I built (and rebuilt) and maintained for a number of years a machine for an officer of an organization where I used to work. He was born blind, but learned to keyboard (both braille and qwerty) in school.

I installed a Debian based version of the blinux project, which used the Festival software speech synthesizer (saving us hundreds of dollars on a hardware speech synthesis card). As I recall, Festival was only one of two or three choices we had for software text-to-speech synthesis.

Since he operated completely in plain text, with a speech synthysis process piping it to him, and dealt almost exclusively with email, we were able to build his machine on a used 4gb drive, which he never filled in the time I was at that office.

Teaching his to use emacs (which streamlined the process for him of handling email through a tts processor), was the only exposure I have had to emacs. I'm a vim kind of guy myself. But the emacspeaks project has rebuilt the emacs code to process most of its user interactions through tts for a blind user. It makes it possible to handle email and web browsing and lots of other functions I never explored.

Our blind user had to be patient until his machine would sing at him upon presenting him with a login prompt. After that he would log in in silence, but get an auditory cue upon success. Then, again in silence, he would evoke emacspeak. After that every keystroke would be echo'd back both to the terminal and also through the speakers.

I have no idea what is available for windows boxes. I've barely touched one in years.

-- Hugh