Keeping in touch with friends and family just got even easier with the Emerson Big Button Photo Phone.
Finally a coffee maker that listens! Get your Primula 10 cup Speak n’ Brew Coffee Maker today!
Everyone needs a Cash Cow Talking Bank.

Sometimes you may want to spell check a word without having to open a browser or a word processor. In a situation the command line can once again come to the rescue. To get the spell checker, in a terminal, type:
sudo apt-get install hunspell hunspell-en-us
After the installation has completed you can do:
hunspell
and type in each word you want checked. If the word is spelled correctly it will display *. If the word is not correct it will offer suggestions. Another way to check a word is to type:
echo “word” | hunspell
To make things even easier, you can create a file named spellcheck in ~/bin/ and add the following lines:
#!/bin/bash
echo “$@” | hunspell
exit 0
Save the file and change its permissions by typing:
chmod 700 ~/bin/spellcheck
Now you can check words by typing:
spellcheck word to check
the above line should yield 3 * symbols. So, the next time you need to check a single word to paste in to an application, open a terminal and get the correct spelling in a few seconds.

Related Information

• March 25, 2010 -- TTYtter, an Awesome Console Based Twitter Client
• January 17, 2010 -- Commanding the Command Line (Part 2)
• January 13, 2010 -- Commanding the Command Line (Part 1)

Keep the important stuff well organized with the RNIB PenFriend Voice Labeling System.
Let’s play cards. Get your 1-year membership today.
This talking calculator is also an alarm clock. More importantly, it has optional headphones. Great for class.

Last month for my birthday I was given a professionally Rockboxed MP3 player from Accessible Electronics. At less than a hundred dollars each, these players are a great deal. It took my player two days to arrive. Included in the package was the player, ear buds, and the usb cable. The player is already set up to talk when it arrives. I turned it on and it began speaking after a short loading time of about a second. Unfortunately, I noticed that my battery was reaching only about 89 percent at maximum charge and it was draining in a matter of about 4 or 5 hours. I contacted Accessible Electronics about this problem and was told to return the player. I followed the guide lines for returns on their site and sent the player on its way. I received an email when the player arrived and another when the replacement was on its way back to me. In total the whole transaction took about a week. It would have been even faster but there was a mail holiday right in the middle. The constant contact and updates on my player’s status was a nice touch. I highly recommend these players to anyone, the customer service is outstanding.

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.7

Related Information

• No Related Post

Can you sink their Battleship? Find out with this Braille version of the classic game.
Now here’s a talking watch worth having. Alarms stopwatch, and more.
Kapsys is an innovative mobile navigation system principally based on satellite geo-location (GPS) and vocal interaction (speech synthesis and voice recognition).

TTYtter is a great command line Twitter client. To get it up and running to its optimal capabilities can take a little work, especially if you would like to get pop up notifications on your desktop with libnotify. So, here is a guide that will show you how to get it all working. Even if you are normally a GUI only sort of person I would still like to suggest you give it a try. TTYtter is my favorite Twitter client. These instructions work on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic and later and should work on other systems with minimal modification.
To install TTYtter with readline support and get the curl package open terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install libterm-readline-perl-perl curl
Now, to download the file:
sudo wget --output-document /usr/bin/ttytter http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/dist1/1.1.03.txt
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/ttytter
If you do not have system wide access save it to ~/bin/ttytter instead of /usr/bin/ttytter and use chmod 700 instead of 755. It may be necessary to create the ~/bin directory.
Note that the version of TTYtter may have changed. If you have any trouble with the instructions, visit http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/dl.html and check the version number. If it is different replace the number in the instructions with the new one.
TTYtter is now installed but missing some of its coolness. If you were to launch it by typing:
ttytter
You would have to also include some arguments to get it going like your username and password. It’s much better to save this information in a ~/.ttytterrc file. So, here is the ultimate .ttytter file. The slowpost setting is set to 7 seconds to give screen readers time to read the tweet before it is posted. If you don’t need/use a screen reader you can lower the number or remove the line altogether. If you do not plan to use the notifications with libnotify you can leave out the notification lines too. Copy and paste the following in to a file called .ttytterrc
#TTYtter settings
mentions=1
avatar=eog %U
urlopen=firefox %U
pause=auto
ansi=1
vcheck=1
hold=15
newline=1
slowpost=7
readline=1
wrap=1
notifytype=libnotify
notifies=dm,me,reply,search,default
#end TTYtter settings
To enable notifications takes a little more work. The notify-send package is available from the repository, but for some reason a patch that
adds required functionality has not been added in to the distributed version. So, instead of using the standard package, we have to roll our own. If you are not sure if you already have it installed, in terminal type:
sudo apt-get remove libnotify-bin
To build the libnotify-bin package and apply the patch type the following in terminal:
cd
apt-get source libnotify-bin
sudo apt-get install gtk-doc-tools
sudo apt-get build-dep libnotify
then visit http://trac.galago-project.org/attachment/ticket/147/notify-send-support_body_from_file.patch and at the bottom of the page where it says "Download in other formats" click on the "Original Format" link. After the file has finished downloading:
cd libnotify-0.4.5/
The number in the directory name above may change as new versions are released. If you type libnotify and press tab it should complete the name, then press enter to get in to the directory. Then, apply the patch. My files save in ~/Downloads if your files download to another location you will need to alter the path in the next command to point to the downloaded file:
patch -p0 < ../Downloads/notify-send-support_body_from_file.patch
./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install
I had to restart before notifications worked as expected. Now TTYtter is installed and should work with its ultimate coolness factors enabled. Enjoy, but be warned, TTYtter will be your new favorite Twitter client after five minutes of use. For instructions check out http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/.

Related Information

• August 4, 2010 -- Command Line Spell Checker
• January 17, 2010 -- Commanding the Command Line (Part 2)
• January 13, 2010 -- Commanding the Command Line (Part 1)

Now here’s a talking watch worth having. Alarms stopwatch, and more.
This accessible chess and checker board set will bring countless hours of fun for the whole family.
Can you sink their Battleship? Find out with this Braille version of the classic game.

Oracle has, in their infinite, "wisdom" laid off the leader of the Gnome accessibility project leader, not to mention the lead developer of Orca. This is a horrific blow to the blind community, especially those who use the Orca screen reader. This move by Oracle was unexpected because in the past they have at least pretended to care about accessibility. I must say that Sun Micro Systems was a great company, I know it will take a lot for Oracle to live up to our expectations, but for them to just abandon Orca like that is ill tidings for the future. What will happen to the accessibility of other products now owned by Oracle? Will Open Office no longer be accessible to the blind? Once the avalanche begins, where will it end? If you, dear reader, care about accessibility I urge you to please take what action you can. Leave a comment here, contact companies, let everyone know that accessibility is important and needs to be taken seriously. Even if you do not use Orca or Linux it still is important to you. Perhaps other companies are watching to see how the blind community responds to this situation. Maybe if this battle is lost it could be the beginning of losing the war. Let your voice be heard. Maybe we can reach them with out resulting to Billboards.
For More information:

• An Open Letter to Oracle on the Topic Of Accessibility
• orca screen reader and Oracle takeover of CSun

Related Information

• June 11, 2009 -- The Sendspace Wizard with Orca
• February 10, 2009 -- Website Navigation With Orca
• February 5, 2009 -- Keyboard Shortcuts

This handy Bausch & Lomb Folding Pocket Magnifier makes it easy to read on the go.
Everyone needs a Cash Cow Talking Bank.
Kapsys is an innovative mobile navigation system principally based on satellite geo-location (GPS) and vocal interaction (speech synthesis and voice recognition).

This is part two of a discussion of accomplishing your hearts desire with out the use of a GUI. It’s back to the console for us as we dive in to such fun things as web browsing, instant messaging, and text editing.

Instant Messaging with Finch

Pidgin and Finch are closely connected. finch is the command line version of Pidgin. So, the way I handle setting up accounts is with Pidgin. Then, in the console launch by typing finch. The first time you run it you will be presented with the accounts list. Use highlight tracking in Speakup because it works better with Finch. Press space on each account you want activated. Move through them with the up and down arrow keys. When you activate an account it will say X to show that it is checked. When you have activated all of your accounts, press alt+a to be taken in to a menu with items like buddy list, plugins, sounds, etc. Select the sound option and tab until you find the first sound option, probably "Someone says your name in chat". Press space to check each item for which you would like to have sound. Use the up and down arrows to navigate the list. After selecting the sounds you want, press alt+a to get back to the menu. I must say that I have never successfully gotten sounds to work in Finch but I know people who have, so it’s just my problem apparently. Select Plugins and check the plugins you would like to activate. Most of the plugins that work in Pidgin also work in Finch. This is a good time to mention my favorite sets of plugins. Some of these only work with Pidgin, but I will include them anyway. Pidgin-musictracker displays your currently playing track in Pidgin. Pidgin-plugin-pack, lots and lots of useful plugins. Pidgin-mbpurple, adds Twitter and a couple of other things to Pidgin. To get them all:
sudo apt-get install pidgin-plugin-pack pidgin-musictracker pidgin-mbpurple
When you have the plugins configured the way you want them, press alt+a to get back to the menu. If you are not on your list of groups that contain your contacts, press tab until you get to it. Only buddies who are on-line will show up. To expand a group press space and to close it press space again on the group title. If you press f10 you will get another menu with things like add buddy in it. If you would like to turn off time stamps, while chatting with someone press f10 and press enter on show time stamps. To exit Finch press alt+q.

