Re: dosemu and accessibility

Jude DaShiell
2021-05-02T18:23:42Z

Slint findings. For those that don't know, slint is the international
version of slackware and has had considerable accessibility upgrades done
to it by its maintainer Didier Spaier.
Findings, most of dosemu2 will build. The show stopper is comcom32 and
why that is is recipe for command.o fails to build. There is no
documentation I could find in README.md or INSTALL files either. I ran
make ultimately and ran into the command.o failure. My guess is that
package is too debian-centric. As near as I can tell that's the only show
stopper. I have log files for config make and install separate for
dosemu2 since some of these are quite large so if anyone is interested in
examining them please let me know and I'll send them. While doing this, I
was making dosemu2.org an orgmode file with installation notes for slint.
The dosemu2 run process crashed since it didn't have comcom32 or freecom
and it complained about several packages being too old. Slackware later
this year will release slackware 15.0 so perhaps some of these old package
complaints can be resolved with that version.
I used the tee command to generate those logs so they'll likely be
readable and complete.
For now Didier Spaier has no time to build dosemu2 so I'm doing a little
path finding function for him.

On Wed, 31 Mar 2021, Julius Schwartzenberg wrote:

> Alright, I will continue with top posting then. I think arch would help a lot
> as it has more packages, also through AUR. I would recommend starting from
> scratch and installing the fdpp, comcom32 and dosemu2 packages. fdpp and
> comcom32 provide a DOS environment inside dosemu2, so you do not have to
> provide a copy of dos. You can still do so if that is preferable however.
>
> Op 31-03-2021 om 14:13 schreef Jude DaShiell:
> > Yes, easier to get to with top posting.  Slackware hasn't yet got dosemu2
> > but archlinux has it in git and since hard drives are interchangeable here I
> > can run archlinux.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, 31 Mar 2021, Julius Schwartzenberg wrote:
> >
> >> Are mail replies at the top easier for you to process?
> >>
> >> It would be better to move to DOSEMU2 as nobody can really help with the
> >> older version anymore. Do you have the ability to sign up for a GitHub
> >> account? To receive the mails on dosemu2 one has to log on to GitHub and
> >> press "watch" and then "all activity" at the top of of this page:
> >> https://github.com/dosemu2/dosemu2
> >>
> >> Let it know if that turns out to be difficult. Using dumb or terminal mode
> >> would indeed seem the easiest way to have dosemu accessible as those modes
> >> are entirely text based. Are you aware of graphical software for dos that
> >> has accessibility features?
> >>
> >> Op 30-03-2021 om 21:59 schreef Jude DaShiell:
> >>>  Hi, I have cloned stuff from github before and built it on my system.
> >>> This
> >>>  distribution is slint.  When packages are new, slackbuilds.org may have a
> >>>  SlackBuild script made for the package so others can install it on slint
> >>>  and on slackware.  Slint is slackware international version and is at
> >>>  https://slint.fr/.  All of this work was done in dosemu 1.4.0.8.
> >>>  I learned sdl exposes no accessibility information at all so it's
> >>>  unuseable for any screen readers.  I thought that was the case and got it
> >>>  confirmed by a sighted person doing accessibility work on orca.  I'm
> >>>  running dosemu with espeakup and will try it later with provox and tdsr
> >>>  two other console screen readers.
> >>>  Better yet to move on up to dosemu2 as well.  Thanks for the heads up on
> >>>  this and if dosemu2 has its own email list I'd like to subscribe to that
> >>>  one.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>  On Tue, 30 Mar 2021, Julius Schwartzenberg wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>  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
> >>>>
> >>
>
>