State of accessibility on BSD systems

[Tony Baechler]

Alex Snow wrote:
> I was able to install netbsd without sited assistence a while back, 
> and I believe there is a way to do this with freebsd.  All I did was 
> use a serial console, with Minicom under linux.
>   


Yes, I forgot to mention use of a serial console.  I don't have one and 
thus have no experience with using it.  I read here that it can be done 
that way but again I haven't tried because I don't have one.  How much 
does it cost and how does it work?  Do you just plug it into a serial 
port and get speech?  They seem to be popular and one might be useful to 
have if it isn't expensive.

Getting back to BSD installation, I can't comment on anything but 
FreeBSD but it uses a text installer so perhaps it would be possible to 
install via an emulator such as Bochs with a curses interface.  NetBSD 
claims to run on anything including the Vax so I'm sure it has a text 
installer that could run in an emulator.  If I try BSD again, I think I 
would go with NetBSD just because it seems to be more historical 
regarding older BSD software and does run on platforms which I've 
certainly never heard of, far more than Linux.  Either way, there is no 
chance in the near future that Speakup will run on BSD because Speakup 
is a set of Linux kernel modules.