Web Browsing with Elinks

To get elinks, in Ubuntu, type:
sudo apt-get install elinks
When you first install Elinks, it takes some configuring to get it working optimally with Speakup or any other console screen reader. To launch it type:
elinks
If it is the first time you will get a welcome message. Press enter to go to the next screen. Here it will ask for a URL. Press escape to get into its menus. In Speakup, it is a good idea to turn on highlight tracking if you haven’t already. Press right arrow to get to the Setup menu, then down to Options Manager and press space to activate it

Numbered Links

Move down to Document and press space to activate it then down to browsing and press space again. Go down to links and press space. Move down through the menu until you find Numbered Links and press tab until you get to Edit then press enter. For some reason these selections do not read exactly right. when I was on the Edit option, for example, it said "Info Edit". Press backspace to remove the 0 and type the number 1 in its place and press enter. Now links on pages will be numbered. To activate a numbered link type its number and press enter then enter again to activate it.

Turn Off Frames

Press down arrow until you get to Html Rendering and press space. Go down to Show Frames and tab to the Edit option and press enter. Change the 1 to 0 and press enter.

Remember to Save

When you have finished setting options, be sure to save. Tab until you get to the save option and press enter. In this case, Speakup read it as "Search Save". You will know you did it right if you get a message about the configuration being written successfully.

Tips and Tricks

You can launch elinks with an address so when it opens you will go directly to a web page instead of having to type in the address. for example:
elinks http://www.stormdragon.us/
or:
elinks stormdragon.us
To enter a new URL press g. If you would like to be able to copy the current URL, press shift G. You can use screen’s excellent copy feature to get the current address.

Email with Alpine

To get Alpine, in Ubuntu, type:
sudo apt-get install alpine
To launch Alpine type:
alpine
the first time it runs it will create a mail folder and show you a welcome message. Press enter to get to the main menu, then s for setup and c for configure. If you want to use Alpine with your gmail account, there is an excellent guide that shows you how. If you get imap errors when trying to retrieve your email, open the .pinerc file and search for the line that reads:
inbox-path={imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=YourEmailAddress@gmail.com}
Remove any extra characters after the right brace } and save the file. It should now work correctly. Alpine works very well with Speakup and the menus are clear and not difficult to follow.

Related Information

• January 13, 2010 -- Commanding the Command Line (Part 1)
• August 4, 2010 -- Command Line Spell Checker
• March 25, 2010 -- TTYtter, an Awesome Console Based Twitter Client
• December 7, 2009 -- Speakup Revisited
• March 13, 2009 -- Installing Speakup in Ubuntu

This handy Bausch & Lomb Folding Pocket Magnifier makes it easy to read on the go.
Keeping in touch with friends and family just got even easier with the Emerson Big Button Photo Phone.
Everyone needs a Cash Cow Talking Bank.

In the event that you decide to, or for some reason have to go completely command line for a while, you will likely be wondering how to do certain things. There are some things that have to be done on any computer to make the computer in question worth it’s plastic. So, here is part one of a discussion on doing these important tasks from the command line. Some of this may be covered elsewhere here but I am including it again for the sake of completeness. To get to the console from gnome, press control+alt+f1 through f6. You have six consoles to choose from, but when you wanna go back to gnome, it is control+alt+f7. If you want to use the console you will need a screen reader for it like Speakup. For information on installing Speakup in Ubuntu read "Speakup Revisited".
If you are completely new to the command line, you can use these two tutorials to get started with it quickly:
Into the Linux Command Line Interface (CLI) and Introduction to Command Line Interface (CLI) 2.

Multiple Terminals With Screen

I am pretty sure that Ubuntu comes with screen installed. I don’t ever remember installing it, but it could have sneaked in as a dependency for something else though I doubt it. If you don’t have screen, you need it. To launch it, type screen. You will have to press enter after it starts to get your prompt back. Screen makes it so you can have several terminals all at once. To create a new one, press control+a followed by c. You can have as many as you want, one for music, one for email, one for instant messaging, etc. To switch between terminals, press control+a followed by n for the next one or p for the previous one. To close a terminal that you no longer need, type exit. Another great feature that screen has is the ability to copy and paste. When you need to copy something, press control+a followed by either the escape key or [. Use the arrow keys to position the cursor on the first of the text you would like to copy and press space. Find the last part you want to copy and position the cursor on it with the arrow keys and press space again. Now, when you need to past the copied information press control+a followed by the ] key.

Twitter From The Command Line

The program twidge is an excellent command line Twitter client. A lot of distros include it in the repositories. In Ubuntu, for example, you can get it by typing in terminal:
sudo apt-get install twidge
If your distro doesn’t include it you can download it from http://software.complete.org/software/projects/show/twidge.
After installing Twidge, you need to configure it. To do this, type:
twidge setup
There are only two questions and they should be very easy to answer. After twidge is configured, you can get the latest tweets very easily. First though, you should run:
twidge lsrecent -su
This gets the last 20 tweets and also sets a place marker so you won’t see them or anything before them if you do not wish to do so. After running this command, you can then get all new tweets by typing:
twidge lsrecent -asu
To post an update type twidge update and press enter. Type your update and press enter again, just remember not to go over the 140 character limit. For more detailed instructions on Twidge and its uses, type:
man twidge

Weather Information

I wrote an article on weather a while ago. There is a great program called weather-util for the console. To find out how to install and configure it, please read "…And Weather For All".

Command Line Music Player

I have tried several terminal based music players. None of them worked well with Speakup. I was about to lose hope in ever finding a good one to use with a screen reader when I heard of cmus. In Ubuntu, get it by typing:
sudo apt-get install cmus
Launch it with the command:
cmus
and close by typing:
:quit
After the first time you start and close the music player open the ~/.cmus/autosave file. Find the line that reads:
set softvol=false
Change it to true and save the file. softvol allows you to change the music players volume without changing volume for the whole computer. There are a lot of other settings that can be changed in this file including repeat and shuffle. To add music to the library use :add and the directory where the music is stored. You can use :a as a short cut if you prefer. To add all of the songs in ~/Music and its sub directories, for example, you would type:
:a ~/Music
Use – to decrease the volume and = to turn it up. Previous track is z, play is x, pause is c, stop is v, and next track is b. Use the up and down arrows to move through the tracks in your library and enter to play the currently selected song.. For more info on cmus, type man cmus.

Sox, the Swiss Army Knife of Sound Processing Utilities

Sox is one of my favorite command line programs. It can play audio, record, convert from one file type to another, and add effects to audio. Unfortunately it is not packaged with all of its powerful abilities enabled by default. The best way to deal with this little problem is to download and install it yourself. The only thing it is lacking is the ability to write mp3 files. It can play them, but by default, in Ubuntu and I assume other distros, it can not write mp3 files. So, if you do not care about this functionality, just do the normal sudo apt-get install sox. If you want to be able to convert to mp3, you will need to download it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/ and install it. Before installing though, you will need to get some other libraries. In Ubuntu type:
sudo apt-get install libmp3lame0 libmp3lame-dev libsox-fmt-all
sudo apt-get build-dep sox
Next extract the sox files with the following command. The version may have changed after this writing, so be sure to use the current numbers in the file name:
tar xzvf sox-14.3.0.tar.gz
Change to the newly created directory with:
cd sox-14.3.0/
./configure –with-lame
make
sudo make install
For more information on the options that can be used when compiling sox read the included INSTALL file.
Sox can do so many different things that it would take a long time to write them all down here. Here are a few things to get you started though:
sox filename.wav filename.ogg
Convert filename from a wav to an ogg file. Don’t worry, it doesn’t delete the wav file. You can convert from any type to any other type of audio.
play filename.ogg
Plays a file it can have effects added and the volume can be adjusted as well.
rec filename.ogg
Creates a file and starts recording to it. for all of the incredible things sox can do, type man sox.

