Hello all,
As many of you here and on the Speakup list have seen, Samuel has often
contributed to both lists regarding Braille support and Debian
accessibility in general. During a free software conference, he gave a
short talk on this subject. It is called, "How Accessible is Debian,"
and seems targetted to developers and interested Debian users. I
haven't listened to the talk but it seems to focus on Braille. Since he
reads this list, I'm sure he will correct me if I'm wrong on this.
While the video files have been available since 29 February 2008
according to the directory listing, they are very big and not easy to
play. I got CRC errors with the mpeg file in MPlayer and Winamp on
Windows would not play the MPEG file at all. Extracting the audio
stream helped but still wouldn't play in Windows and had very low
volume. I have now converted it to a relatively small mp3 file with
normalized audio and it seems much better to me. If anyone wants it,
please write off list. It is not huge but it is too big to attach to
email. If there is a lot of demand, I will put it up on a public web
server.
There is no reason at all why people can't download the video files and
convert like I did, but I am guessing that most people here won't need
the video stream and will want normalized audio. The mp3 file is about
1/3 the size of just the ac3 audio stream. Apparently MPlayer has no
way of normalizing after looking at the help and "grep"ing the html
docs. Mencoder doesn't normalize either. The first 2:30 is silence, so
the actual audio of the talk runs almost exactly 30 minutes starting at
2:31 into the file. If there are other accessibility talks that folks
want converted to plain audio streams, let me know and I'll see what I
can do. I am surprised at how apparently difficult that turned out to
be on Linux, even with many audio transcoding tools installed.
I find this talk interesting because it helps me associate a voice with
the name. I have read Samuel's replies before but had not heard him
give a presentation before. I came upon this talk by accident because I
happened to look at the 2008 meetings archive. For those who want the
original source, look at the following link. I hope the mp3 file will
be helpful to someone.
http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/
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