It's been awhile (hi, new stuff, help, apologies, etc...)

On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Mike wrote: You DON'T need one. It is set to accept PHONEMES, NOT English language words. To use it, you need to spell phonetically from a chart of their phonemes. There are additional characters added for some phonemes, particularly to handle the multitudinous vowel sounds. That results in some scrambled LOOKING words. For example, IIRC, "H38L8^U" (second to last character is an up arrow) will produce a marginally acceptable "Hello". I have a copy of the docs and get get you a list of the phonemes and what letters to use for each. There DOES exist some software (IIRC, after-market) that attempts to translate English words into their equivalent phonetic spellings. Though you can imagine how that task is tough enough to get through. Such software is generally VERY unsatisfactory. And even with careful phoneme translation, it will never sound better than "a martian in a tin can". Some of the fancier software operates as a TSR, and on appropriate hotkeys will read whole screen, content at cursor position, etc. But I have a blind friend who used to program using one; she ran it at a considerably faster rate than normal speech, and said that you get used to it; that eventually it's just like a friend with a very heavy accent. BTW, most blind folk are NOT happy about transition from TRS-80 and MS-DOS text mode over to Windoze and WWW with excessive visuals. Will the Insite Floptical fit? I have two, and would consider selling one. I thought that the Next used a 2.8M (4M unformatted) Barium Ferrite disk. The Floptical is 20M by adding optical alignment to Barium Ferrite disks. You COULD use the expensive 20M flopticals in a 2.8M drive and just ignore the extra optical stuff. -- Fred Cisin cisin(a)xenosoft.com XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com 2210 Sixth St. (510) 644-9366 Berkeley, CA 94710-2219