Related Information

• January 17, 2010 -- Commanding the Command Line (Part 2)
• August 4, 2010 -- Command Line Spell Checker
• March 25, 2010 -- TTYtter, an Awesome Console Based Twitter Client
• February 12, 2009 -- Yasr (Yet another screen reader) on Ubuntu Intrepid

Keep the important stuff well organized with the RNIB PenFriend Voice Labeling System.
Everyone needs a Cash Cow Talking Bank.
Kapsys is an innovative mobile navigation system principally based on satellite geo-location (GPS) and vocal interaction (speech synthesis and voice recognition).

Text to speech isn’t just for screen readers any more. I find myself writing small speaking applications for my friends and family to use on their computers more and more often. So, I put 2 an 2 together and got 22 and also the idea to share these applications with everyone. The first part is to decide how you would like to trigger the speech. Some of the people I wrote these programs for preferred to access them by right clicking their mouse and selecting the app from a scripts menu. This setup is quite easy, just save the script in the
~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/
directory. If you would like them in a menu by themselves, just create a sub folder for them.
mkdir text-to-speech
Other people like to create a keyboard shortcut to launch the script. If you are using Ubuntu Karmic, and I would assume any distro with the latest Gnome, just click on the system menu, preferences, keyboard shortcuts. Click on add, and enter the name of the script in the name field and type the command to launch it in the command field. Usually the command is nearly the same as the name just with a .sh or .py extension. I usually save the scripts in ~/bin so they will be in the execution path. Click apply and the new action is created. You will notice when you scroll down to the bottom of the list that your new action is listed but it says "Disabled". Click on the "Disabled" and press the key combination you would like to use.
Now, for a working example, let’s get the computer to tell us if we have any new tweets waiting. For this script you will need to have twidge and speech-dispatcher installed. First, let’s test for speech-dispatcher. In terminal type:
spd-say "Hello World"
If you hear the words you just told it to say, Hello World, then you are good to go. If you got something that ends with "command not found" then you need to install speech-dispatcher. In ubuntu type:
sudo apt-get install speech-dispatcher python-speechd
When that has finished you will have speech-dispatcher installed. Now it is time to configure it. So, earlier, if you got no speech with the spd-say command but you did get some message about the connection being refused, try the following:
speech-dispatcher
If you see that speech-dispatcher has started then try the spd-say command above. Still no speech, or have just finished installing speech-dispatcher? Type:
spd-conf
Here it is usually OK to just press enter for each question. There are a couple of exceptions though. When it asks for the port it may offer 6561 this needs to be changed to 6560. When it asks for sound driver, unless you have uninstalled pulseaudio, you need to type in pulse and press enter. To get US English, when it asks for the two letter language code enter en-us and press enter. If it doesn’t offer to start speech-dispatcher at startup, add speech-dispatcher to startup programs under system, preferences, startup programs. Click add and enter speech-dispatcher in both fields.
Whew! now that’s done with let’s move on to Twidge. Lots of distros have it packaged. In ubuntu in terminal type:
sudo apt-get install twidge
Then, to configure it, type:
twidge setup
Then, just so Twitter doesn’t get flooded with requests the first time you request all tweets, type:
twidge lsrecent -s
Of course to use Twidge, you will need a Twitter account. Also, this is an excellent opportunity to do a little advertising and shamelessly invite you to follow me on Twitter.
OK, now we have your computer talking and Twidge installed and a shiny new Twitter account, it is at long last time for the script. Open your favorite text editor and paste the following in to it down to and including the line that says end script.
#!/bin/bash
x=0
while [ $x -lt 1 ]; do
newTweets=`twidge lsrecent -u`
if [ ! -z "$newTweets" ] ; then
spd-say -w "You have new tweets waiting."
fi
sleep 300
done
#end script
Save the file. I called it newtweets.sh. This script runs in the background with out interaction, so save it in ~/bin. You may need to create the bin directory. You will need to give it permission to run. In terminal:
chmod 700 ~/bin/newtweets.sh
To get it to run automatically at start up, add it to start up programs. Remember the command includes the .sh extension:
newtweets.sh
Well, I got all of this written before remembering that that script runs in the background and I was supposed to be discussing scripts that launch with a key press or from the context menu. So, let’s add the second part to our Twitter reading scripts. If you want this to be a keyboard shortcut, save the following in ~/bin. If you would rather right click your mouse and start the script from the context menu, save it in the ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/ directory.
In your favorite text editor paste the following down to and including end script:
#!/bin/bash
x=`twidge lsrecent -asu`;for i in $x;do y+=” $i “;done;spd-say -w “$y”
#end script
Save the file as readtweets.sh. Open terminal and change the file’s permissions with one of the following commands depending on where you saved it:
chmod 700 ~/bin/readtweets.sh
chmod 700 ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/readtweets.sh
If you saved it in the nautilus-scripts directory, it is complete. You may need to logout and back in before it shows up in the context menu. If you saved it in the bin directory there is still a little bit left to do. Click on System, Preferences, Keyboard shortcuts. Click add. In the name field enter readtweets. in the command field enter newtweets.sh and click Apply. Scroll down to custom shortcuts. Beside the readtweets shortcut click on the word Disabled. Press the key combination you would like to use to have new tweets read to you. For example:
control+shift+t
That’s it! Now when your computer says you have new tweets waiting, just press control+shift+t to have them read to you. Or, right click and select readtweets.sh from the scripts menu. I hope you have found this useful. Have fun and enjoy.

Related Information

• March 16, 2009 -- Using Speech-dispatcher with Yasr

Keeping in touch with friends and family just got even easier with the Emerson Big Button Photo Phone.
Finally a coffee maker that listens! Get your Primula 10 cup Speak n’ Brew Coffee Maker today!
Stay informed of the current temperature with this talking digital in/out door thermometer.

In Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic, the way speakup is installed has changed. You can still build it from source if you want, but now it is included in the repository. Here are the instructions for installing it. In terminal type:
sudo apt-get install speakup-source espeakup
After the packages have finished installing type the following:
sudo m-a a-i speakup-source
You may also want to install the speakup-tools package. To get it type:
sudo apt-get install speakup-tools
The method used to get speakup to start automatically has not changed. Just type:
sudo gedit /etc/modules
Move down to the end of the file and on a blank line add the following:
speakup_soft start=1
From then on, when you start your computer speakup will be running. The espeakup program also starts so you will have speech. You may want to change the voice to your language. To do so, in terminal type:
sudo gedit /etc/default/espeakup
Add your chosen voice to the end of the line that reads VOICE= like so:
VOICE=en-us
Now, it will speak your language.
Finally, the way you adjust speakup’s settings has changed slightly. From speaking with users of other distributions than Ubuntu, I have learned this is the way most if not all the rest of them were doing it. Here is an example of turning off key echo:
sudo echo 0 > /sys/accessibility/speakup/key_echo
To turn it back on change the 0 to a 1. For a list of things that can be changed type:
ls /sys/accessibility/speakup/
You can add the command to /etc/init.d/rc.local to have it automatically happen at start-up. To save all of your speakup settings, if you have the speakup-tools package installed, type:
speakupconf save
when you have everything set the way you want it. To get it to load at startup add the line:
speakupconf load
to the end of your ~/.bashrc file.
As said in the beginning of this article, this applies to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic and possibly new versions of Ubuntu. If you are using an older version the following link will be more helpful:
http://stormdragon.us/?p=44

Related Information

• March 13, 2009 -- Installing Speakup in Ubuntu
• January 17, 2010 -- Commanding the Command Line (Part 2)

Keeping in touch with friends and family just got even easier with the Emerson Big Button Photo Phone.
Now here’s a talking watch worth having. Alarms stopwatch, and more.
This talking calculator is also an alarm clock. More importantly, it has optional headphones. Great for class.

