On Sat, 12 Jan 2002, Dave Mielke wrote: > Depending on what you want, once you have BRLTTY working, you can start it very > early in the boot sequence and no longer rely on speech. This is very true; I used to use speech solely, as what I had was a doubletalk-lt. When I started using brltty and subsequently got cable-modem access to the Internet, I put the doubletalk on ttyS0 and the braillelite on ttyS1. I still have the capability of using speakup or emacspeak when I want to do so, and I tend to use speech when I have a longer text file to read. For the most part, though, I use brltty by itself. I love the way I can move around in an editor or among web links with brltty and know exactly what I'm doing and where I am. I also very much enjoy being able to listen to audio with my sound card and not having to listen to my speech synthesizer at the same time, if I am doing several things at once (which I usually am). I also was a bit surprised to discover (though logically I should have realized it) how much using the speech was sometimes slowing me down; the line I wanted would be right there on the braillelite when the speech synthesizer was still blabbing away. This isn't meant to start a speech vs. braille war. For one thing, braille displays are expensive and I wouldn't be using one if I didn't have the equipment due to my job. For another thing, speech and braille both have their advantages and disadvantages and, there are skills and tricks and shortcuts one learns in order to make excellent use of either or both. I'm only saying that, after having used speech extensively, it was delightful to discover some of the advantages of using braille. Since i've allways been an avid braille reader anyway, and will in most cases choose braille if it is available, my delight in using braille with my computer would come as no surprise! Cheryl