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Squeak Accessibility

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squeak-dev-bounces

Squeak Accessibility

Hi All,

my apoligies if some feel this shold have been sent to the new users list.
However, looking through the archives of that list made me think my request
was better suited to the dev list.

I'm interested in finding out what the situation is with respect to squeak and
access for a blind programmer. I've looked through the mail archives and the
wiki and done a bit of googling, but have failed to find much information.

My situation is I'm a blind programmer who works on a GNU Linux platform. I've
been doing some smalltalk using GNU smalltalk, but would like to move over to
using squeak. However, all my attempts so far have failed to provide any
workable solution.

I have found a few references to making squeak accessible, but they are old
and have not found any evidence that anything has gone further than some high
level general discussions. Based on my minimal knowledge of squeak and my
limited smalltalk experience, I do have some ideas, but thought it made sense
to find out what other work has or is being done before developing my ideas
any further. I'm interested in seeing if I can contribute or work on improving
or developing a way to make squeak accessible as this could be a good project
to help develop my skills with smalltalk. I'm not looking for someone to do
the work (though assistance always welcome!).

any pointers or suggestions would be appreciated. Feel free to mail me
directly 'off-list' if that is appropriate.

thanks,

Tim

--
Tim Cross
[hidden email]

David T. Lewis

Re: Squeak Accessibility

Hello and welcome!

I hope that others can provide better answers, but as far as I know there
has been no recent work to make squeak more accessible for people with sight
impairments. This sounds like a very worthwhile project. You will find that
Squeak is very flexible, and people on this list are very willing to help.

Dave

On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 06:26:57PM +1100, [hidden email] wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> my apoligies if some feel this shold have been sent to the new users list.
> However, looking through the archives of that list made me think my request
> was better suited to the dev list.
>
> I'm interested in finding out what the situation is with respect to squeak and
> access for a blind programmer. I've looked through the mail archives and the
> wiki and done a bit of googling, but have failed to find much information.
>
> My situation is I'm a blind programmer who works on a GNU Linux platform. I've
> been doing some smalltalk using GNU smalltalk, but would like to move over to
> using squeak. However, all my attempts so far have failed to provide any
> workable solution.
>
> I have found a few references to making squeak accessible, but they are old
> and have not found any evidence that anything has gone further than some high
> level general discussions. Based on my minimal knowledge of squeak and my
> limited smalltalk experience, I do have some ideas, but thought it made sense
> to find out what other work has or is being done before developing my ideas
> any further. I'm interested in seeing if I can contribute or work on improving
> or developing a way to make squeak accessible as this could be a good project
> to help develop my skills with smalltalk. I'm not looking for someone to do
> the work (though assistance always welcome!).
>
> any pointers or suggestions would be appreciated. Feel free to mail me
> directly 'off-list' if that is appropriate.
>
> thanks,
>
> Tim
>
>
> --
> Tim Cross
> [hidden email]
>

K. K. Subramaniam

Re: Squeak Accessibility

In reply to this post by squeak-dev-bounces

Welcome to Squeak!

I don't see any intrinsic problems in making Squeak accessible. Squeak is a
multimedia authoring system. It has packages to generate sound and convert
text to sound. I guess nobody with visual difficulties has looked into the
possibilities so far. It should be possible to create a hot key to read out
text, mouse position.

Version 3.8 image contain a Speech-TTS package for converting text to speech.
You can open a workspace by pressing alt k and then type:

Speaker child say: 'welcome to squeak'

and press alt-d to run this statement, you can hear a greeting in a child's
voice.

What would you like to see in Squeak?

Subbu

Jon Hylands

Re: Squeak Accessibility

On Mon, 7 Dec 2009 19:27:56 +0530, "K. K. Subramaniam"
<[hidden email]> wrote:

>Version 3.8 image contain a Speech-TTS package for converting text to speech.
>You can open a workspace by pressing alt k and then type:
>
> Speaker child say: 'welcome to squeak'
>
>and press alt-d to run this statement, you can hear a greeting in a child's
>voice.

I can also say that Dragon Naturally Speaking (commercial voice
recognition) works fine with Squeak - I use it with BrainBot (one of
my robots) all the time.

The Standard version of the product is able to inject text directly
into a Squeak workspace or other text window.

Later,
Jon