Martin, You must have a devil of a time with spam. I used to read for a nearly blind guy who was way into computers. He had software that would magnify the text so each character would fill the screen, which he could then read through inch-thick glasses. However, it was more efficient to have somebody read it to him. I, in turn, learned an awful lot from him so it was a great trade. -- Lawrence Lile Martin McCormick Sent by: pic microcontroller discussion list 11/11/2003 10:12 PM Please respond to pic microcontroller discussion list To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU cc: Subject: Re: [OT] My Time Capsule I wrote my own screen reader in 8086 assembler and have been using it with slight modifications since about 1987 or so. One of the first things I put in it after getting the basics of just making it work running pretty well, was a feature I can turn on and off which looks for the > or | that many-times precedes quoted lines in Email messages. If the first character is either of those, no speech is generated. When the end of the line is reached, the flag is reset so it will speak if the next line doesn't have this character as its first, but the end result is that one can buzz through all the quotes very fast and only hear the status message which may say, "more" or "15%" or whatever the paging application you are using puts at the bottom. That makes the quotes very painless. The other thing I put in extremely soon after starting to use this program was a nuisance killer that silences the speech after the second repeated character for example a line of 80 dashes or stars or some other thing that is just lovely to hear several hundred times in arow. I'm not kidding! I override this if the characters are the digits0-9 or a-f or the letter w because of www. Those filters are probably the smartest thing I ever did in that whole project and the reason why I haven't gone outside and laid down in front of a stream of heavy traffic. That kind of stuff can drive a person batty in minutes. The traffic starts looking pretty good, though, when somebody sends a message and includes 15 or 20 screens worth of names also receiving a copy. That is also a massive violation of those people's privacy, to. It just seems so dorky. Andrew Warren writes: > Martin uses text-to-speech, as far as I know... But even so, > having to "read" through irrelevant quoted paragraphs and > headers/footers must be really time-consuming and frustrating. -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body -- http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu