CD distributors, it may not be
necessary to guess at what distribution would be best for you. One can
affordably try a variety of candidates. These sell for about $2.00 per CD
(plus shipping and handling, about $5). Popular ones currently include:
Red Hat, Caldera, and SuSE, maybe Mandrake, which is an enhanced Red Hat,
Slackware (maybe easier to install eyes free, depending on hardware, but a
pain to upgrade, etc), and Debian (the largest, most programs/packages, with
the "alien" conversion utility, which allows borrowing packages from other
distributions, but hard to install, for newbies).
Cheap CDs can be found at www.linuxcentral.com, www.lsl.com,
www.linuxmall.com, and www.cheapbytes.com: more are appearing all the time.
For a blind user, these are just as good as the $49.00 "boxed sets" from
distributors like Redhat and Caldera: the main advantage of the later is
that they include a paper manual and installation support, which can be had
for free on the Internet. The Red Hat installation manual is available in
electronic format, right on the CD (in HTML format), and on the web: others
may be as well. --L. C. Robinson
A: It depends on the distribution you use. If you have a second computer or other device that you can use as a terminal, you might be able to install over your computer's serial port. Slackware can be installed in this way. With Red Hat and derivatives (eg Mandrake), you can use kickstart to automate an install, so the details can be set up within windows or the like, and a custom boot disk will set up Red Hat to the users specification. It can even take RPMs from an FTP site, so for example, the Festival synth can be set up at install time. --Jimmy O'Regan You can use a Speakup boot disk which holds a modified Linux kernel with speech support to install Linux eyes free. Speakup boot disks are available for different Linux distributions. Check out the Speakup home page for further details. Speakup is also available from the Blinux File archive.
A: At present, it's not too practical, unless modified somehow, to install
eyes free. Perhaps you get someone to tell you what's on the screen during
the installation.
Advanced Unix users might be able to use Red Hat's kickstart procedure (see
www.redhat.com, or the Kickstart HOWTO) to prepare an automatic, eyes free
installation. If you are a novice, forget I mentioned it.
A: There is no single answer to this question, any more than there is a single choice for a sighted person. Different people prefer different distributions, but the distribution that you choose does not restrict the software that you can run, so each is more or less equally accessible. Some distributions may be easier than others to install without sighted assistance by using a serial terminal; Slackware can be installed in this way (see the Emacspeak howto), but this should not be the only factor that you use in deciding on a distribution, if possible. The Distribution howto may be worth reading. You may want to buy a Linux CD, especially if you don't have a fast Internet connection, but all distributions are available for download at different places depending on which one you use.
A: SVGATextMode, available under system/Console (I think) on your local
sunsite mirror. It can program quite a wide variety of text modes, and I
think it comes with mode setups for 40x15. It requires configuration to
match your particular video card, however.
--Kenneth Albanowski <kjahds@kjahds.com>
A: Some hints about booting Linux and reading boot messages
- Finding out when the LILO boot prompt is on: It is easy to just hold down
the left shift key when the computer boots, but the only way to make sure
you have reached the "boot" prompt is to listen to the HD and wait. Well
here are two tricks.
One of the things LILO can do, is print a customized message before giving
the prompt (that is the "boot" prompt, not the "LILO" prompt). Just put a
line in your lilo.conf that looks like:
message = /boot/message
and put your customized message in /boot/message. The interesting thing is
that if that file contains an ASCII 7 character (control-G), you will here a
short beep when the message is actually printed by LILO. So when you hear
that beep, you know you can release the shift key and type in your command
line.
Another thing LILO can do, is print all its stuff to a com port, so you can
read it on an attached serial terminal. Just put a line in your lilo.config
like
serial = 1,9600n8- Reading kernel boot-time messages:
cd /dev rm console mknod console c 4 64 # 4,64 are the major and minor for ttyS0I haven't done that in quite a while, so I might be forgetting something, or getting something wrong. I don't remember if it will come at you at 9600 or 38400... Perhaps someone would care to try it out...
cd /dev rm console ls -l tty0 # it's the same as console, so you can find the numbers there # if you forget mknod console c 4 0 chmod 622 consoleIt's useful when you really have to find out what it says on the screen. Of course you have to be able to get to /dev and have rm and mknod and ls and such working. But it can be useful when you prepare a root disk to install a new machine.