So now that you have all these games installed and working in Wine you may be wishing for a way to use your game controller in those games that take input from the keyboard only. The program QJoypad can help in this matter. It is not included in the Ubuntu repository but you can grab the source code from http://qjoypad.sourceforge.net/. QJoypad requires QT4 and libxtst-dev which are both in the repository. You can install them from terminal by typing:
sudo apt-get install qdevelop libxtst-dev
There may be a smaller package that will install all of the required packages but qdevelop is the one I used. Follow the installation instructions included in the QJoypad source code in install.txt.
Now that everything has completed successfully it is time to configure your controller. QJoypad has a nifty configuration that makes assigning keyboard buttons to your game controller a snap. Orca, however, does not read QT4 applications. All is not lost though because you can create QJoypad layout files in your favourite text editor. QJoypad uses X key codes for the keyboard. You can get these codes by running xev in the terminal. Switch to the xev window with alt+tab, press the key for which you would like the code, then alt+tab back to terminal and use flat review to find the line that contains the key code. The line with the correct key code will be the second key code line up from the bottom. The first one up always contains the key code for alt because of the alt+tab combo used to change windows. Here is an example layout file with several commonly used keyboard buttons. In a real layout file you can not include the comment lines. Only the very first line in the file should begin with the # symbol.
# QJoyPad 4.0 Layout File
Joystick 1 {
Axis 1: +key 114, -key 113
Axis 2: +key 116, -key 111
Axis 3: +key 102, -key 100
Axis 4: +key 104, -key 98
Axis 5: +key 102, -key 100
Axis 6: +key 104, -key 98
#Left Shift
Button 1: key 50
#spacebar
Button 2: key 65
#Left Control Rapid Fire
Button 3: rapidfire, key 37
#left Alt
Button 4: key 64
#a
Button 5: key 38
#p
Button 6: key 33
#1
Button 7: key 10
#2
Button 8: key 11
#Tab
Button 9: key 23
#Enter
Button 10: key 36
#end Layout File
Place your layout files in the ~.qjoypad3/ directory. Give it a .lyt extension and you are ready to go. To load your layout file, press alt+f2 and when the run dialog opens type qjoypad FileName. For example, if your layout file were named firefox.lyt you would type:
qjoypad firefox
The QJoypad instructions say you can switch layouts on the fly, but this has always given me an error. So, before loading a new layout file open terminal and type killall qjoypad. QJoypad Is a great program that adds just a little more coolness factor to the Linux gaming experience.

Related Information

• No Related Post

Keeping in touch with friends and family just got even easier with the Emerson Big Button Photo Phone.
This accessible chess and checker board set will bring countless hours of fun for the whole family.
This talking calculator is also an alarm clock. More importantly, it has optional headphones. Great for class.

There are some audio games that will not work in Wine with out a little modification. This modification may require some assistance because Orca is unable to read Wine related information. Still, it may be possible to press a key combo in the correct order and get the desired result. The first thing to do is to install the winetricks package. Using winetricks can help to get some great things installed. It does, according to the winetricks documentation, have a few adverse side effects. Basically you will not be able to get support from winehq if something doesn’t work. In recent versions of Ubuntu winetricks is included with Wine. So, try typing:
winetricks
in terminal. If it doesn’t work you will need to install it manually. To install winetricks open terminal and type:
wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
It should finish downloading very quickly. When the download is complete make sure the winetricks script has permission to run. To do this type:
chmod 700 winetricks
You can then run the script by typing ./winetricks and when the script opens there will be a long list of packages. You need the vb6run (Visual Basic 6 runtime) and all directX packages except the “not recommended” packages. You can install them all at the same time. A window will come up that is not accessible to Orca. Make sure this window has focus and press alt+y to install the Visual Basic6 runtime. Now you can install a broad variety of games.
Here is a partial list as well as a few notes on some of the games.
If you notice lag in the sound, try installing alsa-oss with:
sudo apt-get install alsa-oss
and launch the game from the terminal with aoss at the beginning of the line:
aoss wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Game/launcher.exe

Kitchensinc Games

The games are all free and very good. They are located at http://kitchensinc.jgriffith.com/ttsgames/ttsgames.htm. You need to download and install winkit first. It is a menu system for the games. When it is finished downloading right click it and select "extract here". When it has finished extracting find and press enter on the winkit folder, then right click the setup.exe file and select open with wine. Press enter four times. wait a few seconds and press enter again. If everything went as it should the installer should close and there will now be a "kitchensinc menu" under applications, wine, programs. If you select the games option the self-voicing menu will launch.
To install the games just download the one you want and when it is finished right click and open with wine. Wait a few seconds to make sure it has opened and press enter, alt+o, and alt+c. At this point the window will close and the game will be installed. To play the game select it from the kitchensinc game menu.
In puppy1, when I changed the voice from the default, the game became unplayable. The golf game tends to crash. To make this not happen, wait until it has finished speaking completely before selecting your club or swinging. Those are the only two I had any problems with and the work arounds are quite simple.

LightTechInteractive Games

The games can be gotten from http://www.lighttechinteractive.com/web page/lightGames.php. The general install format is right click the game after downloading it, select open with wine, and after waiting a few seconds for it to open, press alt+n twice followed by alt+y then alt+n three or four more times for good measure. Finish with an alt+i for install and wait a few seconds while it works its magic. Press enter to close the installer. The games will be under applications, wine, Program, LightTechInteractive. I have installed "Bop It Ultimate", "Light Cars", and "NUM-Crunch". They all work well. In Light Cars, when you have completed a race and have tried to start another race the game may go silent. If this happens, press enter and the game will close. Open the game again and everything will work. These games are a lot of fun as evidenced by their download counter for each one. You will have to run the configuration option before playing the game. Each game has the option in its menu. The configuration utility is not self-voicing, but it is still possible to get through it. When it opens press enter, type your first name, press tab, type your last name, press enter and enter your email if you want(it is not required), press tab and down arrow once for Canada or twice for United States, and finish by pressing tab and enter twice. The window will close an the game will be configured.

L-works Work Around

Other games may work too. The free games from l-works.net work very well. The only thing is, you have to change to the folder where the game is and launch it. This may only be necessary if you have removed PulseAudio in Ubuntu. To change to the l-works directory open terminal and type:
cd .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/lworks
Then use the ls command to get a list of the games installed. Change to the directory with the cd command then launch the game with wine.
wine toy.exe
The games will not work if launched from the wine menu under applications.

Installation Instructions

There are too many games to write the instructions for each in this post. I have already put off publishing it for some time to test and figure out installation issues. That is where you can help. If you install a game and it works, please post a comment with instructions here. Most of the time games can be installed by pressing alt+n several times then alt+i and finally alt+f. Sometimes you have to agree to terms. In this situation, the key series may be alt+n followed by alt+a, press space to check the agree box, then alt+n five or six times and finish up with alt+i ad either alt+f or enter to close the installer. Sometimes the installer may start by asking if you want to install the program. If the installer closes right off when you press alt+n then this is likely the cause so try starting out with alt+y. These instructions should get you through most installers. Good luck and have fun.

Related Information

• No Related Post

Keep the important stuff well organized with the RNIB PenFriend Voice Labeling System.
Finally a coffee maker that listens! Get your Primula 10 cup Speak n’ Brew Coffee Maker today!
Now here’s a talking watch worth having. Alarms stopwatch, and more.

Although weather information is available in Orca with the press of a button, there are times when you may want more detailed information such as a forecast. It may also be useful to get weather info for more than one location. This is possible with the clock on the top panel, just right click it, click preferences, and set your location by clicking add on the locations tab. It can also be achieved buy right clicking a blank spot on either panl, click "Add to Panel" and click "Weather Report", click add, then click close. Once it has been placed on the panel, set your location by right clicking it, click preferences, and select your location from the list. If you want, you can also get a raydar map. To do this, check the raydar map box and the custom image box. You will need to enter a url in the box. You can get this url by going to:
http://weather.noaa.gov/
Enter your zipcode click go. Then click the raydar link and click standard version. Click once on the map so it starts showing real time. Finally, right click the map and select "Copy Image Location". Go back to the weather preferences and paste the url in to the box buy pressing Control+V.
To get detailed weather information simply click the weather icon on the panel or right click it and click on details. If you click the raydar tab you should see the map updating in real time.
This also works well with Orca. The details are read and can be navigated using the tab and arrow keys. The only problem is, Orca and the panels do not always play nicely together. As a solution, you can use a terminal based weather program. In Ubuntu, you can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install weather-util
After the program is installed, you can set up aliases for it in a file named .weatherrc. First, however, you will need to get the location id for each area for which you would like weather information. To do this, go to:
http://weather.noaa.gov/
If you are in the US select your state, otherwise select your country and click go. On the next page, select your location, the place closest to where you live and click go. The page you are on now will have a heading with your Location id below it. Here is an example:
Baku / Bine Airport, Azerbaijan
(UBBB) 40-27N 050-04E -1M
In this example, the id is (UBBB). Now that you have the location ID, you can make your .weatherc file. Type:
gedit .weatherrc
you can of course use any text editor you prefer. Here is an example .weatherrc file. You can cut and paste it just be sure to change the values to match your information. It will probably not work with the values I have in it because they are all different places. If you get a 404 error, set the forecast line to False or just delete the line altogether. If you do not live in the US, you will probably want to delete the st line. Here is the sample file:
[default]
id = UBBB
quiet = True
city = New York
st = CA
forecast = True

Now, when you type weather you will get the current weather and forecast. To add more locations, just copy the info in the .weatherrc file and paste them at the end. Change the line that reads [default] to something like [work] and update the rest of the information. Now, when you type:
weather work
You will get the weather and forecast for the new location. This utility works great with Orca or any terminal based screen reader. For more information on the .weatherrc file, type:
man weatherrc

Related Information

• No Related Post

Keep the important stuff well organized with the RNIB PenFriend Voice Labeling System.
Finally a coffee maker that listens! Get your Primula 10 cup Speak n’ Brew Coffee Maker today!
Can you sink their Battleship? Find out with this Braille version of the classic game.

