Where to start.

[Janina Sajka]

Hi, Anna:

Good to see you back here on the Speakup list. Also, good to see
you're posting using Pine. I guess you've got some things
working! <grin> That's good.

Now, what next?

I think the magic might be hiding behind a door marked "focus on
something." Can we pick something specific to focus on? What
would that be? Here are some thoughts:

Writing and editing text. You're already doing this since you're
sending mail from Pine. By default, pine uses a text editor
called pico. So, if you just type pico at your shell prompt,
you'll find you're in the same composer. You can create text
files and then save them with pico's commands. 

Ifyou do 'man pico' I think you'll find this man pageis not at
all intimidating. And, anything you create in pico you can later
read with more advanced editors like emacs and vim. So, there's
every reason to get 100% comfortable with pico.

Need a step up from pico because you want search and replace?
Nano would be a great next step. We can talk about that if you
like.

How about web browsing? Are you comfortable with lynx yet? Does
your lynx show web pages in a blind friendly way, or is the
cursor parked at the lower right of the screen? Press the small
key in the middle of the bottom row of keys on the numeric keypad
to find out. If it says something like "line 25 position 80" we
have to make some configuration changes.

It's worth making these changes not just for web pages, though.
Lynx is a great way to look at files in your home directory. When
you do:

	lynx .

you get all the files in your home directory. You can arrow up
and down through them, and you can quickly check what's in those
files, and come back to the list with the right arrow and left
arrow keys respectively. If it's a file you want to throw away,
just press 'r' and, boom, it's gone.

But, does your lynx show a lot of permissions, size, date and
time stuff before reading the filename? That's the default, and
it's not at all blind friendly. We can fix that, if you like.
Just give the word, and I'll dredge up the syntax, or just send
you a default configuration file that's more blind friendly.

You mentioned the Red Hat documentation CD ROM. Yes, you need to
first extract the files there onto your hard disk. That involves
using a command called tar. It's easiest just to tell you how to
do that. Remember this tip, because you'll need it over and over
and over and over and over and over ...

tar xzpf [file.name]

If the file ends in .tar.gz or .tgz, and

tar -xjpf

if it ends in .tar.bz2 or .tbz

Of course the [file.name] part above is a tad tricky too. You
must first mount the cd rom, probably:

mount /mnt/cdrom

and then you must path your command to that file
system--something like:

tar xzpf /mnt/cdrom/Getting_Started [tab]

Now, notice where I put [tab]. If you press the tab key after
typing part of a command name or file name or file path, linux
will fill out the rest for you. If you get a beep instead, either
you need to type more to choose between a couple of options
(files that start with the same letters, for example), or you did
something incorrectly and might as well bail out with Ctrl-C and
start over.

Now, you'll need lynx to read the files in the directory the
above tar command creates, so we'd best get your lynx configured
to be very blind friendly before we go at this task.


-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

Chair, Accessibility SIG
Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF)
http://www.openebook.org