A: Linux and DOS are completely different operating systems and Linux does not natively run DOS software. If you have another system that you can use as a terminal, one option would be to hook it up to your Linux box and access Linux through your terminal. This setup has the advantage that you can continue to use your existing screen reader, and may be a good option while you're getting started. . A variation on this technique would be to network your systems together. The Emacspeak howto (which I would recommend reading) has some information on using a terminal. Brltty allows braille displays to work in the console and supports a variety of devices; it has a web page at http://mielke.cc/brltty/ (the brltty page has a list of supported braille displays). There are also several programs for providing speech that are in various stages of development. Emacspeak is the most developed of these and is an advanced audio system that runs under Emacs, adding speech to all of Emacs's features. If you are going to use emacspeak, you should subscribe to its mailing list (emacspeak@cs.vassar.edu) by sending mail to emacspeak-request@cs.vassar.edu. Screader, svlpro), and Speak-up are more general-purpose screen readers but are newer and still being developed.
A: Different screen readers support different synthesizers. Emacspeak
includes a server for DEC-Talk synthesizers, but Jim Vanzandt has written
servers for the Doubletalk / Litetalk, Braille 'n Speak / BrailleLite / Type
'n Speak, Accent, and Apollo 2 synthesizers.
Bart Bunting has also written an Emacspeak server for
Mbrola which can be used to get speech out of an ordinary sound card. Check
out Bart's Mbrola Server home at http://bart.socs.uts.edu.au/mbrola_server/"
or you can download Mbrola Server from the Blinux file archive. Mbrola
server is still a beta version. So it might choke from time to time.
A high quality speech synthesizer which is supported by Emacspeak and
Screader screen reader is IBM's Outloud. You can freely download Outloud
from here after you have registered.
Svlpro screen reader supports the Echo, DEC-Talk, Accent, Speak-out, Braille
'n speak, Apollo and Artic Transport. The Linux kernel includes a driver for
the Doubletalk, and a driver for the DEC-Talk PC is available. Other
internal synthesizers will probably not work. In particular, it would be
difficult to write a driver for the Sounding Board since it would also be
necessary to write text-to-speech software for the card since it only knows
how to make utterances, and GW Micro will not release specifications for it.
A: You can download Emacspeak from T.V.Raman's Emacspeak site at emacspeak.sourceforge.net or from the Blinux file archive.
A: Check out the Emacspeak-HOWTO and T.V. Raman's Emacspeak home page. --Matthew Campbell <mattcamp@feist.com>
A: The Emacspeak manual is available in the info documentation system, which you can start with the control-h i command once you have started Emacspeak. If you are new to Emacs, you may also find it helpful to read the Emacs tutorial, which you can get to with the control-h t command within Emacs.
A: Emacs is an editor but it is a powerful program capable of doing many other things as well. Emacspeak is much more than a speech enabled editor. Emacspeak is an audio desktop which allows access to all major 32 and 64 bit operating environments. With support for the freely downloadable IBM ViaVoice Outloud speech synthesis engine, Emacspeak now turns Linux into the first zero-cost Internet access solution for blind and visually impaired users. Those who use Emacspeak are claiming, that Emacspeak is the most advanced user interface for eyes free access currently available. Some of Emacspeak's highlights are:
A: Well, of course there will always be drawing and graphical stuff, picture viewers, etc, that can't be accessed this way. But Linux has hundreds of utilities and programs in text mode that provide almost any kind of functionality that you might care about, usually in a better native format than their graphical counterparts, from the standpoint of a blind user, and often for others as well. These text mode applications are often superior, from a productivity and usability standpoint, for ANY user, though the learning curve may be higher. These are accessible from within Emacspeak. --L. C. Robinson
A: Emacspeak comes with a driver for the Multivoice --dtk-mv. You can therefore use emacspeak with the Multivoice --you should use the driver dtk-mv instead of dtk-exp --see the Emacspeak documentation for further details. --T.V.Raman
A: Generally you would not want to do that. Native text utilities and applications will usually work better: these are accessible through emacspeak. Linux, like other Unix-based operating systems and unlike MS Windows, does not integrate a GUI into the kernel. Many of the graphical programs that run under Linux are actually either front ends to text-based utilities, or programs which do things which can be done using text-based utilities. Since X is merely a set of applications which run on top of Linux, the text-based interface will always be available, as will applications that run in text mode. --L. C. Robinson
A: You do not need to recompile emacspeak for every account that would be fairly brain-dead. I suspect that your path in the new account is not properly set, and as a result when you launch emacspeak as yourself it is not finding tcl and therefore bombing. As root, check where you get tcl from --type
which tclthen as yourself make sure that this directory is in your shell search path.
