Re: dosemu and accessibility

[Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@panix.com>]

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
>