Re: dosemu and accessibility

[Julius Schwartzenberg <julius.schwartzenberg@gmail.com>]

Hi Jude,

Op 29-03-2021 om 10:43 schreef Jude DaShiell:
> I put a .dosemurc and .mtoolsrc file together since a 
> long-standing friend has some dos applications he'd like to run and both 
> of us are blind.
I saw some of your previous messages and I think it is important to 
highlight that as you are blind, you are using different equipment than 
what previous respondents probably assumed you were using.

This mailing list is barely used anymore by the rest of the DOSEMU user 
community and so are all the 1.x versions of DOSEMU. There is now a 
GitHub project started by Stas, the DOSEMU 2 project, with versioning to 
be 2.x based and interaction went over to the infrastructure that GitHub 
is providing. The accessibility consequences of this were most likely 
never taken into consideration.

Unfortunately it is not something that can be changed overnight, but I 
think it would be appropriate to strive to fix this, especially if you 
would be interested in being more involved and/or there might be even 
more DOSEMU users in a similar situation.

My proposal would be to set up some simple webpages that are friendly to 
screen readers and braille devices as part of the new DOSEMU 2 project 
with instructions to install newer packages particularly for 
distributions that handle screen readers and braille screens well or at 
least the distributions popular among users of such devices. Maybe your 
.dosemurc and .mtoolsrc could be provided as well.

There could possibly be an instruction to sign up your e-mail address as 
a so-called watcher to the DOSEMU 2 project or maybe we could link this 
mailing list so it watches the DOSEMU 2 project. The amount of traffic 
is quite significant, on some days only a few messages, but sometimes 
there might be over 20 mails a day. Note that you can respond to those 
messages by e-mail and the replies will by part of the conversation as 
usual.
Searching online I found a community on GitHub called Blind Computing. 
Maybe we could ask them for advice.

How easy would it be for you to upgrade to a newer DOSEMU if packages 
are not provided by your distribution? Which distribution are you using?
What do you think of my proposals regarding the mails?

Here is the GitHub project for DOSEMU 2, I do not know if you can access 
it comfortably:
https://github.com/dosemu2

Here is the page on the Blind Computing website about contributing to 
their GitHub project:
https://blindcomputing.org/contributing/

Best regards,
Julius