Audio games available from GMA Games work very well in Wine. The one exception is "Shades of Doom" it works until you try to enter a door, then freezes. The only way to close it is to go to system monitor and end the process. The rest of the games have not given me any problems. The basic pattern to follow when installing these games is to right click the setup file, select Open with Wine Windows Program Loader, and wait for a few seconds for it to open. Use alt tab to move between windows until you find something like "Setup inaccessible". When you have moved to that window, press the following keys to install the game:
alt-y
alt-n
alt-y
alt-n
alt-n
alt-n
alt-n
alt-n
alt-i
At this point, the game will install. Wait about ten or so seconds and then press alt-f to finish the installation. Most of the games add a shortcut to the desktop. You can use the shortcut to launch the game or open applications, Wine, Programs, and find the game listed there. On the desktop you may find a second shortcut with a .lnk extension. It is safe to delete the .lnk shortcut because they do not work in Linux (as far as I know). When you start the demos, there are a couple of windows that do not talk, just press enter three times and game sound and speech should begin. The first few windows are where you can enter your information when you have purchased the game. In the game Lonewolf, the information is spoken from the very beginning. I have tested all of the game demos as well as the free games and I have to say they are all impressive and very addictive. I highly recommend any or all of these games.
One last note, in VIP Mud, when you first launch it, the opening window will read as "Product Security inaccessible" I am not sure what this window is, but if you press enter three times it will start talking. For some reason, voice settings are not always remembered and the "interrupt this voice with typing" option doesn’t work. I have not used it in Windows, so I am not sure if this is a Wine only problem or not. You can interrupt speech with the control key if you need to do so.

Related Information

• No Related Post

Keeping in touch with friends and family just got even easier with the Emerson Big Button Photo Phone.
Finally a coffee maker that listens! Get your Primula 10 cup Speak n’ Brew Coffee Maker today!
Everyone needs a Cash Cow Talking Bank.

There are lots of accessible games that, until now, only work in Windows. Quite a lot of these games will work in Wine, an application that translates Windows applications so they can work in Linux. There are a few things that are necessary to get it up and running though. A lot of the Windows game use Sapi5 to present information in speech format. Thanks to the Open-Sapi project started by Thomas Lloyd, it is now easy to get sapi up and running in Wine with no sighted assistance. For more on the Open-Sapi project, visit http://code.google.com/p/open-sapi/. Now, Let’s get started setting up Wine so accessible games can be installed.

Installing Wine

Although some games work with the version of Wine that comes installed, things will work better, and more games will install and run correctly if you have the latest version of Wine. To do this, you will need to add the Win repository. If you are not using a Debian based distribution of Linux, consult your distribution’s documentation or the Wine website for instructions. Ubuntu Users do the following to add the Wine repository and get the key for it. Open terminal and type:
wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
After that command completes its task, type:
sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/jaunty.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list
If you are using a version of Ubuntu other than Jaunty, simply replace the word jaunty in the line above with your version’s name, for example, users of 8.04 would replace jaunty with the word hardy.
Next, get updates and install Wine:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wine
You should now have the latest version of Wine installed.

Installing Open-Sapi

For this part, you will need to have subversion installed. If you do not have it, or if you are unsure, type the following command in terminal:
sudo apt-get install subversion
To create the open-sapi directory and download the files, in terminal, type:
svn checkout http://open-sapi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/open-sapi
At this point, files will be downloaded and setup in the open-sapi directory. If you are not using Ubuntu or a Debian based distribution, you can install manually with the instructions from the Open-Sapi Wiki.
For Ubuntu or Debian users, type:
cd open-sapi/installer
chmod 700 osapi.run
./osapi.run
When it finishes, you will have open-sapi installed. Now games that use sapi will work, for the most part. You can also use Open-sapi with Orca through speech-dispatcher. For more information, refer to the Open-sapi project.

Installing A Game

For this example, you will need the Solitaire game from Gmagames. Click the games link, and find the "free games" link. Download the solitaire game. It will save to your desktop. When it has finished, select it and press shift-f10 and select open with wine windows program loader. Wait a few seconds then press alt-tab until you here "setup inaccessible". Orca, of course, does not work with Wine, so the installer is completely inaccessible. You have to know what key combination to press. In this case, press the following with a few seconds between each keypress to make sure the action has completed:
alt-y
alt-n
alt-y
alt-n
alt-n
alt-n
alt-n
alt-i
Wait about 10 seconds, then finish with alt-f.
When you arrow around on the Desktop, you should find 2 shortcuts. one will be "GMA Solitaire.lnk" you can delete this shortcut. The other one is the one you will need. Press enter on it. You will get a warning about untrusted application. Tab to the mark as trusted button and press enter. Now, the next time you press enter on the desktop shortcut the game will launch and will be self-voicing.

Getting Help

To access the help file, open applications, wine, program files, GMA Solitaire, read manual in text format. This will open the manual in Notepad. Orca will not read in notepad, but this isn’t really a problem. Just press control+a to select all, control+c to copy, then open text editor and paste with control+v. Now you can read the file with Orca.
Have fun, and keep checking back for more game installation instructions and reviews.

Related Information

• March 13, 2009 -- Accessible Games for Linux

Finally a coffee maker that listens! Get your Primula 10 cup Speak n’ Brew Coffee Maker today!
Stay informed of the current temperature with this talking digital in/out door thermometer.
This talking calculator is also an alarm clock. More importantly, it has optional headphones. Great for class.

A couple of months ago I found out about a service called Sendspace.
It is a great service that allows you to upload files and send links to them by email. You can also use the links on your blog or website if you have limited space or if your host doesn’t allow files to be uploaded. One of the things that makes Sendspace great is the Wizard. Instead of navigating through the Sendspace website to upload or download files, you can install the Wizard and use it instead. It is a very convenient piece of software for Linux, Mac, and Windows. I downloaded the Wizard shortly after creating my account. When I opened the Wizard for the first time, it was almost completely accessible with Orca. There was one exception though, and that one problem prevented me from being able to use the Wizard at all. The local and remote file views are displayed on something that Orca just refers to as panels. I noticed a “send feedback” option in the Wizard’s help menu and selected it. I was taken to the Sendspace website where I filled some information into a form and explained the problem I was having. I had also noticed that two of the keyboard shortcuts used by the Wizard conflicted with shortcuts used by Gnome, so I included that in the message as well.
I have contacted several companies in the past requesting accessibility improvements, or a Linux version of their software. In the past I have met with very little success for my efforts. Usually, after a week or two, the company would respond with some variant of “no”. This was not the case with Sendspace. I received a reply from them almost immediately. The message said that they would begin work on fixing the problems I had described. They were as good as their word too. I even got updates about the progress being made. Last week, the new version for Linux was released. It was slightly behind the Windows version, I suspect because of the problems with getting Orca to read info in those panels. When the new version came out though, it was usable with Orca. It now has a general file selection dialog that Orca can read as well as the panels. The keyboard shortcuts were even fixed. I am really impressed with how fast they responded to and fixed the accessibility issue I reported. It is great to know that a company is dedicated to providing their software to anyone who wants to use it regardless of platform or disability. In fact, Mike, a Sendspace Representative says, "We’ve been committed to accessibility ever since we found out about it and we’ve been improving it slowly but surely since then (on all three platforms, mac, windows and Linux)."
So, if you need to send files that are too large for email attachments or need to host files for your blog or website, get your free Sendspace. account today. Tell your friends and family. When a company s dedicated and responds to accessibility requests as fast as Sendspace, they deserve all the support and promotion we can give them. Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about this company. Thanks to the Wizard developers for all of your hard work.

Related Information

• February 7, 2010 -- Please Help Protect Accessibility
• February 10, 2009 -- Website Navigation With Orca
• February 5, 2009 -- Keyboard Shortcuts

This handy Bausch & Lomb Folding Pocket Magnifier makes it easy to read on the go.
This accessible chess and checker board set will bring countless hours of fun for the whole family.
Everyone needs a Cash Cow Talking Bank.

