If the box has a serial port I plug in hardware speech and boot a dos boot disk. Many systems have the serial port header on the board so it is easy enough to wire one up. I just pay any sighted person to get it done, a couple of beers or a tenner usually does the trick. You need to make sure the BIOS upgrade is actually necessary and be prepared to loose a Jaws activation if you have it on that system. If you don't have sighted help you are kinda screwed so here are your options. You can boot the machine with a boot disk assuming you can navigate the boot screens to convince it to boot from floppy/USB stick. You then use an IOS application on the iphone or something on the droid to scan text off the screen. KNFB Reader is nice and expensive so try things like Prismo or saytext or digiteyes or bemyeyes. Dedicated people have used shift-printscreen to dump screens to a braille embosser on the parallel port, this is time consuming but can work. Note that if the upgrade is complex you may exhaust the patience of your volenteer depending on how dedicated to help you they are on bemyeyes. Also if the BIOS flash utility is graphical this can make it harder. If the utility appears to hang better to leave it for 10-15 minutes because if you switch off in the middle of an upgrade you end up with a bricked machine; Let's hope your power source is stable. If you have a friend on facetime and an Iphone or a friend on skype you can sometimes get them to read the screen with your camera. This can make it happen also. Regards, Kerry. On 19/07/2015 8:24 AM, David Mehler wrote:
Hello,
To those who have done bios updates using USB and/or software speech I'd like to know how. I've got a box that's needing a bios update. I use to have a dos boot floppy and an external synth with a serial port, all of that is not doable anymore.
Thanks. Dave.
On 7/17/15, Kerry Hoath<kerry@ciscovision.org> wrote:
Careful you get the right freedos, the new one is 32-bit and flashy.
I use asap for boot disks if you have hardware speech, I don't think Larry is chasing anyone over it these days. Otherwise there are copies of demo flipper and also provox around I have all of them.
Regards, Kerry.
On 18/07/2015 1:15 AM, John G Heim wrote:
Anybody have an old copy of the free jaws for DOS download? I need to flash a BIOS and I want to make a talking, bootable, USB thumb drive. I used to have a talking freeDOS boot floppy image but I got rid of it. I know jaws for DOS works with freeDOS. I downloaded a bootable freeDOS image so prety much all I have to do is to install jaws.
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