chmod 666 /dev/cua0This lets any user read from or write to those devices. The more elegant solution is to give yourself some additional privileges, by joining the group that owns those devices. ls will tell you which group that is. For example, on my system the group is "dialout":
ls -l /dev/cua0Root may sign up a user to an additional group this way:
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 5, 64 Apr 4 07:54 /dev/cua0
adduser joe dialout
A: Yes. Don't hold your breath, though. Much of the X stuff will never work well this way. There has been some discussion here of the superior possibilities for the new Gnome desktop (see the archives for details). The really important thing to understand, is that you have very little reason to be concerned about the GUI stuff, because of the rich functionality available in text mode. Also, Brian Selden is working on porting Ultrasonix to Linux. Ultrasonix is a screen access package for X that was originally developed for Sun SPARCstations running Solaris; see http://www.henge.com/~brian/ultralin.html for info.
A: Get an .xbm graphic made of the cursor at a usable size, and also a corresponding mask for the transparent bits of the cursor - black becomes transparent and white is solid if I recall correctly, I might be wrong. (I got a friend to do this for me.) Then I added to my .xsession:
xsetroot -cursor .cursor.xbm .cursormsk.xbmwhere .cursor.xbm was the image of the cursor and .cursormsk.xbm is the mask. - Andrew Devenish-Meares You may also want to look at the X-Big-Cursor mini-howto. --L. C. Robinson
A: If I were a new, blind user, I would probably get sgmltools (which was developed for the linux documentation project -- see www.sgmltools.org), and use that. I have Word Perfect for Linux, the server edition (which has the added capability of working on text based serial terminals). I do NOT recommend it. For people who need the proprietary MS-Word format to send documents to others, I would recommend using sgmltools to produce HTML format, and ask them to just use the HTML input capability of their proprietary word processor to convert or read it. Writing in a macro or formatter language (linux has several of these) has a more steep learning curve, but has been shown by studies to be far more efficient than WYSIWYG solutions, even in the sighted world.
A: Believe it or not the following actually worked --I tried it for kicks
about a year and a half ago.
With emacspeak running, I brought up an eterm (terminal inside emacs) with M-x
term, ran DOSE MU in that terminal and it worked.
Next, I turned off Emacspeak's speech in that terminal buffer,
and launched vocal eyes that I had installed on 12. And it worked just fine.
The only problem with doing this from inside an emacs terminal is that that
terminal has only 79 columns, and most DOS programs have 80 columns hard-wired
in them.
Conclusion: from a linux console window you should be able to run Dose mu and
any DOS screen reader with no difficulty. --T.V Raman
A: I have experimented with Xocr without success myself. There's a lot of
work represented there, but it seems to have been abandoned before it
was properly functional.
I recently sent email to the author of wocar, a freeware ocr package for
Windows 95/NT that is distributed as binary executables. I suggested
porting to linux, perhaps utilizing some existing utilities to facilitate
the port (with or without X). I got a courteous reply that it was possible,
but not an objective of the author.
