I need a program

[Hugh Sasse]

On Thu, 2 Oct 2008, Eric S. Johansson wrote:

> Hugh Sasse wrote:
> 
> > I'm not sure if this is anything near what you are looking for.
> > I thought people used web forums for this sort of thing now.  
> 
> the only difference being that the old BBSs from the 1980s are faster and have a
> better user interface.  I know it's damn near impossible to drive a web forum
> with speech recognition and pretty miserable just entering message text.  I
> imagine that screen scraping for text-to-speech is just as bad.
> 

Agreed. It's bad enough with low vision, but when I used to visit
"Sight Village" regularly I was given the impression audio browsers
were catching up.  I used to be on the ACCMAIL list (Accessing the
Internet by Email) and got some bugs out of Arthur Secret's Agora
program, and enhanced it to provide compression, base64 encoding,
and a few other things.  Since the departure from that area of Gerry
Boyd the list has basically fizzled out.  Agora didn't cope too well
with forms, but there was Getweb if memory serves) that was better.
There was also some work on a text browser called Netrik, but its
very accessible web page

http://netrik.sourceforge.net//?intro.html

doesn't seem to have changed for a long time.
We had a BBS running on an Olivetti 3b2 circa 1988, but I can't
remember what it was called, and I think the people who were there
then have now left.

Maybe poking around the mustier bits of comp.sources.unix might turn
up something.

The only other thing I can suggest is you poke about in places where
the Amateur Radio enthusiasts keep their Packet Radio software. I
never got into that, but it was much lower bandwidth than the web,
so is likely to be more accessible.

        Hugh