Distro for visually handicapped user?????

[nordinaryspider]

I am interested in attempting to put together an inexpensive PC for a friend with a severe visual handicap. He is an avid reader whose life would be immensely enriched by something comparable to the M$ eBook Reader text-to-speech engine.

XP is not an option due to financial limitations. Other than being able to enjoy books again, his needs are fairly basic: email, web surfing, printing out paper letters to his daughter, etc.

The hardware, which we haven't purchased yet, will also be fairly simple, probably a PII or faster PI.

Can anybody here recommend a good distro for him?

[Icarus]

I can't think of any distro off my head that would do that, but I think Fedora, SUSE and Mandriva (Mandrake) have 'accessability options'. I'd look around http://distrowatch.com to see of there are any specificly made for that purpose.

There's been a few posts lately about voice-to-speech programs on the forums, try searching for those as they had very good links.

[irlandes]

As a rule of thumb, current up-to-date distros will need pretty much the same computer as XP. And, for the task you propose to do, I suspect you will need a current distro as minimum.

Much older distros, such as Mandrake 8.x will run things like web surfing and email and word processing very well.

You have not said if he is totally without sight. There are accessibility utilities on many distros, even older versions, things called names like ZOOM, I think, which will let you expand screen a lot if that will help.


if you dig, you might find a voice program that will run on P1 or PII, but it will take some digging and some luck.

It sounds as if you want to do it totally free, and it may be possible, there are folks today who are tossing P-3's, but you need to know one.

Do not try Mandrake CE, the so-called free download version, it is busted. If you dig, you can get the 4 CD's of Official somewhere in .ru and it will handle most things. You have to be able to compile if you want to add major new software.

This is one person's opinion, but note that I have not personally set up what you seek to set up, so I am not an expert on this.

[irlandes]

I googled:

"text to speech" linux


and got a bunch of hits. The most promising seems to be Festival, a free speech synthesizer at:

http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/fe.../download.html

The current version is beta (that is, not totally tested) 1.95 but older versions are also available. 1.95 looks to be less than 700 MB, which means it will fit on a CD.

Also, try

"text to speech" linux festival

for other information and etcetera on Festival.

No promises, but the first hit for Festival was in 2000, which means it is certainly available for older distros, such as Mandrake 8.x or whatever. I note that in notes, it said it had been tested on Redhat 6.0 which is almost antediluvian today, and that will certainly work on early machines, IF you can find CD's for something that old.AND, if you can hit the sound cards on that old machine.

It would help if you can find a local linux guru to help you set it up. Unless you are in a small town in rural Montana, there will be people around you with some linux knowledge.

I do not think from the description that it will be hard to set up, though my warning on older computers still applies. Since Linux is free, they did not always have drivers for all video cards or sound cards.

However, some distros will work slowly on older machines, IF you can get in a larger HD and a bunch of Ram, not possible on many older machines. I am talking like 256MB, and some earlier machines are limited to 128MB.

If you are going to be learning Linux, first learn to use google as it will save you a lot of time for basic problems.

If I had Internet in Mexico where I am going Monday for two months, I'd download that sucker and see if I can help you. Well, can't be in more than one place at a time.

[nordinaryspider]

Thanks BUNCHES!!!!!! Amazingly prompt replies, if I might add.

It just so happens that Festival is available as an extension for Damn Small Linux, which was what I was originally considering when we thought that my friend would be able to have surgery to improve his vision. This should keep me busy brainstorming for awhile.

He says that from about three feet away, I look like a blurry blob. You guessed correctly that I want to try to do this for as close to free as possible and that it is sort of a case of the blind (Linux Newbie) leading the (literally) blind.

He does have a sympathetic roommate/attendant to help out within reason, but nobody likes to be dependant on others.

[AdamZ]

There's a version of Ubuntu being developed specifically for accessibility. I think it does exactly what you want. It's still under development at the moment, and it only has a live cd component, but it may be worthwhile to keep an eye on it in the future.

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/Acce...veCDDerivative
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/Accessibility

You can download the latest iso from here:
http://www.themuso.com/ubuntu/accessibility/