Lead, kindly light: Debian shows the way

Sam Varghese
Saturday, 02 February 2008 15:51

Opinion and Analysis

Screen-reading software such as YASR, SpeakUp and BRLTTY (in console mode) enables blind users to interact with the Linux console while Emacsspeak provides a different method - the Emacs editor and its applications (Richard Stallman's well-known programming toy) are extended in Emacs Lisp to create the spoken interface.

In a jocular tone, White said he would not enter into any debates about the relative merits of vi and Emacs during his talk - a topic that has contributed to more than its fair share of flame wars on mailing lists.

Software such as Festival, Festival-Lite and Espeak (all multilingual software speech synthesiser) are others which blind people can use,

Apart from the refreshable device, White also demonstrated the use of speech software -  the tones were eerily reminiscent of a robot speaking.

A Debian GNU/Linux user, White praised the distribution for including the BRLTTY daemon as a default choice in its installation.

There are applications which run under the X Windowing system that blind people use as well - White mentioned the GNOME accessibility architecture which is also supported by OpenOffice.org and Mozilla. Here widget libraries are extended to support the alternative user interface. Support for the architecture is being developed by the KDE project.

White is working on his doctorate at Melbourne University's philosophy department; his research pertains to the contemporary philosophy of language.