Every time I start my computer, I launch some applications. It would be easy just to add them to start up programs, but the thing is, I want them in specific work spaces. The default installation of Ubuntu comes with two work spaces. I always change mine to have four work spaces, in two rows. I have a specific use for each space. The first space is where I do all my work, editing text files, browsing the internet, etc. Space two is for email, instant messaging, posting to Twitter with Twitux. The third work space is for multimedia, Rhythmbox, Totem, etc. The fourth space is where I put applications that need to be open but don’t require much interaction, like Transmission. It may not be the best layout, but it works for me.. Anyway, the point behind this, is that if I open everything it automatically goes to my first work space. So, if I had the programs start automatically, I would still have to put them in the work space I have chosen for them. The answer to this problem is a program called Devil’s Pie. You can get it by opening terminal and typing:
sudo apt-get install devilspie
After devilspie is installed, you need to make a .devilspie directory in your home folder. So, type:
mkdir .devilspie
Change to this new directory with the command:
cd .devilspie
There are a few good tutorials out there that show how to create files to place applications where you want them including maximizing and decorating them, so I will keep this brief. Just for reference, to create a file to place Pidgin on your second work space, create a file called pidgin.ds:
gedit pidgin.ds
Place this line in the file:
if (is (application_name) “Pidgin”) (set_workspace 2))
Now, Devil’s Pie will move Pidgin to the second workspace when it is opened. If you create a file with an application name in it and it doesn’t move the application to the designated space, try using all lower case in the application name, or if you did use all lower case, try the first letter in upper-case. Evolution, for example, is all lower-case.
To get everything working with out any interaction, go to the system menu, preferences, sessions. On the start up programs tab click add. Enter the following information:
Name: Devil’s Pie
Command: devilspie -a
Click on add, then click close. Now Devil’s Pie will start automatically and apply your settings to any window that is opened, as well as any window that was already opened.
If you would prefer to use a GUI to make devil’s Pie files, one is available. It is called gdevilspie

Related Information

• No Related Post

This handy Bausch & Lomb Folding Pocket Magnifier makes it easy to read on the go.
Finally a coffee maker that listens! Get your Primula 10 cup Speak n’ Brew Coffee Maker today!
This accessible chess and checker board set will bring countless hours of fun for the whole family.

I was wondering if Yasr could use any other synth than emacspeak. Turns out, if you are using Ubuntu intrepid or later, or if you have the latest version of Yasr installed, it can. For those of you who don’t know, yasr is a terminal based screen reader.
Yasr can now use speech-dispatcher. This means, it can use Espeak, or any other synthesizer that speech-dispatcher supports. To get it, in Ubuntu, type:
sudo apt-get install yasr
Once it is installed, you will need to edit the /etc/yasr/yasr..conf file to get the speech-dispatcher support working. First, you need to be sure that speech-dispatcher is installed and working. To get it:
sudo apt-get install speech-dispatcher python-speechd
Once it is installed, type:
spd-conf
to get it set up. You can accept the defaults on all of the questions it asks except the port. For some reason, on my computer at least, it wants to set the port to 6561. It should be 6560, so be sure to type that into the prompt for the port if it says something else. When that has finished, launch it with:
speech-dispatcher
If you want, you can make it start automatically by going to System, Preferences, Sessions and adding speech-dispatcher to the start up programs.
name: speech-dispatcher
command: speech-dispatcher
Now, for the /etc/yasr/yasr.conf file. Open it with sudo, remove the # at the beginning of the speech-dispatcher lines, there are 2 of them. Then add the # in front of the emacspeak lines. Once again, there are 2 of them.
You can change speech rate, pitch, etc by editing the file:
~/.speech-dispatcher/conf/speechd.conf
Most of the lines are commented out, so remember to remove the # if you want your changes to be applied. To launch yasr, type yasr in terminal.

Related Information

• December 21, 2009 -- Let the Computer Read for You
• March 13, 2009 -- Installing Speakup in Ubuntu
• February 12, 2009 -- Yasr (Yet another screen reader) on Ubuntu Intrepid
• February 10, 2009 -- Website Navigation With Orca
• February 5, 2009 -- Keyboard Shortcuts

Kapsys is an innovative mobile navigation system principally based on satellite geo-location (GPS) and vocal interaction (speech synthesis and voice recognition).
This talking calculator is also an alarm clock. More importantly, it has optional headphones. Great for class.
Now here’s a talking watch worth having. Alarms stopwatch, and more.

If you ever happen to have some of that mythical stuff known as spare time, you may be wondering if there are any accessible games for Linux. The answer is, there are several of them. There are a couple of MUD clients that work well with Orca. Gnome-mud and tintin++ are both very accessible. to get them, simply type:
sudo apt-get install tintin++
and/or:
sudo apt-get install gnome-mud
in a terminal. Tintin++ is a terminal based client, so you can also use it with speakup if you have it installed. It is also a very powerful client with aliases, speed walking, triggers, scripting, and a lot more features.
There is also a package called bsdgames you can install that has text based games. The games include go-fish, adventure, and wumpus. To get it, type:
sudo apt-get install bsdgames
in a terminal.
there are two more games that are accessible. They require a bit more effort to install though. The first is called AudioQuake. It is located at http://www.agrip.org.uk/download/. I got the Linux/x86 installer (3.2M) file. It is a script that will install everything for you, well, almost everything. To get it up and running, open a terminal and switch to the directory where the file was downloaded, usually Desktop. make sure the file has permission to run with the following command:
chmod 700 AudioQuake-0.3.0.1_linux-x86.run
then execute it with:
./AudioQuake-0.3.0.1_linux-x86.run
It will guide you through the installation of both Quake and AudioQuake. When it is finished, you still need to install a couple of things before you can play. To get the packages you need, type:
sudo apt-get install eflite libconfig-tiny-perl
Once that is done you can play the game by doing the following. in your home directory, type:
cd .zquake
At this point it is a good idea to turn off Orca because from my experience the game will not run if Orca is open. Then, type:
./start.pl
From this point on the game should be totally self-voicing.
The next game is called SoundRTS. It is a favourite. You can get it at http://jlpo.free.fr/soundrts/py25/. Unzip it in your home directory or on your Desktop, it doesn’t matter which. Before playing it you will need to install python2.5 and python-pygame. So, in terminal, type:
sudo apt-get install python2.5 python-pygame
then, to launch it, change to the soundrts directory:
cd soundrts
and launch with:
python2.5 soundrts.pyc
In Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid and later Python 2.5 is no longer available. You can still play SoundRTS by downloading a patch from http://jlpo.free.fr/tmp/soundrts1.0.1-python2.6.zip. Unzip the patch and move all of the contents from inside the folder to your soundrts folder. If you are asked if you would like to replace files select replace all. SoundRTS should now work just by switching to the soundrts folder and typing:
python soundrts.pyc
The patch makes the latest version of SoundRTS work. You can get the latest version from http://jlpo.free.fr/soundrts/soundrts-1.0.1-en.zip
If you would like to add a launcher to your desktop, you can do so with the following script. Open your favourite text editor and copy the following lines:
#!/bin/bash
cd
cd soundrts
python2.5 soundrts.pyc
exit 0
Save the file as ./soundrts.sh in your home directory. If you put your soundrts directory somewhere else other than your home folder, be sure you change the path in the script to match the location. For example, if your folder is on your desktop, it would be:
cd Desktop/soundrts
Make the script executable with the command:
chmod 700 .soundrts.sh
Then, on your desktop, press control+f10 and choose create launcher. In the name, type SoundRTS then press tab to get to the command field. In the command box type:
./.soundrts.sh
Tab to the OK button and press enter. You can now start the game by pressing enter on the SoundRTS launcher on your desktop.
If you used the patch you need to replace python2.5 with python. The game is completely self-voicing. You do not need to turn off Orca before starting this one, it works fine even if Orca is running.
Have fun, I will add more game info as I get it.

Related Information

• June 12, 2009 -- Setting up Wine for Accessible Games
• March 13, 2009 -- Installing Speakup in Ubuntu
• February 5, 2009 -- Keyboard Shortcuts

Finally a coffee maker that listens! Get your Primula 10 cup Speak n’ Brew Coffee Maker today!
Now here’s a talking watch worth having. Alarms stopwatch, and more.
This accessible chess and checker board set will bring countless hours of fun for the whole family.

