From msp at altlinux.ru  Tue Apr 15 22:27:31 2014
From: msp at altlinux.ru (Michael Pozhidaev)
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 05:27:31 +0700
Subject: [Accessibility] Luwrain: the environment and OS for blind people
Message-ID: <m3ioqa5iuk.fsf@blard.localdomain>

Dear friends,

With this letter, me would like to inform you about the project that
has been started last year and currently already has first public
materials.The project name is Luwrain, it is a special environment for
blind and visually impaired people. Luwrain highly respects the
positive part of text-based tools like emacspeak and is provided as
the ISO-image (evidently with linux kernel).

Luwrain environment is constructed mostly inside of Java virtual
machine, gathering functions provided by a huge number of Java
libraries (for mail reading, web services access etc). First of all,
Luwrain should be treated as a project aimed to obtain new, more
efficient, speedy and elegant way of interaction of blind people with
PC's. Hopefully, Luwrain could be especially useful on small laptops
as companion for popular everyday tasks, including easy access to
popular services, like Twitter, Google products etc. Me is kindly
asking everybody not to take Luwrain as some kind of competitor in
area of well-known existing solutions to accessibility because me is
strongly convinced that the sector of Luwrain is not covered with
them. 

Is it possible that Luwrain become a part of Linux Foundation in some
way ?Linux Foundation definitely is a great place for attracting new
developers for interesting projects and meantime pays a lot of
attention to accessibility questions. It could make a great impact to
my work if that could be possible.

Currently available materials include some publications in English and
very first bootable images. Our website is open at:

http://luwrain.org 

but it is still very incomplete. The following links could help everybody
who is interested to find useful information about this work:

http://luwrain.org/community/publications -publications,

http://luwrain.org/download/distr/ - first bootable images,

http://luwrain.org/download/sources/ - the source code.

Looking forward to good and productive cooperation! 
Thank you very much! 
-- 
Michael Pozhidaev. Tomsk, Russia.
Russian info page: http://www.marigostra.ru/
English info page: http://www.marigostra.com/