Protecting Windows

[Daniel Robitaille]

On 2/8/06, Brian Astill <bastill at adam.com.au> wrote:
> Greetings, all.
> Can anyone help with this issue?
>
> Person with deteriorating vision has discovered Dragon
> Naturally Speaking which not only allows the construction of text
> from speech but can also speak from received text.  ie letter writing
> and email conversing etc become possible for the visually impaired.
>
> All of which is wonderful except - you guessed it - the %$$#@*&
> program runs on Windows 2000/XP only.  Why would anyone in their
> right mind NOT port a program as sensible as this to a SECURE OS?
>
> So .. what can be done?  Would a good firewall (FBSD?), then distro of
> choice (Ubuntu) and run 2000 in a virtual machine from Linux, protect
> our visually impaired operator from inadvertently triggering a
> virus/trojan/worm embedded in an innocent email or text-based
> web-page or VB-embedded-script in a MSOffice document?
>
> What arrangement would you suggest to enclose Windows in a "safe"
> environment?
>
> Alternatively, anyone know of a "Dragon Naturally Speaking" port to
> *nix or an app that achieves the same effects in OOO and (say)
> Firefox?

Ubuntu has an accessibility team (
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility), with its own mailing list
(https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility). 
Maybe they will be a good place to ask for specific accessibility
issues if no-one has the answer here to your questions.

--
Daniel Robitaille