Hello everyone!

[Maurice McCarthy]

Hi Spencer,

Welcome to the list. As you can see it is not hugely active but I
think it could be.

I'm new here too and interested almost by accident. I'm too old to
learn very much quickly but I've been using Debian based systems for
some 10 years now. I'm not too clever with scripts and configuration.
At work on the North Sea oil fields I cannot get to sleep in spite of
a very active 3 days so I thought I'd do something constructive.

Brian Cox has done some truly stirling work putting together the
scripts to make Ubuntu more friendly at www.vinux.org.uk  As he
acknowledges putting a distribution for the visually impaired on a
gui-oriented system seems counter-intuitive but he finds the hardware
recognition in Ubuntu superior to Debian. I would not have Audacity
voice recording working but for Vinux. (I want to put a certain
philosophic work into audible which is not available elsewhere.)

I'd like to run some thoughts past you. I first started thinking about
accessibility issues when I chanced across the grml distro.
http://grml.org It is a system administrators distro packed with
documentation and text tools. Heavily text biased it has clear
advantages for the blind wanting to understand computers better
because of the text to speech tools. Grml is maintained by Austrian
students in Vienna and though they made a policy decision early on to
support accessibility there is no one who especially tends this side
of the project. Never the less it has occurred to me that some of
their work might be hackable into Ubuntu and Vinux.

Secondly, particularly for the blind, Emacs has always seemed full of
potential to me in combination with Festival. Emacs does not work like
other environments and can seem daunting if you are used to windows
ways but I feel it could be so useful. Everything can be done in emacs
as it forms a desktop of its own - though I am a rudimentary
practioner in it. It would be almost identical in a gui or a braille
terminal, I think, and therefore transportable across all linux
distros (And at least partly into Windows as gnu emacs for windows can
be downloaded from
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-22.3-bin-i386.zip )
Obviously I learnt this from grml. They have it set up that in Emacs
the command: Say "some region of text" does exactly that.

I understand from some of the blind users on grml that the biggest
obstacle is the gui - probably because the most common use is browsing
and so many interesting sites are http and full of visual crud.

Well I'll try to get to sleep again now.

Best Wishes
Maurice

 - - - - - - - - - - -
Spencer wrote:

Greetings,

My name is Spencer and I am an avid advocate & self-advocate for those
developmental disabilities. Ever since I started using Linux about
three to four years ago after growing weary of Windows' high
maintenance, I soon discovered the better quality assistive technology
and software found in Linux and Ubuntu.
Currently I work at a university and am pursuing more affordable
assistive technology for all.