RE: programming on Windows (was RE: Any support/suggestions for a blind student)

  • From: "DaShiell, Jude T. CIV NAVAIR 1490, 1, 26" <jude.dashiell@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:37:51 -0400

The contact I have who can get me a legacy sound card told me he managed
to get Vinux up and talking on his laptop earlier today.  Don't have
anymore details on it than that though will probably find out before
Wednesday of this week.

-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Don Marang
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 11:31
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: programming on Windows (was RE: Any support/suggestions for
a blind student)

Bummer!  I thought Vinux primarily went away from alsa and pulse audio. 
They primarily depend on speech-dispatcher now.  Perhaps that is part of
the 
problem?  I am not an exprert in this area, but will pass this issue on
to 
the developers.

I would attempt to plug in a USB headset with an external sound device
and 
then boot into Vinux.  The kind most people buy for use with Skype.  I
bet 
it would automatically configure and switch to this audio output.

using Vinux will certainly not help you understand the quirks of SigWin.

Don Marang

There is just so much stuff in the world that, to me, is devoid of any
real 
substance, value, and content that I just try to make sure that I am
working 
on things that matter.
Dean Kamen


--------------------------------------------------
From: "DaShiell, Jude T.  CIV NAVAIR 1490, 1, 26"
<jude.dashiell@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 10:52 AM
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: programming on Windows (was RE: Any support/suggestions for
a 
blind student)

