Re: LYNX-DEV Lynx for a blind user

[Lloyd G. Rasmussen]

On Sat, 20 Sep 1997 15:24:07 +0100 (BST), 
David Woolley   <address@hidden> wrote:

>> 
>What I said was that it would either work straight away or be very difficult.
>
>A screen reader is almost certainly going to be a TSR.  If I were creating
>a DOS extender, I would give serious consideration to doing screen output
>directly, rather than switching back to real or virtual 86 mode to call the 
>BIOS, and I wouldn't necessarilly give control back to real mode to allow
>a TSR to directly read the screen.  If that is the case, the screen reader
>would have to be customised for the DOS extender.  As the main use of DOS
>extenders these days is highly graphic games, I wouldn't expect there
>to much of a market for 32 bit mode screen readers, possibly having to
>be ported for each extender.
>

I have been using Bobcat and Lynx/386 since they came out in January 
and February with a screen reading program called Vocal-Eyes.  There 
were no issues regarding protected versus real mode to get it 
running.  The main things you have to do are determining whether or 
not to use show_cursor, and setting up a couple of "hyperactive 
windows" (Vocal-Eyes terminology for screen areas that are checked 
periodically for changes) so you hear some of the status messages.  I 
believe several other screen readers have also been used successfully 
with these programs.  Many blind people who used Lynx over a shell 
account are accustomed to all of the text coming through the BIOS.   
This makes it easy to automatically speak everything as it comes in, 
and is a function available in most DOS communication programs.  The 
libraries in Lynx/386 and Bobcat do direct screen writes, so nothing 
is automatically sent to your speech synthesizer.  That's why we have 
to have hyperactive windows, hot-zones, etc.  They are needed for all 
sorts of DOS programs that do direct screen writes.

If I could figure out how to make mail and ftp work from Lynx/386 in 
my environment, I would say it was the greatest thing since sliced 
bread.  As it is, it's a very fast way to surf the web, etc.

Hope this answers a few of your questions, or generates a few more.

-- Lloyd Rasmussen
Senior Staff Engineer, Engineering Section
National Library Service for the  Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress          202-707-0535
(work)       address@hidden    www.loc.gov/nls/
(home) address@hidden

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