If you are setting up Puppy 4.3.1 for anyone who is visually impaired or anyone who would generally like to use a screen reader with speech output, you might find foksyfeyer useful. Though created quite a long while ago, it nevertheless works fine in Puppy 4.3.1 and includes a yasr/speechdispatcher/espeak screen reading environment and a menu driven system which provides easy keyboard access to its included inbuilt console (commandline text) applications.
The console (commandline) apps provided in the dotpet include: "nice" a great wee text editor, which works in traditional fashion including [the familiar use of ctrl-c, ctrl-x and ctrl-v] and provides a human friendly menu bar; edbrowse (another editor and also a text mode web-browser with ssl and simple javascript support, which is very powerful but a bit tricky to learn; Lynx webbrowser (with ssl and simple javascript support); sc, a spreadsheet program; krecspeak voice recorder (to ogg and mp3) and player (uses sox for functionality); and a simple inbuilt rxvt console (fonts) magnifier. The whole system has been fine-tuned and configured so everything works well together.
Installing foksy involves a few simple steps:
1. Download the following two dotpets from
www.puppylinux.asia/ (login: puppy; password: linux):
EDIT: No longer at puppylinux.asia. Instead you can find the files at
arkitektia.com under section Products -> Software Designs
http://puppylinux.asia/tpp/foksyfeyer/f ... .0.0-1.pet
(the above pet contains all of the above apps yet weighs in at only around 3.5 MBytes).
and a small patch dotpet so that foksyfeyer will work with Puppy 4.x series (tested on Dingo and also Puppy 4.3.1):
http://puppylinux.asia/tpp/foksyfeyer/f ... rDingo.pet
2. Actually installing the above two dotpets is enough to get foksyfeyer running with almost complete functionality. However, if you want krecspk (the voice recorder) to function, you need to install the following dotpet version of sox (other versions of sox often didn't include mp3 support, but this one does):
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/dis ... 2.18.1.pet
You can always now read the installed help file at
/usr/local/share/doc/sreadenv/foksyinstallREADME.txt
(or read it readable online at
http://puppylinux.asia/tpp/foksyfeyer/f ... README.txt
However, the following should be enough to get you going anyway ->
Brief Installation Instructions:
1. Install the above three dotpets in order.
2. Open an rxvt console and enter the command:
3. The above command automatically creates (without further user interaction), amongst other things, an entry in the file /etc/profile.local, so you need to then reboot your system to complete the install. i.e. Reboot once you've finished doing that, and finished reading all these instructions! :-)
4. Once puppy reboots, open an rxvt console and enter the command:
The above command activates the yasr, speechdispatcher, espeak screen reader environment included with foksy.
5. Finally, in the same rxvt console, enter the command:
to get the menu of all the apps and facilities provided.
For more information, choose Help from the menu, or read the documentation files automatically installed in
/usr/local/share/doc/sreadenv
Disclaimer: like all installations I suppose, install foksyfeyer at your own risk of course!
Obviously, your underlying sound system must have been previously t ested as working (e.g. Alsamixer set up to allow play and record at sufficient volume - for recording it is usually good to set record volume to maximum and to boost it as in this thread post:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 105#205862
EDIT: Oh... I forgot to mention that foksyfeyer comes with a GUI version of the voice recorder called wrecspk. After installation of the above dotpets you should find wrecspk as a JWM Menu item in the Category Multimedia. It is a gtkdialog frontend to krecspk.
You might find the following hot-key commands useful with foksy:
Alt-x to temporarily stop the speech
Alt-w to re-read the whole visible console screen
Alt-q if you are in the "nice" editor and want to quit out of it.
Moving the cursor down to a line usually causes that line to then be read.
Read the menu provided help info on yasr for more speech control key information.