This project is designed to gather information and downloads for access products for platforms that have fallen out of mainstream use. Examples include DOS, Pre-OSX Macintosh and OS/2.
As time moves on, these operating systems are kept alive via emulation and ports. FreeDOS is a good example of this; it can be run inside a virtual machine such as the free VMware Player.
In 2023, the software and hardware needed to support access to these old operating systems is mostly unsupported. For example, most speech synthesizers are no longer being manufactured. If you do manage to obtain one, it is likely that the screen reader you want to try will be a demonstration version which is now impossible to register because the company that produced it either went out of business or is no longer supporting it. This project has been created in hopes of changing things.
ASAP was a screen reader made by Microtalk. The most recent version I have found is from January 2002. The demo appears to be fully functional, but plays a tone and announces a message periodically.
Download demo of ASAP, January 2002This screen reader is freeware and made by Dolphin. I don't know Much about it, but from searching the manual it seems to only support Dolphin synthesizers.
Hal Lite downloadJAWS for DOS was made by Henter-Joyce, now Freedom Scientific. It was made freeware in 1999, and is available for free download.
Download JAWS for DOS (Installation help)
This screen reader was made by Telesensory and includes braille support. As far as I can tell, there was ScreenPower Speech, ScreenPower Braille, and ScreenPower Integrated (speech and braille).
Screen Power Speech was retrieved from here.
Tinytalk was a screen reader created by Eric Bohlman of OMS Development. There is a demo of 1.67 out there, which to my knowledge only has a nag at the beginning and a delay.
This screen reader was made by Alva Access Group.
Download Outspoken 3.0 for WindowsThis program was created by Kansys in the 1980's. The current version includes source code.
Vocal-Eyes was created by GW-Micro. Checking in September 2010, it appears to be abandoned and no longer sold and has been removed from the GW-Micro FTP site as of September 27, 2010.
Vocal-Eyes 3.0 demoThis screen reader came with an external keypad. I don't know much about it. There's a DOS and OS/2 version in here. The DOS version doesn't seem to have documentation. Download on archive.org
This screen reader was created by Alva Access Group. This blog post has links to Outspoken 8 and 9.0.
Files for the Dectalk PC, PC2 and Express can be found at the Dectalk files index. For the PC2 and Express, both versions 4.2CD and what I think is 4.61 are provided.
Many more Dectalk resources are available at Jake's site, see resources below.
Here is the Contents of the Accent driver disk.
Here is a post with a link to files for the Accent Messenger IC.
Sounding Board 2.7 and Speakout 1.2
I have created a guide on how to set up DOSBox-X to work with a screen reader.
So far, I know of the following software I can't find.
If you have any more information or downloads to add to this page, please Email me.
I'm also looking for hardware.