Re: [orca-list] eBook readers that work with Orca

["Rob Hudson" <rob_hudson3182 opopanax net>]

John J. Boyer <john boyer abilitiessoft org> wrote:
> I wonder why  people make self-voicing applications, instead of just making them screenreader friendly.


I'll give you one case use.
I myself and deaf blind. However, I do have enough hearing via c.i's to hear the computer. In addition, I use 
a braille display
One of the major stumbling blocks that is keeping me from completely switching over to Linux is the inability 
to have a self-voicing IRC client. I have written with a friend of mine some wrapper scripts for mIRC that 
connect with eSpeak and IBMTTS libraries packaged with the client and do not necessarily rely on those 
libraries being installed upon the system. By doing it this way, I can do things like turn speech on and off 
for various channels, queries and chats. While I have irc voicing on its own, I can perform other operations 
with the screen reader via the braille display, or voice. Such a setup would not work on Linux because there 
is no self-voicing package for Irssi, Pidgin, or indeed any other client that approaches the sophistication 
of my own IRC setup. Reaching out to  other users, however, does not yield promising results; no one else 
seems to want such a setup, so it has not been written. And I do not have the skills or intelligence to write 
it myself. I imagine a wrapper for something like Hexchat or Weechat could be done in Python that does what 
my mIRC setup does.
This is one reason a self-voicing application is handy. For ebooks, you can read your ebook in the background 
and still be using your screen reader to do computing tasks such as reading your email. However, if you rely 
solely on your braille display, you can really only do one thing at a time. Therefore, a self-voicing 
application would, indeed, be rather useless.