Snip: "does that mean that > some have considered undertaking writing speech for X/Windows or Gnome?" Yes, there is the Gnome accessibility project which is developing accessible toolkits and apps for Gnome as well as a screen reader, magnifier, and other assistive technologies. However, most of it is still unstable pre alfa software, and is limited in what you can do with it. It's not going to be a real solution for the blind for quite some time yet. Also KDE has started it's own accessibility project, but is even further behind in accessibility than gnome. Hth.
