Talking bios

[Janina Sajka]

As a matter of principle, I would agree with you. But, there's a problem
here. Ultimately, the computer boots from a very simple command/call.
That bootstraps the next call, which then bootstraps a bit more. In the
initial instance, these are very simple calls that don't support any
kind of fancy stuff like painting pretty pictures on screen, let alone a
self-voicing application.

Of course, some of the discussion here has been about bios applications
that are huge and could support fancy features like pretty pictures of
many splash screens, and perhaps even some self-voicing.

But, I can promise you that people, in general, aren't going to want
their computers chatting up the bios as the system boots. So, you're
driven back to some mechanism to make that start. What would that be?
And, how do you know when to engage that mechanism:? Please recognize
that there was a minor war over putting a simple Ctrl-G into the GDM
application to let us know that we could now login to the now speech
enabled graphical desktop. We have one beep, sometimes, when bios leaves
and system OS booting starts. I would expect major complaints over yet
another beep.

Besides, how are you going to debug a badly behaving bios if you expect
it to be self-voicing? And if it isn't self-voicing, how does it provide
access except that it talks to some device that you hook up, which
brings you full circle to where I reported on connecting a BNS to take
advantage of serial terminal capacities in the DEC computer I have.

I don't see how we get around the need to connect a smarter device to a,
as yet very dumb system in order to fully satisfy our need to configure
without sighted assistance.


Lorenzo Prince writes:
> From: Lorenzo Prince <lorenzo at prince.homelinux.org>
> 
> I guess the issue some people have is that perfect accessibility can only be achieved by making the bios talk for itself 
> instead of having to connect a very expensive device to it that can cost as much as the computer just to get it to talk.  
> I generally share that opinion, but I will also add that anything at all is better than nothing.
> 
> PRINCE
> 
> The famous speaker who no one had heard of said:
> > How so?  She can connect a device to her computer, and just like that the
> > BIOS is accessible.  How is that the oposit of accessible?  That is the
> > picture of accessible, as far as I can tell.