Re: dosemu and accessibility

Julius Schwartzenberg
2021-03-31T06:23:30Z

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
>>