> I've been failing to install Vinux 3.00 since May of 2010.  It doesn't
> get along with the onboard sound card three of my machines use.  After
> Intrepid, support for that kind of sound card went by the wayside.
This
> is an intel nvidia ck804 and several sighted people also have issues
> with this particular model of sound card as well.  This week, I have a
> contact who has some legacy sound cards that ought to solve both the
> Vinux and Windows XP problem for me.  I've used Vinux 2.0 and have the
> Vinux 2.0 cli max version which does work on the machine Vinux 3.0
fails
> to work.  The problem or so I've been informed is that Vinux 3.0 is no
> longer sound card support agnostic and arbitrarily went with Pulse
Audio
> and it's the Pulse Audio incompatibility with the current sound card
> that's causing the problem.  Now if Vinux wants to get accessible it
> probably ought to do something like what Apple does and if it doesn't
> get a keyboard response or verbal response to a question sent out over
> the sound system figure that the sound system isn't working and won't
> work until pulse audio is at least temporarily disabled and alsa
drivers
> get installed and the system gets configured with alsa.  Then ask the
> question again and see what kind of response if any comes back.  If
> none, there may be a broken or missing sound card situation.  If an
> appropriate response comes back, it's alsa that's needed at least
> temporarily and possibly permanently.  Not done yet and won't be done
> for the next few versions since it'll be complex to implement but
that's
> why I haven't yet got Vinux going.  Also, use of Vinux would tell me
> nothing about cygwin or mingw.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Don Marang
> Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 10:13
> To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: programming on Windows (was RE: Any support/suggestions
for
> a blind student)
>
> If the only reason to install XP is to run SigWin, why not just
install
> the
> real thing?  Try Vinux, a blind friendly distribution of Ubuntu.  It
> provides and configures several screen readers, like SpeakUp for it's
> consoles and Orca for the gnome GUI desktop.  It also has two
> magnifiers.
> The Vinux community is solving many of the Linux accessibility and
voice
>
> stability issues.  It has a fully accessible installer that can either
> use
> the entire internal drive or install side by side with Windows for a
> dual
> boot configuration.  It can also run from a live disk, a USB pen
drive,
> or a
> Virtual Machine.
>
> Check out
> http://vinux.org.uk
>
> I just added a bash script, speedy-ocr, to the Vinux repository which
> uses
> the free tesseract or cuneiform OCR software to provide simplified
> scanning
> and performing OCR on any image file or files.
>
> Don Marang
>
> There is just so much stuff in the world that, to me, is devoid of any
> real
> substance, value, and content that I just try to make sure that I am
> working
> on things that matter.
> Dean Kamen
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> From: "DaShiell, Jude T.  CIV NAVAIR 1490, 1, 26"
> <jude.dashiell@xxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 7:50 AM
> To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: RE: programming on Windows (was RE: Any support/suggestions
for
> a
> blind student)
>
>> Thank you very much for these resources, they may be useful at home
if
> I
>> can end up installing Windows XP myself using screen narrator.  None
> of
>> these resources will be useful at work since we work in a locked down
>> software environment.  Anything not already approved for use costs
>> dollars and takes a year to get approved if everyone does everything
>> right all along the line for the software approval.  That doesn't
> always
>> happen either.  Screen readers for Linux do exist and the Mac has
>> VoiceOver but Linux has http://www.linuxspeakup.org/ and
>> http://speakupmodified.org/ among others to examine.  Screen readers
> are
>> like Center Fielders with catching gloves on both hands.  If right
> field
>> is input and left field is output and center field are peripherals,
> and
>> interaction in that system is considered the ball, the interaction
>> between keyboard and computer is caught translated and spoken as is
> the
>> text going from computer to screen.  Sometimes done with sound cards
> and
>> hardware speech synthesizers any more these days once there was a
time
>> when the Screen Rover did it differently.  A camera was set up so it
>> could capture the screen and O.C.R. was done on camera input which
was
>> converted to computer ascii and that ascii was then sent to a
hardware
>> screen reader.  Unfortunately screen rover went off the market since
> if
>> it hadn't blind people probably would been lots more effective
reading
>> more sites and not having to deal with all of these accessibility
>> issues.  The reason for me to install windows xp on a home computer
at
>> all is to perhaps install cygwin and/or mingw and djgpp utilities and
>> see what type of unix-like development I can do successfully on that
>> platform.  Since I can't do this at work, I'm willing to experiment
> with
>> a computer at home.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
>> arachna@xxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Sent: Friday, August 27, 2010 17:45
>> To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Subject: programming on Windows (was RE: Any support/suggestions for
a
>> blind student)
>>
>> I ran across the following post in the list archives by accident when
>> searching for something with Google and it piqued my curiousity:
>> "DaShiell, Jude T. CIV NAVAIR 1490, 1, 26" wrote on 16 March 2010:
>>>As I see it, Microsoft made two mistakes with Windows which until
>> they're corrected the best software for those
>> of us with no memory of vision to program for will be Linux in its
>> varied forms.
>>>First, the command line interface was made into a very poorly
equipped
>> environment for software development.
>>>Second, if someone does console-based development of software within
>> Windows to my knowledge to date no xenity equivalents yet exist for
> any
>> supported software development package now running on Windows; I
would
>> love to be
>> corrected on this point if at all possible even if packages under
> active
>> development are all that can be offered as suggestions.
>>
>>
>> Would dialog be a decent replacement for zenity on Windows?  I have a
>> how-to on building dialog for OpenWatcom here:
>> http://www.openwatcom.org/index.php/Dialog_howto
>> It's very similar to build it on mingw and msys.  There are just a
few
>> less places to patches.  I can put together the mingw patch if
someone
>> needs it.
>>
>> By the way, did a quick search of zenity and win32 to check if
someone
>> had ported it yet and ran across this:
>> http://www.placella.com/software/zenity/
>>
>> I've been experimenting with the idea of using dialog with bash or
> v8cgi
>> to create menus that will work in or out of X Windows on FreeBSD and
>> Linux.  Since I like to program cross-platform, the menus would work
> on
>> Windows just as well.
>>
>> There are at least 3 versions of bash I know of for Windows.  Cygwin,
>> djgpp and msys all have one.
>> Here's a stand-alone package based on Cygwin:
>> http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/bash/
>>
>> The other tool I've been looking at for cross-platform scripting that
>> I'm really starting to like is v8cgi:
>> http://code.google.com/p/v8cgi/
>> Syntax will be more familiar to C/C++ programmers than bash is.
>>
>> Since I'm not a blind user, I've been wondering just how the visually
>> impaired use console based tools.  Does the terminal emulator or some
>> such software read the information out loud, because the programs
>> themselves usually don't add speech capability?  Read an example on
> the
>> INX list where someone used tee and sent the information to espeak as
>> well as the menu.  I was wondering how hard it would be to add an
> option
>> to dialog that sent the information it drew out to another program
> like
>> espeak.  However, if a screen reader program already exists and works
>> fine with dialog and other software, that would be a more general
>> purpose solution.
>>
>> The other option I've been checking into is using the browser and
>> Javascript for the programming environment, but the one thing still
>> lacking is being able to shell out to other local programs and use
the
>> results.  There are some work-arounds for this specific to browsers,
> but
>> I'm waiting to find out if a more portable solution becomes
available.
>> What I'd really like is a merge of a Javascript server side language
>> like v8cgi with the ability to create an interface like a browser
can.
>> Of course, since it could do local file access, the Internet access
> part
>> should probably be shut off for security reasons.  The other drawback
> to
>> the browser approach is that relatively few console based or light
>> weight browsers fully support Javascript and css standards.
>>
>> Would be curious to know what's lacking in the Windows console
>> environment for software development that's available in other
>> environments like Linux.  I use mingw and msys all the time for quick
>> console development.  I use the DOS command prompt and have
customized
>> it to a way I'm comfortable with, but other options like Console 2
are
>> available and I believe Cygwin has a limited port of rxvt.  There are
> a
>> number of good compilers that work from console mode, including
mingw,
>> djgpp and OpenWatcom.  There are also some decent shell script
> languages
>> such as bash if batch files aren't enough.  I haven't found any
>> information on ncurses working on Windows, but you do have pdcurses.
> I
>> also I read about a Windows port of vifm to Windows, so I would guess
>> that means s-lang is available as well.
>>
>> Couldn't resist discussing this topic even though the original post
> was
>> from some time ago.  I've been very interested in some of the
subjects
>> and would enjoy hearing other programmers viewpoints on them as well.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>> Laura
>> http://www.distasis.com/cpp
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