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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