Re: Updating mbrola (again)

[Brian Buhrow <buhrow%nfbcal.org@localhost>]

	Hello.  Those of us with vision impairments, I am totally blind, are not completely left
out of NetBSD.  I've been an official NetBSD developer since 2011 and have been using NetBSD
since it emerged from 386BSD in 1993.

	I use a screen reader called yasr, along with a build of eflite, which uses flite as its
speech synthesizer in conjunction with Yasr.  Yasr was written by a gentleman named Mike Gorse,
who is also totally blind.

	I've used NetBSD on I386, AMD64, RPI and Sparc systems, as well as in the cloud and in the
Xen virtual environment.


	As far as nonvisual usability, the challenge I've not yet worked out is how to get Orca
working with Firefox on the X environment under NetBSD.  I think this has mostly been due to a
lack of time on my part, but if anyone wants to help with this process, I'd be greatful.  Orca
is in the pkgsrc tree, and it compiles, and my issues have mostly been the same as for every
one else, that is, geting X to work reliably with the graphics cards and monitors I have
available, as well as just getting the X keyboard to do what I expect with the keys I want.

	If anyone wants to write with questions off list, I'm happy to correspond and offer my
perspective, for what it's worth.  Or, we can do it on list, if folks dont find it too
distracting.

	And, for the record, this e-mail was written using Yasr, the window(1) utility, mush (mail
user shell) and vi.

-thanks
-Brian
On Jan 20,  5:06pm, adr wrote:
} Subject: Re: Updating mbrola (again)
} On Sat, 20 Jan 2024, Greg Troxel wrote:
} >  The use of -git as a suffix because uptream is hosted on github, or
} I did a port back then of emacspeak. I don't have vision disabilities,
} but I'm interested in interfacing a computer only with audio. It's
} something I've been always curious about. Altough I have a love-hate
} relationship with emacs, it offers a complete and uniform textual
} environment. Another interesting project I've been using is edbrowse,
} but I'm not satisfied with the software screen readers I've tried,
} and then you need other software for other tasks and the uniformity
} of the interface is then broken. I think this could be good for
} the community, people with vission impairment has been left out of
} netbsd. At least that is my impression, correct me if I'm wrong.
} The idea I have is to make an image with the latest release (I hope
} it will be 10) so someone could boot an rpi into X11 (so that person
} could share work with peope without vision disabilities) into an
} emacspeak session. Then this person could also use the pi as an
} audio terminal, through ssh or the uart port to interact with
} other systems, even at boot time.
} 
} There are instability problems with raspberry pi computers on
} netbsd, specially with usb, and isochronous transmissions on the
} pi4 have been broken for years, imagine the confussion of a person
} who can't see the screen when some usb device is plugged in and
} the system crashes and reboot itself, or the frustration when all
} usb audio devices like cameras or microphones don't work. So I've
} been using other systems, and going back to netbsd now and then.
} 
} Those packages (and the others I pushed to wip back then: espeak-ng,
} sonic, tclx...) are emacspeak's dependencies.
} 
} Regards,
} adr.