[Inx] Blind Distro CLI project - Seeing Puppy for the Blind

[Peter Garrett]

On Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:14:53 -0500
"David Ring" <n1ea at arrl.net> wrote:

> I did exchange an email with one of the project people (Peter) and he
> promised to send the following info to the group, but since I decided
> I wanted to keep up to date with this beautiful INX, I thought I'd
> sign up for this mail list and also post a little bit about our
> project.

Sorry David... I did indeed say that I would pass on the information. I
did, however, notice that you had posted here on the 15th December
about your project...

Just briefly: I had a little play with INX using "espeak". It was
surprisingly usable - the trick I tried was to pipe menus through
espeak like this:

menu | espeak
direct | espeak

Now, INX uses "figlet", so the voice has to read through a lot of
"backstroke backstroke stroke backstroke..." and so forth. The easiest
way around this of course would be to make the menus so that "figlet"
was optional. Also the colour escape codes would need to be removed,
since they are also read. 

The other issue was that of course when you drop to a prompt, although
the speech output continues, running a program does not always do as
expected. Some things continue to work quite well - for example, running
the elinks browser results in audible reading of the pages, and so on.

I've not looked at your program yet. I think the main interest here
would be to see if something can be done  with INX along similar lines
- in other words, the idea is good but your project, strictly speaking,
is off-topic for this list. That is not to dismiss it, simply a
statement about the function of the INX list.

It would be interesting to try and make INX usable for the visually
impaired. It is certainly something that I have thought about, but you
will understand that the first priority was to get a working INX system
up and running :)

Peter

-- 
"INX Is Not X" Live CD based on Ubuntu 8.04 : http://inx.maincontent.net
Screenshots slideshow: http://inx.maincontent.net/album/1.png.html