Full screen Presentation (Waswhere am I on the screen? )

[Martin McCormick]

Before I started using speakup right around
Newyear's Day, I was using a screen reader I wrote in assembler,
starting in the very late eighties. I seem to remember that some
forms of ansi.sys in DOS would produce multiple prints of
whatever was being sent to the screen. Do any of you remember
hooking interrupt 0x10 better known as the video BIOS interrupt?
I think the multiple prints consisted of one valid character of
the desired color plus another just before or just after that
had the same foreground and background attributes making it
invisible on the screen for sighted users, but you could sure
hear it if you were ignoring attributes and just catching the
ASCII value in the lower 8 bits. What we are dealing with now is
more likely the same problem. I used 3ansi.sys to get sensable
output in general DOS and MSKermit as the VT100 emulator which
normally gave clear output. I always think it is best to get
readable output as it comes in whenever possible and MSKermit
did cause the FreeBSD installer and similar full-screen programs
to behave fairly well as long as the output from the program
came in sequentially.

	What I hear now is a slow and dragged out presentation
as a new screen comes in and a nice snappy normal presentation 
upon pressing the keypad Plus to review the screen. Speakup is
simply trying to read what it is receiving which I believe is a
lot of double-printing as the terminal emulation paints a new
screen. I guess it comes down to figuring out whether existing
tools can be configured to produce clear speech as new screens
come in or if I need to get busy on some sort of filter. I think
it was more dumb luck than anything else, but MSKermit's VT100
emulator did a great job of handling the installer program's
output.

	I've got about 8 systems to do this installation on so
everything that makes it smoother is greatly appreciated.

	So far, the change from my old system to speakup has
been fantastic. The problem with the full-screen installer and
VT100 emulation is the only thing that, so far, used to work
better and is pretty rough at this time.

	I don't think the FreeBSD sysinstall program is doing
anything that out of the ordinary but it probably uses a lot of
curses-based library routines for control. Trying to  decipher
the sound and fury of the screen output has prompted a few
curses of my own. Hmm. Is this still the same screen again or
did I go to the next screen? I think it said something about
rebooting. Is this what Martian sounds like?

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group