I've been thinking that perhaps we could get some blinux developers to
volunteer to develop a Linux port of wocar, perhaps under some non-disclosure
agreement if that is a concern of the developer. Are there some programmers
on the list interested in this? It's a critical "missing piece" in putting
together a complete freely distributable adaptive access package for
electronic media... --Lar Kaufman <lark@world.std.com>
A: I was just looking at Vividata's http://www.vividata.com
selection of Unix imaging and scanning software. For those who don't know,
vividata market omnipage professional/unix.
While there isn't currently a port of their software to linux, they do
have solaris/x86 binaries, so it would be trivial for them (given enough
demand) to port from there to linux Certainly a lot more trivial than
porting the windows based ocr software over, since Vividata already have
low-level scanner interfaces.
It may be worth dropping a not to their support staff (address is on the
web page) suggesting that there might be a market for a linux port of some
or all of their software.
--Aaron Howell <aaron@sunrise.cnl.com.au<
A: GSpeech is a tool that allows eyes-free access to graphical applications
built using the Gtk+ library.
GSpeech is a Gtk module that can be loaded automatically in Gtk apps
setting an environmental variable (GTK_MODULES=gspeech) or on a per app
basis using the --gtk-module=gspeech command line switch.
Being a module, means GSpeech works more or less with all of the
applications built with Gtk (less when the application uses special purpose
widgets like AbiWord or no Gtk widgets at all like Mozilla).
GSpeech exploits the object oriented design and the advanced features of
the Gtk library and as such it's not possible to use it with applications
built with other toolkits (although some of the by-products are).
GSpeech runs in the same address space of the applications and so can
easily access the widgets that form the user interface: this allows GSpeech
to provide a through description of the interface as well as alternative
navigation techniques.
GSpeech can also automatically load additional sub-modules that can handle
application-specific widgets.
To provide feedback to the user GSpeech uses synthesized voice
(implemented in the gspeech-server add-on library) and sounds.
Additional support for braille display is planned, but not yet designed.
The behavior of GSpeech is defined completely in a text based
configuration file, so that an advanced user, for example, can have a
different experience then a newbie who wants a more verbose auditory
interface.
TODO
GSpeech works already quite well with some applications, but a number of
problems need to be resolved before it's considered a productive tool.
More speech server need to be developed as well as more comprehensive
support in the auditory icon department.
Internationalization needs to be addressed as well as dealing with
component technology (Bonobo allows to use CORBA objects that may be run as
different processes or even on different computers).
More importantly user feedback and tests are required to improve it.
Download
You need gtk+ version 1.2.0 or above to use gspeech.
You can find it on the anonymous gnome cvs server (module name: gspeech).
Look for instructions on out to checkout the module on www.gnome.org.
You'll also need festival running (other speech servers are in
development)
--Paolo Molaro <lupus@lettere.unipd.it>
A: Yup, sure can. I'm running 3.7.2 and it works just fine here. The only complaint is that you can't do file transfers (sz and such) while in screen, because it escapes some of the control codes zmodem needs, but that's a minor problem, since screen's multitasking ability is useless while you're downloading anyway. --Travis Siegel <tsiegel@softcon.com>
A: If you want the cursor to follow the highlighting in menus and lists and
be positioned at the place for the text you are searching for and so on
(puh), you can turn "show-cursor" on in the setup. From the main menu,
select S)etup, then C)onfig. Go to "show-cursor" (you can use "W" to
search) and turn that option on.
Since I found this, Pine has been a bit more easy to use.
Note that it doesn't put the cursor at the status/error messages at the
line just above the menus. Often, however, the program beeps when messages
appear at this place. --Peter Nilsson <peternil@pnidv96.univ.hv.se>
A: First make sure you are running an up to date version of both Linux and
emacspeak, and anything else you need. Lots of problems disappear just by
running recent software in the Linux world, as improvements are extremely
rapid. You can get recent CD versions for only about $7.00 from multiple
vendors, as mentioned elsewhere in this FAQ, so there's no reason to fool
with old versions.
