Without a hardware synth, you don't have a lot of options, though there are some. Most notably, you can run emacspeak with the IBM ViaVoice software speech engine. You say you have a Braille Lite 40. You can use that as a speech synthesizer over the serial port with speakup, and speakup supports fully speech enabled installations of linux. Consult: http://www.linux-speakup.org For advice on partitioning and installation issues, read. You need to learn a little before you dive in--unless you're happy to blow away your hard drive at any time, which maybe you are. You might want to start with: http://www.linux-speakup.org/ftp/disks/redhat/HOWTO_INSTALL.html As for your other issues: OCR support has recently begun to emerge both in emacspeak and speakup. Word and Excell access is available now. It was discussed at length on this list over just the past two days.So, consult the archive and look at recent messages here. On Fri, 11 Jan 2002, David Csercsics wrote: > Ok so I've tried 5 versions of windows all of which crash quite a bit no > matter how much you mess with them. And dang it I liked linux a heck of a > lot when I was able to use it. I have a set of SuSE cd's here but the > trouble is that suse-blinux no longer detects my braille display (had to get > a new one recently because I needed a portable braille display.) so I cannot > install that on this machine. I have a braille lite 40 here now. I don't > really think it matters to me which linux I decide to use. Got some > questions though. I've got a 45 GB hd sitting in this box with an athlon 4 > chip and 768 mb of ram. How should I partition my drive for linux? What > would be the easiest distro to hack a boot disk for so that I can install > without sighted help as I don't trust a lot of people with my computer and > most of the people I know would faint if they had to install anything other > than windows so it looks like I'll be doing it myself. Also is there a way > to read ms word and excel documents under linux? I get a lot of those and it > seems saving things as plain text is a foreign concept to a lot of people. I > assume that I would have to sacrifice ocr for a reliable operating system. > By that I mean that there is ocr for windows but the os crashes too often > and I am forever reinstalling but I've treid to put up with it because I > haven't been able to get a dual boot to work at all. All that seems to > happen when I try to dual boot si windows becomes twice as unstable. So am I > correct that there is no useable ocr for linux? Any > comments/suggestions/advice/whatever would be greatly appreciated at this > point as I'm going to slowly go insane and I've got a huge programming > project I've gotta get started on (studying computer science in college) and > I need to use my computer for a lot of other things and I really can't > afford to waste a lot of time and torture myself with instability. The lack > of ocr is probably going to hurt but I suppose that I can figure something > out. I should also point out taht I have a fast internet connecdtion and a > cd burner and half a dozen different linux iso's sitting on my drive. Oh, > almost forgot, I don't have a hardware synth. If you need more details about > my setup you can always ask. Thanks for taking the time to read this and not > pressing the delete button already. :) I will quit before I cause more > trouble here and I will go back to insanity for a bit before I freeze up > again. > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Blinux-list@redhat.com > https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list > -- Janina Sajka, Director Technology Research and Development Governmental Relations Group American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) Email: janina@afb.net Phone: (202) 408-8175 Chair, Accessibility SIG Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF) http://www.openebook.org