Re: Emacspeak for w32 platforms?

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I agree, I've found supporting software under windows is a lot of work
and it does seem that the majority of windows users want their hand to
be held for everything. I use Jaws on my windows box when I'm forced
to turn it on and find it a constant frustration - the program is
expensive, has an error prone authentication system which is really
frustrating (plus you only get a limited set of keys) and in the end
you still only have a "dumb" screen reader. It also has some weird
bugs including one which crashes the system if it should try to read
two certain words when they follow each other (can't remember what the
words were at the moment) and a nasty little timezone bug which
prevents it from running if you use a daylight saving timezone which
is'nt a US timezone (makes you wonder what sort of mess will happen in
2000!).

One thing about jaws which has impressed me is the software
synthesizer which comes with version 3.2 - although its performance
does depend greatly on your system and hardware, I've found it to be
very good - clear, fast and supports multiple accents (e.g. US,
English) and languages. I'm looking forward to the day when software
synthesizers in the linux world reach the same level of quality. 

Eventually, I suspect someone who uses NT etc a lot and wants
emacspeak will write a driver for that platform (just like the servers
which have been written for other synths etc under linux/unix have
been written by unix/linux users who wanted to use emacspeak with
their synthesizers). Its one of the great things about open sources,
you want to move to a new platform and need drivers then its not too
difficult to work out what you need to do as you have all the sources
and you don't need to go through some sort of nightmare of
dis-assembling binaries etc. 

Tim 
T. V. Raman writes:
> Tim--
> 
> you're right --it's not easy to get things setup to work
> effectively on the darkside which is another reason why I've
> stayed away from releasing the server code.
> 
> Ideally, it would be great to run the tcl server, but the
> last time I checked, select was not quite implemented fully
> in TCLX for NT.
> 
> But at this point with a lot of twiddling I actually have a
> common .emacs across my Linux, Solaris and NT environments
> --and all the emacs packages I use on UNIX work on NT.
> 
> The CYGNUS kit is great --it's getting easier to install
> with every release.
> 
> However without resources I'm not prepared to support NT for
> Emacspeak  --if anything blind computer users who live in
> the MS world are used to paying thousands of dollars and
> having someone hold their hands for every little bit, and
> distributing an open source solution to that world is just a
> pointless waste of time.

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