Scripts for vo users

We've written a couple of scripts to make using voice over easier These scripts are: say time, Say date, Say Both, and Move File These scripts will, when combined with Spark, (see the programs compatible with voiceover page) give you the ability to have a key combination speak the time, date, or both.
This is functionality windows screen readers have, and is something missing from voice over. You can download the source, or the compiled versions to the scripts, so you can modify them as you may need and use them however you like. These scripts are merely provided here for your convinience. There are no restrictions on what you may do with these files. There are no comments in the source, if this is a problem, please let me know, and I'll add them.

Move file is a script to take the place of cut and paste in the finder. Voice over users cannot cut files and paste them into a new location, and drag and drop doesn't always work. Instead, voice over users must highlight the file, copy it, go to it's new location, then paste the file into place. After this is done, voice over users still need to return to the original file, and delete it.
This script takes care of that problem. It will move the file to it's new location without you having to copy then delete the original file.
Due to some discussion on the voice over list, the following script will count the number of words in text edit. You can download the count words script below. word count
You can compile your own scripts with this one. To count characters or paragraphs, replace the word words with characters or paragraphs, depending on what you would like to count.
Note that this script counts the default document, so be aware of which document is the current one when using these scripts if you have multiple documents open. Also, be advised that web pages don't seem to count properly, so don't depend on the numbers if you're countint a pasted web page. You could of course convert it to text first before trying the count, but I don't know if that will help any.


Here is a version of text edit that has the character, word, line and paragraph counting built-in. It can be accessed by using the command-option-P key combination, or on the properties option under the file menu. Hope this helps some. TextEdit.zip
show local and network ips
If you need to know your ips, whether it's the gnat address your machine gets from your internal network, or the external ip, the one other computers on the internet see when they get a request from your machine, then you'll like this script. It will show them in a dialog box.

translate.pl

This is a script to grab books from project guttenberg, and translate them to braille on the fly.
You'll need to configure the folders in the script (they're hard coded) and this was initially a unix shell script that has been (partially) converted to perl. I had intended to complete the perl translation, but got sidetracked with lots of other things, and didn't manage to complete the task.
I may get back to it, but for now, just know it works, and in some circles, that's all that matters. :-)
Download the translate script here.

Also, be aware that this is not a user-friendly script. You'll have to know the number of the book you wish to retrieve. You'll need to visit project guttenberg to find out which number is associated with the book you would like to download.
After you've found the number of the book you want to download, then you'll execute the script like this.
./translate.pl 16960 which will download project gutenberg's text of History of the United States.
It will then convert the downloaded text file into braille using the nfbtrans program.
After that, it will copy the translated file to a folder of your choice.

If there are any additional scripts or applications you'd like to see here, please let us know, and we'll see what we can do to get them placed here.