I think you may have answered some of your own questions already. For remote access, I use Telnet over a network. I've done this from other linux machines running speakup and from windows telnet clients. Both methods worked well for me. My total programming experienced involved using an optacon and later moving to speech when it became available. Speech wins out over the optacon hands down. Optacon was nice for looking at layout and format. I could never afford braille devices so can't comment on their effectiveness. I have all punctions turned on in my speech environment so I don't miss the commas and semicolons and stuff. When I use Window-Eyes in environments like Visual Basic, I can use a "mixed case" mode which will properly pronounce complex variable names such as SingleMouseClick as "single mouse click" - separate words. Little enhancements like this make programming in a speech environment pretty tolerable (to me at least). One linux compatible database server (postgresql from www.postgres.org) can be coupled into perl scripts and web based applications. In fact, this server can be remote accessed via TCP/IP also. The default client that comes with it is a commandline based thing that works well in a text based environment. In fact, they have a windows client that can be used to administer it as well. I haven't had a chance to check this client out to see how accessible it is though. These ideas don't have much to do with speakup specifically but I hope they are of some help. -----Original Message----- From: rjc [mailto:rjc@xxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 7:00 AM To: speakup at braille.uwo.ca Subject: Help the Floundering Newbie! OK, I'm still very confused about all of this. Perhaps if I describe my ultimate goals and what I see as my choices for accessing the linux environment, all you smart folks out there might have a better shot at helping me out -- so here goes! I want to be able to configure and administer a typical database driven website. Most likely, we'll use Apache, MySQL, and some combination of Perl and PHP. I've done my share of static html coding and have some knowledge of Perl and PHP. I have a background in unix, having done some systems admin and basic system's level C programming in the 80s on BSD. However, at that time I had access to a refreshable braille display and had a direct serial connection to the unix box. The display was a big win, since I could easily deal with unix speak. Try reading a bash script with synthetic speech, however, and you'll quickly see one of the reasons I'm so frustrated today... How do you guys program with speech? Well, ok, writing code is one thing, but reading other people's code is hard even if your sighted and have been doing it all your life. How does a blind guy do it effectively with speech? To accomplish my goal, I need to find a comfortable way of working in linux. The choices that I have are: remote login from PC with Jaws, local login and run emacspeak with dectalk on the serial port, local login to a kernel with SpeakUp compiled into it and dectalk on the serial port. Remote login might be the only way to go in general, since if I'm going to be charged with administering this server , the only connection I'll have is via the network, since the server will not be in the same building as our office. However, sighted people would use Exceed or something to run an X server on windows or mac and ssh to linux. However, all I've got access to is a vt100 emulator and the shell. Working this way is cumbersome. I don't even have a file browser. Hmm, but how about Samba (I think that's what its called) which allows mounting of file systems between windows and linux? This may be my only realistic approach. Emacspeak and SpeakUp won't help me if I don't have access to the physical hardware. Any other suggestions? What is emacs server? Thanx in advance for any words of wisdom! Rich _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup at braille.uwo.ca http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
