I was amazed by the results from Tap Tap See. I pointed it at my guide
dog and it said, "light brown medium coat dog". But googling shows me
that it relies at least partially on humans to identify your objects. I
suspect if the human sees words on the screen, she sends it off to the
ocr infrastructure which then sends the results back to you. You may do
slightly better with the knfbReader app. I've had some limited success
with it reading computer screens. It seems to do better with GUI screens
than character screens. It maybe that it doesn't like white letters on a
black background.
I have a thumb drive with the Win7 installation image and an answer
file. So I can boot from this thumb drive and it installs Win7. I've
been able to keep up with the progress by having the knfbReader read the
screens to me. But when I've tried it on a character screen, like when a
linux machine fails to boot, it never reads more than a fraction of the
screen. I've tried the tedious process of moving the phone a little,
taking another picture, waiting for results, and trying again.
Eventually you might get enough info that way to figure out what's going
on. Or maybe not.
The NFB periodically has sales for the knfbReader app. I paid $75 for
it. It wouldn't be worth that just to read computer screens. It's not
accurate enough.
On 07/04/2016 11:26 AM, Mark Peveto wrote:
It's not perfect by any means, but brother when you don't have a pair of eyes handy it's better than nothin. I haven't bought knfb yet, although my
fiance, Alicia, has it.
Mark Peveto
Registered Linux user number 600552
Sent from sonar using alpine 2.20.13
On Mon, 4 Jul 2016, John G. Heim wrote:
If you can configure a serial console, you would be able to read those
messages. But I still say it's a process in an uninterrruptable sleep which
means the kernel can't kill it during a normal shutdown. That, in turn,
implies that it is a kernel bug in a device driver. In fact, I will wager it's
the driver for your sound card and the process that is in an uninterruptable
sleep is pulse. That's just a guess though.
If the machine is kind of old, it is very likely to have a serial port. Then
you need another computer and a null modem cable to configure a serial
console. There is a really good serial console howto on the web. No point in
me reiterating all that. If you have never configured a serial console before,
you are not likely to have a null modem cable lying around. But setting up a
serial console is a valuable skill for a blind linux sysadmin to have. You can
even do a serial console install of VMware ESXI.
PS: Thanks for the tip on tap tap see. I'd never heard of it before. I am
going to try it today. When I need to have a screen read to me by my phone, I
have been using the knfbReader app.
On 07/03/2016 01:08 PM, Mark Peveto wrote:
I've been working on this more today, pulling out all the tools I've got.
To the point i'm using tap tap see to try and get an idea of what's on my
screen when reboot hangs. The most i can
get is a message about bus socket display, and a command prompt.
Not real helpful, but I guess it's a start.
Mark Peveto
Registered Linux user number 600552
Sent from sonar using alpine 2.20.13
On Sat, 2 Jul 2016, Tony Baechler wrote:
On 7/2/2016 1:54 AM, Mark Peveto wrote:
The short version of a long story. I've just installed sonar on a dell
pc.
I've also got it installed on a compaq/hp machine, where the followig
problem doesn't exist. On the dell, sudo reboot seems to hang. Sudo
shutdown works fine. I've tried sudo shutdown -r now, sudo systemctl
reboot, and
other options. How, without sighted help, can I find out what's causing
this machine to hang when I reboot. What's strange is this...why does
it
shut
down just fine, but not reboot?
I'm not familiar with Sonar, so consider these random guesses. First, have
you
looked in /var/log/syslog and kern.log? There might be a process not
shutting
down properly. If you halt the system, all processes are killed and all
filesystems are unmounted. A reboot only resets the system, so I suppose
it's
possible that a process is behaving badly or the kernel can't unmount a
filesystem. I see this sometimes with slow USB devices, like if I copy a
ton
of files to my SD card. A more likely explanation is an ACPI or power
management issue. You didn't say how old the machines are, but it could be
a
BIOS bug. Recent kernels should work around this. Without knowing the age
of
the machine and the kernel version, I can only guess.
Also, the machine isn't a laptop, right? Laptops usually have power
management
issues. On Debian, there is a package called acpi-tools. Try installing it
if
it isn't there or purging it if it's there. I have better luck without it
installed. I would bet syslog and kern.log would have clues to your
problem. I
would check those first. Make note of the time you reboot the machine and
look
at those files with less. You could try booting a live CD to avoid adding
all
of the boot messages to the logs. You didn't say if that happens on a live
CD,
booting from the hard drive, other distros, etc. I''ve noticed most live
CDs
have strange shutdown problems. You might have to pass a parameter on the
kernel command line. Both HP and Dell have issues with Linux.
--
Tony Baechler, founder, Baechler Access Technology Services
Putting accessibility at the forefront of technology
mailto:bats@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Phone: 1-619-746-8310 SMS text: 1-619-375-2545
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