My View on Linux Notetakers

[Shaikh, Saqib]

Hi

Here are a summary of my views on notetakers running under Linux.  I
think all the information is correct - but please correct me if I'm
wrong.  I'd like to hear your views.

1.  My personal belief is that it is better to have a suite of talking
applications rather than a screen reader.  This is because I still think
that for a specialised device like a notetaker you will get better
speech/braille feedback with self-voicing/brailling apps.

2.  There should, of course, be a screen reader available for using the
bash shell, and command-line utilities.  A package manager could be used
to install extra packages which could be used with the screen reader.

3.  There are three main players in the notetaker market: the
Braillenote, the Pacmate, and the Elba.  I think all run on Strong Arm
processors, with industry standard flash memory and various card
readers.

4.  In particular, I think the hardware inside the Pacmate is strongly
based on the hardware inside a Compaq Ipaq.  This is based on a
presentation given at Sight Village 2002 in the UK.

5.  The Elba runs Debian for the Arm processor.  There are two Linux
distributions for the Ipaq - one is again based on Debian (see
www.handhelds.org).  Thus, I think that we could start with Debian for
Arm as a starting point.  Furthermore, it should be possible to have a
generic distribution that could be put onto any of the three notetakers
mentioned.  Modifications could be made for the particular device.

6.  The rest of the system should be made up of standard Linux programs,
which have been speech enabled.  Of course, the Bash shell is not
speech-enabled as it is used with a screen reader.  This is the approach
used by Elba - they use a talking version of Pine for their email
client, a talking version of Pico as their text editor, a speech
interface to Lynx which allows one to cursor up/down for their web
browser, etc.  They use the CatDoc tool to convert word documents into
text documents to load into Pico.  I am not sure what they use for their
MP3 playback but it is likely to be MPG123 or similar, again with a
user-friendly, speech interface.  They also use a proprietary screen
reader and braille translator.  This information was gained by talking
to a developer at Sight Village 2002.

7.  Each of the three devices use (maybe optionally) a braille display,
and also a software speech synthesiser - Eloquence, Keynote and Elon (I
am not sure of the spelling of the last).  We could therefore use any
Linux speech synthesiser such as Flite, though I personally would prefer
the multi-lingual DECTalk.  An open-source braille translator such as
NFBTrans could be used as a stand-alone braille translator, and also an
on-the-fly grade 2 translator when using a braille display.

My exams will finish in mid June and I think I would be able to do some
of the development on this package, provided I had the hardware.

Once again, these are only my oppinions - please email
suggestions/comments.

Saqib Shaikh
Email me at saqibshaikh.com
Web site http://www.saqibshaikh.com/