Help the Floundering Newbie!

[Holmes, Steve]

I think you may have answered some of your own questions already.  For
remote access, I use Telnet over a network.  I've done this from other linux
machines running speakup and from windows telnet clients.  Both methods
worked well for me.  

My total programming experienced involved using an optacon and later moving
to speech when it became available.  Speech wins out over the optacon hands
down.  Optacon was nice for looking at layout and format.  I could never
afford braille devices so can't comment on their effectiveness.  I have all
punctions turned on in my speech environment so I don't miss the commas and
semicolons and stuff.  When I use Window-Eyes in environments like Visual
Basic, I can use a "mixed case" mode which will properly pronounce complex
variable names such as SingleMouseClick as "single mouse click" - separate
words.  Little enhancements like this make programming in a speech
environment pretty tolerable (to me at least).

One linux compatible database server (postgresql from www.postgres.org) can
be coupled into perl scripts and web based applications.  In fact, this
server can be remote accessed via TCP/IP also.  The default client that
comes with it is a commandline based thing that works well in a text based
environment.  In fact, they have a windows client that can be used to
administer it as well.  I haven't had a chance to check this client out to
see how accessible it is though.

These ideas don't have much to do with speakup specifically but I hope they
are of some help.

-----Original Message-----
From: rjc [mailto:rjc at MIT.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 7:00 AM
To: speakup at braille.uwo.ca
Subject: Help the Floundering Newbie!


OK, I'm still very confused about all of this. Perhaps if I describe my
ultimate goals and what I see as my choices for accessing the linux
environment, all you smart folks out there might have a better shot at
helping me out -- so here goes!

I want to be able to configure and administer a typical database
driven website. Most likely, we'll use Apache, MySQL, and some combination
of Perl and PHP. I've done my share of static html coding and have some
knowledge of Perl and PHP.
I have a background in unix, having done some systems admin and basic
system's level C programming in the 80s on BSD. However, at that time I had
access to a refreshable braille display and had a direct serial connection
to the unix box. The display was a big win, since I could easily deal with
unix speak. Try reading a bash script with synthetic speech, however, and
you'll quickly see one of the reasons I'm so frustrated today... How do you
guys program with speech? Well, ok, writing code is one thing, but reading
other people's code is hard even if your sighted and have been doing it all
your life. How does a blind guy do it effectively with speech?

To accomplish my goal, I need to find a comfortable way of working in linux.
The choices that I have are: remote login from PC with Jaws, local login and
run emacspeak with dectalk on the serial port, local login to a kernel with
SpeakUp compiled into it and dectalk on the serial port.
Remote login might be the only way to go in general, since if I'm going to
be charged with administering this server , the only connection I'll have is
via the network, since the server will not
be in the same building as our office. However, sighted people would use
Exceed or something to run an X server on windows or mac and ssh to linux.
However, all I've got access to is a vt100 emulator and the shell. Working
this way is cumbersome. I don't even have a file browser. Hmm, but how about
Samba (I think that's what its called) which allows mounting of file systems
between windows and linux? This may be my only realistic approach.
Emacspeak and SpeakUp won't help me if I don't have access to the physical
hardware. Any other suggestions? What is emacs server?

Thanx in advance for any words of wisdom!

                    Rich



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