Re: screen readers for BeOS?

[Richard Smedley <richard sc lug org uk>]

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 09:40 +0100, Yannick PLASSIARD wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 02:59:55AM -0800, hank smith wrote:
> > hello I don't know where to ask this one I am wanting to try out the BeOS 
> > operating system, 
> 
> 	Yes, this is mainly devoted to the GNOME Desktop accessibility 
> and not for a particular OS...

Hello Hank,

Although BeOS is no longer supported, there is a Free Software
re-implementation, with a mailing list at:
http://www.freelists.org/list/openbeos
and a website at:
http://haiku-os.org/

There are people on that list who have been using BeOS since the
earliest days, who should be able to give you a definitive answer.

> > there is a radio automation package called tune 
> > tracker 
> > that uses the BeOS operating system, from what I can gather from google it 
> > appears to be some sort of unix like os.
> > is there a screen reader that will work on the BeOS operating system?
> > can some one help point me in the write direction?
> 	Assuming what you said is true i.e. BeOS is an unix-like OS, you 
> may be able to run a BrlTty on it in combination with the "screen" 
> program (for the console mode).
> Try looking on http://www.mielke.cc/brltty/

I couldn't see one in a quick look at
http://bebits.com/
but it's worth asking on a BeOS mailing list, like the 
one I mentioned above.

Another option for BeOS / Haiku a11y is using Emacspeak with Xemacs,
but it wouldn't give access to most of BeOS's GUI apps.

TuneTracker appears to be a package for running your own radio
station. There is definitely GNU/Linux-based software to do this
that will run on GNOME, I know of one person who has done this
recently and will send you his contact details off-list, in case
you wish to enquire further.

Note that BeOS is Unix-like in it's rough Posix-compliance, and thus
it has a shell and can run many *nix apps, but it is a very different
beast from GNU and other *nixes, as it is designed so that everything
can (and should) be configured through the GUI.

Regards,

 - Richard

-- 
Richard Smedley,                                   richard sc lug org uk
Sustainable IT Consultant
http://m6-it.org/          ``Software Freedom for the Voluntary Sector''