Hi everyone,

Can anybody point me in the right direction please?
I am developing a suite of software for my blind friend.

This should run on a small DOS-based PC (Windows are not really
suitable for blind people) and I would like to include email
and text-only Web browser. Ideally, I would like to get access
to some source code to modify it and integrate with my talking
user-interface software.

We are even happy to pay for it (but please note that neither my
friend nor I are especially rich). I would also appreciate some
pointers as to where to get information how to write an email agent
and Web browser. While I have a long programing experience and
electronics engineering background, I know preciously little about
TCP/IP and the command structure of email and Web browsing.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

If that is the case, you need a text-only browser.  DOSLynx would be your best
bet, but it's written under one of Borland's Turbo Vision incarnations.  Those
use direct-to-video screen writes unless you explicitly force them not to.

It would be a simple (1-2 weeks' programming time, for someone completely
familiar with the Turbo Vision interface) to redirect all the text output to
stdout, so that the program could be redirected to a voder.  There's a few (my
memory fades after all these years) function calls such as TWindow::write(char
*text) that would need to be rewritten to make that work.

It would be a very interesting challenge to make the interface work.  I think
something that just read off the text of the page would be a good place to
start.  If it said something like "graphic, title is <whatever>" (<hatever>
being the ALT= text string), and announced links as "link #11 <text of link>
endlink #11", then I think it could be made to work.  The user would then type
in "11" to follow that link, for example.  All those hooks ought to be in
DOSLynx (the same function calls that start the highlighted text for a link
could be made to announce the link, etc.), but then you are starting to talk
some serious programming time.  It would take a few months to work all the bugs
out of the interface, at the very least.

It's an interesting project, though.  I'd love to take a stab at it.  But I'm
afraid I can no longer afford unfunded forays into these things.  Even with
respectable funding, I don't think I could spare the time from my commercial
projects.

http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/lynxport.htm

There is a web site about DOS email at

http://www.komaromi.com/dos-email

It has links to obtain software as well as a tutorial about actually
setting it up. I hope this helps.

I don't have the URL handy, but it is available on SimTel. If you can't
find it, drop me a line and I'll see whether I still can find the URL.

On Sun, 22 Jun 1997 11:23:22 GMT, apo...@world.net (Peter Newman)
wrote:

http://discovertechnology.com/LinktBV.htm

maybe you find something.