Hello from a new member, and some questions

[Tim Chase]

> The fact that it's no longer under development makes me
> nervous though. But thanks! I've taken a look at the site, and
> it looks like a great program.

Don't let the "no longer under development" keep you from trying
it out...one of the beautiful aspects of a live CD is that you
can try it without it ever touching your hard-drive (unless you
explicitly request that it does).  Oralux was a derivative of
Knoppix which has been under steady development for a number of
years now, and has spawned a number of custom CDs based on it.
In turn, Knoppix was based on Debian which is still very-much
supported.  Ubuntu is also a derivative of Debian, which shows
the strength of this heritage.

My suggested path would be to try Oralux first--which would cost
you nothing more than the time to download, and the price of the
CD to which you'd burn it.  If you like it, and it serves your
purpose, it has some of the Knoppix tools for installing to the
hard-drive; or you could try an install of one of its
parent/cousin distros such as Debian or Ubuntu.  I don't know how
accessible the installs themselves are, but both make it easy
enough to install "yasr" and "festival" packages for
speech/screen-reading.  Or they might even offer Speakup
(unfortunately, my Debian install doesn't seem to know anything
about Speakup in its repositories).

One of the beautiful things about a live-cd combined with a USB
thumb-drive is that you can boot off the CD from any supported
PC, keep all your files on the thumb drive, and have access to a
speech-enabled system with all your files, anywhere you go.

Another alternative to a USB thumb-drive, assuming such computers
always have network access would be to use some public file-store
combined with FUSE (file-system in user-space) such as mounting
"Gmail" as a folder, allowing you to keep all your files "in the
cloud".  This is a slightly more exotic option, but certainly
feasible.

Anyways, I hope this gives you some ideas to play with, and gives
you the encouragement to not be scared off by the "discontinued"
status of Oralux.

-tim