Re: dosemu and accessibility

Julius Schwartzenberg
2021-03-30T17:42:55Z

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