Good grief, a text mode word clone? The amount of work involved in that would be out of this world. I think our only hope here, people, is to hope the eventual speech access to gnome will give us access to some of the word processors in Linux that save in word format. None of them are perfect, but I think an xwindows screen reader would be a lot more productive than trying to write such a beast. And no, this is not a prelude to the "we don't need xwindows" rant that I just know someone is going to reply to this with. I'm with you on this, ok? I might not use speakup much, being a primarily emacspeak user <no, *that* isn't worth going on a rant about either, I learnt emacspeak first and only use speakup occasionally when necessary, personal preference>. Basically I'm much happier in a console or in emacs myself. All I'm saying is that, I can't imagine too many people other than us would have a huge amount of use for a word processor like that. I seem to have vague memories of a console version of word perfect existing at one point, if you bought the commercial version but don't quote me on it. I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist now in any case. What I'm trying to say is, right now, we just have to live with what we've got. If we want to do more than read word documents, we've got to run windows until someone writes a screen reader that'll let us use star office or something of the sort. If we want to use javascript, we've got to use windows until someone writes a screen reader that'll let us use netscape or Galion or something. I know, I know, it's harsh, but most sighted people aren't going to write these for us in console mode. They can already use all this stuff in x, and open source, like it or not, usually involves people writing what they personally have a use for. If none of us can or have the time to write this stuff ourselves, most likely it isn't going to get done. I know, this is harsh, and is probably going to result in me being flamed off the list, since I'm not a regular contributor, or a regular user of speakup, but while I'm here, I thought I'd say it. The same thing applies to kirk, and whoever else writes speakup. They'll write what they need first, and afterwards what other people want if they have the time and feel it's worth it. To get better service than that, you've either got to get involved in a project that more closely mirrors what you need in a program, learn to program yourself and write it yourself, or live with the decisions that the programmers make. That's just the way it is in the open source world, I'm afraid. As someone who doesn't know, and probably never will know c or c++, I'm in the same position as most of you. We can make suggestions, we can make bug reports, and we can help new users with what we know and they don't yet, to pay for what they give us, but that's about it. As it is, at least with speakup or emacspeak or something like that, we can talk to the developers. It isn't going to cost us thousands of dollars for access to what software's available and what we get might more closely resemble what we want, rather than what primarily sighted developers think we want. and finally, just to end this rant and reply to another thread, hardware vs software synthe. again, software speech is something we're all just going to have to live with. I prefer hardware speech myself, but I'm not using it much right now. I'm moving around all the time, often have limited space for things, and I just don't want to fuss with the cables and junk that the hardware synthe brings. Not only that, the amount a hardware synthe costs can put it out of reach for a lot of people. Not to mention, using a laptop with a hardware speech synthe can be a *major* pain in the neck, as a lot of you can testify. It's not something to get into a religious war about. When Tuxtalk is eventually written, those people who don't have a hardware synthe, for whatever reason, will just have to live with the fact that they won't be able to see the early bootup messages. 95% of times, that doesn't matter at all. And in my case, I'll probably end up using both, depending on which is more practical, so if I really get into trouble, I can plug the hardware synthe in and figure out why it is that my linux kernel has suddenly decided not to talk to me. But you aren't going to lose what speakup can currently give you. If you're still using hardware for speech, you'll still get the same output as speakup has always given you, and people who can't or don't want to use a hardware synthe will have access to the linux console, at least, which'll probably bring more blind people into linux, which is a good thing by anyones standards. Now I'm out of here before I rant any more, and going to duck into my flameproof bunker for a while.
