jmdaweb / vbns-ao2

a vbns emulator (modified from vbns-espeak) which uses accessible_output2

vbns

Introduction

This is a braille N'Speak emulator, which sends the input from a serial port to a Windows screen reader, SAPI 5 or Espeak-NG. It can be used with a MS-DOS emulator (like Dosbox) and a MS-DOS screen reader (such as asap or habla) to hear the text sent by the screen reader in Windows itself. It was originally created by Tyler Spivey, and modified by Sukil Etxenike. Here is the original version.

Speech outputs

This project supports two output methods:

• One which, as the original version, uses eSpeak
• And accessible_output2 library, which can interact with many Windows screen readers and SAPI.

Requirements

You will need Com0Com for the emulator to work properly:

• Download for Windows XP
• Download for Windows 7 and newer (x64)
• download for Windows 7 and newer (x86)

To run the emulator, simply specify the port, and whether you want to use SAPI, Espeak or your screen reader, like this:

emu com8 --sapi

Will use the COM8 port (the default one for ASAP in Talking Dosbox), and will open a menu to select a SAPI voice. If you omit the --sapi switch, the screen reader will be automatically detected, and if you append a number to the switch, the voice corresponding to that number in the menu will be used.

To use an Espeak voice:

emu com8 --espeak-voice=en

Will use the COM8 port (the default one for ASAP in Talking Dosbox), and the english Espeak voice with the default variant.

To run from source and compile

You will need:

• Python (I use version 2.7.15).
• accessible_output2, libloader and platform_utils, by Christopher Toth and Tyler Spivey. They are included. They can be downloaded from http://hg.q-continuum.net.
• Other dependencies. Use pip install -r requirements.txt to install them, and run pywin32_postinstall.py -install afterwards.
• 7-Zip to compress the compiled executable using the included batch file.

To compile the executable, install py2exe-py2, and run python setup.py py2exe. Also, to make it run properly, you will need to delete the gen_py folder of the win32com package, usually found at C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\win32com.