Accessibility hardware for the blind

I'm teaching the Open Source Unix certification track at NJIT (using
FreeBSD 6.2) to a group of physically challenged students. Some of my
current students have extremely low vision and I have several candidates
for the next rotation of the classes that have similar low-vision
problems or are completely sightless.

I need to know if an audio solution exists (in hardware or software)
that will speak monitor output. I need something that will work
independently of X windows. I've tried using gnopernicus in both KDE
and Gnome and I've never gotten its audio component to work. I can turn
on KDE's talking tools, but it only speaks commands and entered text in
specific applications (like Koffice). I need a screen reader that will
speak the entire screen (and terminal windows).

I haven't found a software solution that addresses all the needs of a
spoken command line environment so I'm looking for a hardware solution
(appliance or device) that will speak the screen, but I haven't found
one, yet.

One of my students was an employee of AT&T in their Unix division in NJ
and is considering a job-offer from a consultant who will need him to
administer servers using WebMin and a command line environment, but
screen readers such as JAWS that work under Windows, do a poor job of
interpreting WebMin and will not read the I/O from a terminal window
created by Putty. So, in addtion to needing something that will speak
console I/O, I need something that will properly interpret a Webmin
environment. One portion of the course does teach using Lynx as a
browser and Webmin (if one uses the simplest theme) will work in that
environment.

Any ideas, experiences, or recommendations that you have to share would
be very much appreciated.

Tim Kellers
CPE/NJIT


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