interesting experiment.

[Janina Sajka]

OK, let's take this one question at a time ...

On Sun, 19 May 2002, Octavian Rasnita wrote:

> Are there any games accessible for the blind under Linux, like under
> Windows?
> Please tell me some web addresses.

I was with you until you said "like Windows." I have no idea
about Windows. I know nothing about it.

But, if you want games, you can find them. Maybe they're better,
maybe not. But they're out there. Emacs comes with games, and
some are speech enabled by emacspeak. The only game I really know
much about is gnu chess which can be obtained from
http://www.gnu.org.

I'm generally too interested in things to play games on my
computer. Last thing I'm likely to do, so I'm out of knowledge
here.

> Are there any good sound editing programs for Linux, like Sound Forge, Cool
> Edit, Gold Wave, etc, and programs for creating MIDI music, like Cake Walk?


There's ecasound and sox. Very accessible. And there's
gramophone. I recently came across a java midi patch editor, but
I haven't had the time to get it working yet to find out about
its accessibility. Admitedly, these are less functional than the
Windows apps you mention for many tasks. Is this what you do? Or
are these academic questions?

> Is there a text editor, that has macro features, Regular expressions, the
> ability to save in Windows/Mac/Unix format, etc?

What is Mac format? I've never heard of that. And what is Windows
format?
And, why would you care?

Is there powerful text editing, formatting, scripting? Of course
there is. Far more powerful than in Windows or Mac. There are
probably too many to mention, actually. Linux/Unix has the
proprietary world beat hands down on this one.

Those format questions are themselves silly. You don't need them.
You certainly don't need them to communicate with anyone, or to
print out lovely reports, or design lovely e-content for on line
publishing, etc.

In fact, you do better to forget them and use the superior tools
available on Linux.

> 
> ... Just a few things that camed to mind.
> 
> A lot of things are accessible, but ... harder to learn, harder to configure
> and harder to use, if I am not so bright to remember 1000 command line
> parameters.

Give me a break. Grow up. How do you remember 1,000 dialog boxes.
How do you remember where to tell windows to show extensions to
files, for example. Or how about finding your ethernet card's mac
address. Do you remember that? I could go on. This is another
bogus argument.

But, if you think the gui is actually superior, you're going to
lose this excuse soon enough. GNOME is coming. What sad song are
you going to sing then?

> 
> Thank you for the links.
> Teddy,
> orasnita at home.ro
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Janina Sajka" <janina at afb.net>
> To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
> Sent: Saturday, May 18, 2002 9:59 PM
> Subject: Re: interesting experiment.
> 
> 
> On Sat, 18 May 2002, Darrell Shandrow wrote:
> > I just wish Linux were
> > a more viable general purpose workstation; I use Windows for that purpose.
> >
> Hi, Darrell:
> 
> Just wondering what you think is missing from Linux' desktop
> applications.
> 
> In case this sounds loaded, it might be. The underlying question
> might be: Is it your knowledge deficit, or is it Linux itself?
> For my own experience in this matter, I've found it's my
> knowledge deficit almost without exception.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
	
				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