Blind Man's OS for Pandora


Joined
May 25, 2004
Messages
100
Good Morning, long time lurker, first time poster(I was one of the classic pre-orderers burned by the old board manufacturer who recently escaped that limbo by upgrading to a 1Ghz unit).


Anywasys, I am currently recovering from a detached retina and completely reliant on a screen reader to use my desktop computer, and would like some assistence in getting a decent blind man's set-up on my pandora. I am no stranger to Linux, having used it as my primary OS since 2005, but I am kind of new to accessibility on linux and using it on ARM devices. I am currently running Adriane Knoppix on my desktop, but its procompiled disk images fare for x86, and I would not know where to start for rebuilding it for ARM, though I assume such is within the realm of possibility. As for what I plan to use the pandora for, I am interested in using it as a portable analog for my desktop machine with the following applications in mind:


-Web browsing and listening to YouTube Videos.


-writing console applications and text-based games for both PC and Pandora(C++ is my language of choice, anno and g++ being my editor and compiler of choice).


-Using it as a portable media player, mostly for flac and .avi files.


Of course, given my vision problems, a screen reader is nessecary for me to make any use of any of it, and I would like to stay as far from a full desktop as possible.


Any help in getting me set-up would be most appreciated.
 
I would suggest an Android device with a keyboard. There is a lot of accessability software for Android. I do see your problem though, as most potrable devices require you to either touch the screen or move with an anolog stick on an OS that only operates with relative movements (think PSP). I also know that Windows has a lot of accessability software, so you could get an OQO or something like that (UMPC) that would be a similar formfactor to the Pandora but with more software designed for your needs
 
eSpeak works fine on the Pandora (I use it in my game "Microbes"), I'm not familiar with screen reader software but I would guess text-to-speech is a rather crucial ingredient.
 
Do you know emacspeak (espeak ?) ?


It's included in x86 releases of Slackware, but not Slackware ARM.


Maybe i can give it a try.
 
Back
Top