I was told that speakup isn’t as difficult to install any more because you don’t have to recompile the kernel any more, So, I thought I would give it a go. It took a few minutes, but over all, it was very easy to get it up and running. If you too would like to install speakup, here are the instructions. Thanks goes to Paul Hunt for helping with the instructions. This was done an a Dell Studio 1536 running Ubuntu Intrepid.
First, we need to install the git-core package. In a terminal, type:
sudo apt-get install git-core
After that package is installed, get the speakup packages with this command:
git clone http://www.linux-speakup.org/speakup.git
This one takes a while, so play a game or something, but keep checking back on it. It will finish eventually. After that happens, it is time to compile and install. To do this, type:
cd speakup/src
make
sudo make modules_install
After the above three commands have completed, you need to move some files around because they aren’t installed in the right place. Enter the following commands:
cd /lib/modules/`uname -r`/extra/speakup
sudo cp * ..
Once that has been done, activate by typing:
sudo depmod -a
Now everything should be ready. So to start the module, type:
sudo modprobe speakup_soft start=1
So that you don’t have to type the above line every time your computer is restarted, do the following:
sudo vi /etc/modules
This will open the vim text editor. Press the escape key to make sure you are in command mode. Use down arrow to move to the bottom of the file. Once there, press shift A to get in to append mode. Type the following line exactly as it is here:
speakup_soft start=1
Press the escape key to get back in to command mode. Then type the following to save and exit vim:
:wq
Once you press enter the file will be saved. To get espeak working with speakup, do the following:
cd ~/speakup/contrib
unzip espeakup with the following:
bunzip2 espeakup-0.60.tar.bz2
tar xvf espeakup-0.60.tar
then install:
make
sudo make install
Launch it with:
sudo espeakup –default-voice voice name
So, for US English, the command would be:
sudo espeakup –default-voice en-us
You can add espeakup to /etc/init.d/rc.local, so you won’t need to launch espeakup every time your system is restarted. Place the line at the very end of the file.
You can not use speakup with plain old gnome-terminal. You need to open a text console. You can do this with control+alt+f1 through f6. You can get back to your normal desktop with control+alt+f7. when you bring up the text console you will need to log in with your user name and password. You can read the speakup manual in the ~/speakup/doc directory. For those of us who don’t like using key echo, you can disable it. You need to be root to make this change, so type:
sudo su – root
then, to disable it, type:
echo 0 > /sys/module/speakup/parameters/key_echo
after that is done, type exit to logout from the root account. To do this automatically, add it to /etc/init.d/rc.local. There are other parameters you can change as well such as volume and rate. In the above command change the number 0 to 9 and key_echo to rate to set the voice rate.
echo 9 > /sys/module/speakup/parameters/rate
That’s about it, have fun. Remember, when you find a setting you like, just add it in to the end of /etc/init.d/rc.local to make it happen at startup.

Related Information

• February 5, 2009 -- Keyboard Shortcuts
• December 7, 2009 -- Speakup Revisited
• January 17, 2010 -- Commanding the Command Line (Part 2)
• March 16, 2009 -- Using Speech-dispatcher with Yasr
• March 13, 2009 -- Accessible Games for Linux

Now here’s a talking watch worth having. Alarms stopwatch, and more.
Can you sink their Battleship? Find out with this Braille version of the classic game.
Everyone needs a Cash Cow Talking Bank.

Festival Voices

In Ubuntu Orca uses Espeak by default. This is my prefered speech synthesizer, but it is not the only choice. Other Linux distributions use the Festival speech engine instead of Espeak. It is possible on Ubuntu to use festival if you want. First, you need to install Festival and some voices to use with it. Once that is done, you can use the Festival voices with Orca by opening the Orca preferences, Orca+space bar, press right arrow to get to the speech tab, and tab over to the speech synthesizer combobox. use up and down arrows to move through the different synthesizers, Festival Gnome speech driver should be one of the options. To get Festival and the 16K versions of the Festvox Diphone voices, type:
sudo apt-get install festival festvox-don festvox-kallpc16k festvox-kdlpc16k festvox-rablpc16k
If you would rather have the 8K versions of the above voices for some reason, replace 16k with 8k when installing them. These default voices aren’t the best festival has to offer. There are other voices that sound better. There is an excellent guide for installing the Mbrola, cmu, and Nitech voices on the Ubuntu Forums. If you are using the 64 bit version of Ubuntu, you will need to first install the ia32-libs package before installing Mbrola with the .deb package. In terminal type:
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
Then, in the instructions, watch for the line that starts with sudo dpkg -i. After the -i, type –force-architecture and then complete the command. So, the whole command should look like this:
sudo dpkg -i –force-architecture mbrola3.0.1h_i386.deb
If you are not using the 64 bit version of Ubuntu, you do not have to worry about this step, just follow the instructions as written.
I have created an application that will install the voices you select if you would rather not have to type a lot of things in the terminal. You can use it to install Mbrola and Nitech voices. It is located at:
http://www.stormdragon.us/voices-script/
If you are using 64 bit Ubuntu, you will still need to install the ia32-libs package before running the script.

Purchasing Voices

The IBM Viavoice is available from Voxin for a small fee, about $5.75 USD. They They are the Eloquence voices. They depend on an old library that hasn’t been updated in years, so it is possible that they may quit working on future releases of your distribution. The purchase proceedure is quite simple, only one language comes with your purchase, so if you want multiple languages, you will have to purchase multiple packages. These voices are not sold for profit. The newest version now supports 64 bit systems.
Cepstral offers voices for purchase for both 32 and 64 bit systems. To install them, simply unzip the package you have downloaded, open terminal and switch to the directory you have just unzipped, and type:
sudo ./install.sh
Here’s a good place to point out the autocompletion feature in terminal. If you type part of the directory you want and press the tab key the rest will be filled in for you. It works with commands too, so give it a try, I am sure you will like it. To get them working with Orca, you will need to install gnome-speech-swift. To do this, in terminal, type:
sudo apt-get install gnome-speech-swift
If you run in to problems with it not showing up in Orca’s speech synthesizer list, there is more information available on the Orca wiki.
It’s always a good idea to test out a new speech engine before switching to it with Orca. There’s nothing worse than switching to a new synth just to find out there is something wrong with it and not have any speech to correct the problem. So, to test Cepstral, you can use the swift command. If you have installed it in the default location, the command you would use to test it is:
swift -n VoiceName “hello”
Replace VoiceName with the name of the voice you would like to test.

Notes

This is a work in progress. I will add more voice info as I find out about them. There are some things not covered here like Dectalk, Freetts, etc. When I have time to test/get the information I will post instructions for them as well. The commands in this post were done using Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid. This should work on most Debian distributions. Commands for other distributions may be different.

Related Information

• No Related Post

Keep the important stuff well organized with the RNIB PenFriend Voice Labeling System.
This accessible chess and checker board set will bring countless hours of fun for the whole family.
Kapsys is an innovative mobile navigation system principally based on satellite geo-location (GPS) and vocal interaction (speech synthesis and voice recognition).

With all of the stuff I do in terminal, I started thinking it would be a lot easier to navigate to the correct folder using Nautilus and then open that directory in terminal. The problem is, Ubuntu doesn’t have this option by default. So, I did some research and found a nifty utility called nautilus-open-terminal. It is quite easy to install. Just open terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal
I had to restart my computer after installing this before the "open in terminal" option was available. After restarting, in the contest menu for directory views is a new option to open the current directory in terminal. If you use Orca, right clicking a blank section on the desktop or in a directory can be a bit of a challenge. So, instead of trying to find a blank spot to right click, just use control+f10 to access the menu. Thanks to Jacob Schmude for telling me about this shortcut.
If you aren’t convinced that opening a directory in terminal can really be useful, consider the following for example for installing Viavoice. If you purchase Voxin, you need to extract the package which is simple. Press shift+f10 and then select extract here. Once that is done, there’s a brand new directory that contains another directory that contains the installation file you need to run to install the voice.
You can either open terminal and type in the path to the directory you need an run the installation script, or with nautilus-open-terminal, just open the folder, open the sub folder, then press control+f10 and select "open in terminal". Then, all you have to do is run the installation script with sudo.

Related Information

• No Related Post

Let’s play cards. Get your 1-year membership today.
This accessible chess and checker board set will bring countless hours of fun for the whole family.
Everyone needs a Cash Cow Talking Bank.

Yasr, yet another screen reader, is a terminal based screen reader for Linux. Although I personally have had no problems using Orca in the terminal, I have had other people tell me they which they had a terminal based screen reader. Yasr is one option for this. Speak up is another, but I read that you have to do some pretty advanced stuff to get it up and going. Yasr is quite simple to get started. If you want to give it a try simply open a terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install yasr
There are a couple of other packages that will install with it. Once everything has installed, launch it by typing:
yasr
in a terminal. It uses the festival speech engine. I didn’t do much with it because I found I like Orca much better in or out of the terminal. you can read all about how to use it by typing:
man yasr
There is a review mode that has a separate set of keys. also, you can set options for yasr by pressing control+alt+o. Once you have everything set the way you want it, save to disk with control+alt+s.