When you post questions like this, make sure you specify exactly what
software and hardware you are running, including your synth or braille
display: if you do this, it's very likely that someone can tell you
precisely what to put in your config files so that things will work. If the
information is too vague, most people will just ignore your plea for help.
A: Go to IBM's web page at http://www.ibm.com/software/speech/dev/downloads.html After registering there, you can download Viavoice speech synthesizer for free.
A: There is bare speech support in the actual development version (not released yet) but it is intended as speech complement to braille. However, it can be a starting point for a full-speech screen review software. The thing is that speech is actually activated using the keys on the braille device (since I don't know how to intercept the keyboard from the Linux console). --Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
A: We have modified a brltty's source code and obtained a unofficial version of brltty that works fine on braillex compact; but only on devices with 486 cpu and 42 braille cells. --derosa@mbox.vol.it
A: Emacspeak comes with a driver for the Multivoice --dtk-mv. You can therefore use emacspeak with the Multivoice --you should use the driver dtk-mv instead of dtk-exp --see the Emacspeak documentation for further details. --T.V.Raman
A: Regarding SuSE Linux: SuSE Linux distro _has_ blind support. SuSE is supporting an increasing number of Braille displays. SuSE even employs Linux developers who are blind to improve usability of their Linux distribution.
Regarding other Linux distributors: this topic shines up in regular cycles on blinux-list. The usual sequence of events is like this:
A: There are several worthwhile
access-related projects underway at present. These include Emacspeak,
BrlTTY, Braifo, Gnome Speech, UltraSonix and an assortment of screen
readers. If you aren't involved in any of these projects directly and
would like to assist in making Linux and free/open-source software in
general more accessible, then I would suggest trying any of the following:
1. If you have had some programming experience, and you would like to
contribute to one of these projects, contact the author to find out
whether you could make a contribution. Alternatively, if there is a need
which you think is unlikely to be met by any of the existing projects,
start one of your own.
2. If, like me, you do not have a background in software development, then
you can still contribute in a variety of ways: testing and bug reporting,
writing documentation and tutorials, or providing feedback and design
ideas to the active developers.
3. The open-source community is already engaged in a number of development
efforts which are of relevance to the future of user interfaces, web
access, etc., on Linux and other free operating systems. These include
desktop environments and web browsers. Why not contribute to one or more
of these projects, become part of the development process, or raise
awareness of different user interface scenario in appropriate fora with
the designers of these packages? T. V. Raman's presentation at the Bazaar
open-source conference, which is available online at
http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ is a case in point.
4. If you know any individual or organisation that might be interested in
contributing existing software, in the form of source code, or development
effort, in an area that would be relevant to access concerns (E.G. speech
synthesis software, OCR software, braille translation software, etc.),
then you could, if appropriate, make the suggestion. These days, free
software/open-source projects are starting to appear which are based on
software contributed by an organisation seeking to take advantage of this
mode of development, whether by offering support services, using the
software as an adjunct to related products or consultancy activities,
providing drivers for their proprietary hardware, etc.
5. If you decide to start a software project or wish to raise access
concerns, there is a variety of online fora available: http://lwn.net/
http://freshmeat.net/ http://slashdot.org/ to name some of the better
known options.
These are just some of the ways in which individuals can make a
contribution.
--Jason White
<jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
A: For the Linux console you can run SVGATextMode, which should be included in most distributions; for Xterm use "control-mouse-1" (control key and right mouse button at the same time) to be offered a small font-changing menu. Unfortunately, SVGATextMode is not completely trivial to setup and the xterm menu is written in its default (small) font. --Alessandro Rubini <rubini@pop.systemy.it>
A: #blinux is on EFnet. Here are some servers which are connected to EFnet:
irc.blackened.com irc.lightning.net irc.ais.net --Mario Lang <mlang@teleweb.at>
Thanks to all who have contributed to the Blinux-FAQ. The Blinux-FAQ was created by Michael Gorse <mgorse@wpi.edu> and is currently maintained by Hans Zoebelein <hzo@gmx.de>
Enjoy!
Hans