aaron said:
>   Most blind folks don't want to exit their screenreader
>   to use a program with speech support built in. 
>   They want the other program to work with their screen reader
>   and their screen reader to provide the speech.

got it.  so i think this should be fairly straightforward, actually:
put the text in an editfield for the screenreader to do its thing.

i will have more questions for you, but we'll take it backchannel.

***

tony said:
>   The rest, including Adobe Reader are also quite useless and inaccessible.

that's the impression i'd gotten, yes.


>   WE pioneered support for Adobe Acrobat.
>   However, it is still difficult to convert to plain text

the beauty of a plain-text format in the first place is that
you don't have to do any such conversion...


>   and to move from page to page.

do you want to even know about "pages" per se,
as the numbers existed in the original paper-book?

or do you want the text just to flow?  or have the option?

do you want to be told about things like a new section,
pictures, bold or italic text, a block-quote, things like that?

as you can see, i am quite naive about such things...


>   You can set it to load the full document
>   into one huge page but it will most likely
>   lock up the computer.  Also, who wants to
>   read a 3,500 line book all at once?

it would seem to me that bookmarking would be vital.
and some kind of navigational aids are indispensable too.
but what kind?  i'm willing to work with you too, tony,
to make this happen, but i really need your help to do it.
for the nitty-gritty, we can go backchannel to talk more.

(and yes, my programs will run on windows98.)

-bowerbird