Related Information

• January 17, 2010 -- Commanding the Command Line (Part 2)
• January 13, 2010 -- Commanding the Command Line (Part 1)
• March 16, 2009 -- Using Speech-dispatcher with Yasr

Let’s play cards. Get your 1-year membership today.
Stay informed of the current temperature with this talking digital in/out door thermometer.
Can you sink their Battleship? Find out with this Braille version of the classic game.

orca has a lot of web page navigation keys. If you aren’t the kind of person who has to customize everything you may be unaware of them. There are keys for almost everything you could want, but by default, only a few of them have key bindings. If, for example, you would like to jump to the next combobox on the page you are reading, you can set a key to do so. It isn’t set by default, so you have to open Orca’s preferences for Firefox. To do this, press the Orca key, either insert if you are using desktop layout, or capslock for laptop layout. So, press orca+control+space bar and the Orca preferences for Firefox will open. Use the arrow keys to get to the key bindings tab. Tab over to the function column and then arrow down through the different options. To set a key for one of the choices, press enter while on the item you would like to set a key for and type your choice. Orca will say "Key captured, press enter to confirm". After you have confirmed your choice, tab to the apply or OK button and press enter. You will now be able to use your brand new navigation key on web pages.

Related Information

• February 5, 2009 -- Keyboard Shortcuts
• February 7, 2010 -- Please Help Protect Accessibility
• June 11, 2009 -- The Sendspace Wizard with Orca
• March 16, 2009 -- Using Speech-dispatcher with Yasr
• March 13, 2009 -- Installing Speakup in Ubuntu

Keep the important stuff well organized with the RNIB PenFriend Voice Labeling System.
Finally a coffee maker that listens! Get your Primula 10 cup Speak n’ Brew Coffee Maker today!
Now here’s a talking watch worth having. Alarms stopwatch, and more.

Orca is a scriptable screen reader. This means, if you have the know how, you can add extra functionality to Orca by adding your own scripts to it. For details, see the Orca Frequently Asked Questions page. This is great for people who have the necessary technical skills to expand Orca to meet their needs or wants. For people with out the necessary programming skills, it’s not quite as useful. Orca is designed to provide access to existing desktop functionality. This means things like time and date aren’t built in to the screen reader. It’s not a big deal, because this information is available right on the desktop, but it can be a pain to have to stop working on your current project, use control+alt+tab to get to the top panel, tab around until you find the info you want, then move back to what ever you were working on and find your place to continue working. It would be much easier to have a single key to tell you the time, date, weather conditions, etc. This is relatively easy to do with Orca’s scripting capabilities, but if you don’t know Python, you’re kind of stuck. There is a script pre-written that can be downloaded from the Orca FAQ, but once the script is downloaded, it has to be edited to get weather information working, and unless you know enough about scripting to change the keybindings, you are stuck with the Keys built into the script.
I have attempted to solve this problem with a web based application that creates an orca-customizations.py file. When you access the application, you will be able to select keys for each item. All commands include the press of the Orca key. The Orca key is either insert for desktop layout, or capslock for laptop layout. So, if you select d as the key to speak the date, the key press to make orca speak the date would be insert+d for desktop layout or capslock+d for laptop layout. Once all the information has been entered, You will be able to download the orca-customizations.py file. The only steps left after that are moving the file to the .orca directory and restarting Orca.
So far, the script includes keybindings for battery status, date, time, and weather conditions. If you would like to give it a try it is located at:
http://www.stormdragon.us/orca-customizations/

Related Information

• No Related Post

This handy Bausch & Lomb Folding Pocket Magnifier makes it easy to read on the go.
Finally a coffee maker that listens! Get your Primula 10 cup Speak n’ Brew Coffee Maker today!
Let’s play cards. Get your 1-year membership today.

If you use Espeak with Orca, you may be wondering if it can speak faster. The answer is yes, it can, but it will require a little modification. On Ubuntu 8.10 and earlier, you will need to upgrade to the latest release. You can get the latest version from espeak.sourceforge.net. Click on the download link and on the downloads page, and download the source code and dictionary data.
My files automatically save to my desktop. But to make things easier I am going to move it to my home folder. Right click the espeak source file on the desktop and select cut. Open the places menu and select your home folder. Once in your home folder, right click or open the edit menu and select paste. This will move the Espeak source file from your desktop to your home folder. Once the file has been moved, right click it and select extract here.
After the extraction process, open the applications menu, under accessories, click terminal. When terminal opens you should be in your home folder. If you aren’t sure, you can type:
cd
and it will take you to your home folder. Once there, type:
cd espeak-1.40.02-source/src
Note that in this example the espeak version I am installing is 1.40.02 this is the latest version at the time of this writing, but it is likely that the numbers will change, so just make sure of the version number when you are installing.
Now that you are in the correct folder, we will begin the installation process.
The first thing we need to do is make sure espeak can find lportaudio. To do this, type the following command:
sudo ln /usr/lib/libportaudio.so.0 /usr/lib/libportaudio.so
This creates a link to lportaudio that espeak can use. After that is done, type:
make
This will take a couple of minutes. When it is done, the final command is:
sudo make install
This will install the new version of espeak. If you are using Orca, it will cause your language setting to be switched. It is kind of tricky navigating Orca preferences to get the correct language back, so you may need some help doing this. It may be possible to close and restart Orca to correct this problem, but I am not sure because I haven’t tried it.
Now, for the speed boost. type:
cd
to get back to your home folder. In this example, I am going to speed up the US English voice. If you are using a different language, substitute your language info in the command below. To speed up the English voice, type:
sudo vi /usr/share/espeak-data/voices/en/en-us
When the file opens in vi, press escape to make sure you are in command mode. Use down arrow to move to the bottom of the file. Press shift A to append at the end of the line. Press enter to get on a blank line.
You can then type in the new setting to speed up espeak. the command is fast_test. This is followed by 3 numbers. The first number controls pauses for punctuation, etc. The other 2 numbers change different aspects of the speech like how long vowels are sustained. The fastest speed I am comfortable with is 2 40 40. This comes out to about 510 words per minute. So, to get this speed, type:
fast_test 2 40 40
Press escape, then type
:wq
this will save your changes and exit vi. Espeak should be speaking a lot faster now. If it isn’t, make sure you have your speech rate set to 99 in Orca preferences. Enjoy the new, faster Espeak. If you are not an Orca user, remember that you can use espeak to read long text files and save some of the strain on your eyes.

Related Information

• No Related Post

This handy Bausch & Lomb Folding Pocket Magnifier makes it easy to read on the go.
Keeping in touch with friends and family just got even easier with the Emerson Big Button Photo Phone.
This talking calculator is also an alarm clock. More importantly, it has optional headphones. Great for class.

Sometimes in Ubuntu, you will want to create global keyboard shortcuts that aren’t possible in the keyboard preferences in the system menu. There are a couple of ways to do this, but probably the easiest is a program called xbindkeys. To get it, open terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install xbindkeys xbindkeys-config
If you are using Orca, the screen reader, you don’t need to get xbindkeys-config because Orca doesn’t work with it.
The first thing to do after the program is installed is type:
xbindkeys –defaults > ~/.xbindkeysrc
This basically creates the initial settings for xbindkeys in the file called .xbindkeysrc
After that is done, type:
xbindkeys
this command starts the xbindkeys daemon. In order to have it start at login, go to system, preferences, session. On the additional programs tab click add then type xbindkeys in both the name and command boxes. Click add then click close and it will start automatically on login.
To create a keyboard shortcut, you can launch the gui, called xbindkeys-config, by pressing alt-f2 to open the run dialog and type:
xbindkeys-config
For Orca user, the process is a bit different. Because xbindkeys-config doesn’t work with Orca, you will need to open the .xbindkeysrc file and edit it directly. To do this, in your home directory, type:
gedit .xbindkeysrc
This will open the file in text editor. Once that is done, use the control-end keys to quickly navigate to the bottom of the file. Move up 3 lines. The bottom 3 lines are basically just a fancy ending for the file. On a blank line above the three bottom lines, you can type in your keyboard shortcut. This consists of two lines. The first is the command you want the keyboard shortcut to execute. To launch orca, for example, you would type the word orca surrounded by quotes:
"orca"
On the second line comes the actual shortcut. In our example, we shall use control plus alt plus o as the shortcut. So, to put it altogether:
"orca"
control+alt + o
Press control-s to save the file and close gedit. Now, control-alt-o will launch orca. This can be done for any program you choose. It works on Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and Xubuntu.

Related Information

• March 13, 2009 -- Installing Speakup in Ubuntu
• February 10, 2009 -- Website Navigation With Orca
• February 7, 2010 -- Please Help Protect Accessibility
• June 11, 2009 -- The Sendspace Wizard with Orca
• March 16, 2009 -- Using Speech-dispatcher with Yasr