Vision impaired software on FreeBSD?

Julian H. Stacey jhs at flat.berklix.net
Thu Jan 25 12:57:15 UTC 2007


"Mr. Jim Vaglia" wrote:
> What assistive technology if any will run on FreeBSD? Is this
> what Mac and Voice Over is based on? Many blind people are mostlikely
> not interested in paying high cost of Windows Vista. Thanks for
> spreading the word among the public if all people with physical
> disabilities and impairments are able to use FreeBSD? Totally, blind
> from birth, totally in the *dark* on this OS. LOL

One problem: (last I knew), FreeBSD only has a graphical installer,
not Ascii text mode. So you might need somoene else to install it
for you.  

(That's of course doing a standard install off the cdrom or floppy
& net; if you happen to be a Unix expert there are ways of installing
using command line only, eg
   installing a spare disk on a PC, installing software, moving
   disk to new PC: all of that could be done in single line mode
   commands, possibly with one of those Ascii to braille
   40 char.  adapters a friend told me of 2 decades back, so might
   be possible but tricky.

Last I heard NetBSD still offers a line mode installer http://www.netbsd.org
NetBSD has less ported packages than FreeBSD but otherwise is
similar.  (well, more similar than eg Linux or Microsoft :-)

Apart from what Salvatore Albanese just mentioned, (hope you got it, not cc'd)

... It's also possible freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org might have
heard of other hardware.  Then again, as NetBSD is more hardware
oriented, those people may have heard of more controllable devices.

PS for anyone wondering, No, I'm no troll for NetBSD, nearly all
my many machines are FreeBSD, but NetBSD does have some advantages
in some places.

-- 
Julian Stacey.  BSD Unix C Net Consultancy, Munich/Muenchen  http://berklix.com
Mail Ascii, not HTML.		Ihr Rauch = mein allergischer Kopfschmerz.
			http://berklix.org/free-software


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