Morseall is an accessability tool that allows you to control your computer using only a single mouse button by tapping out morse code. Pehr Anderson --------------------- Welcome to MorseAll! MORSEALL lets you control your computer by tapping out Morse Code. Behaviour of the mouse buttons in paddle_mode 0: Left Button -- hold down a short time for a dot -- hold down longer for a dash -- hold down a really long time to repeat the previous character -- Within a character, hold down to start repeating the new character Right Button -- hold down any length of time for a dash Middle Button -- hold down to repeat the previous character -- Within a character, tap to finish a character immediately Behaviour of the mouse buttons in paddle_mode 1: (default) Left Button -- tap quickly for a single dot -- hold down for a stream of dots -- hold down Left and Right for an alternating stream Right Button -- tap quickly for a single dash -- hold down for a stream of dashes -- hold down Left and Right for an alternating stream Middle Button -- tap to repeat the previous character -- hold down to continue repeating -- Within a character, tap to end the character immediately -------------------- Frequently Asked Questions about Morseall: Q. How do I exit morseall? A. Press the keys Alt-F4 to kill the terminal window. Press Alt-F4 again to kill morseall. Q. How do I control the mouse in morseall? A. The code map has three modes: Keyboard Mode mode where most characters are entered Punctuation Mode shortcuts for punctuation and commands Mouse Mode click the mouse and move it around Tap out the "mode" code to rotate between the modes. When you enter mouse mode, morseall will show you the codes Q. Can I use pull-down menus in morseall? A. No. "File" "Edit" and "Help" are examples of pull-down menus. These menus temporarily take over them mouse. A user can usually "click out" to get back to morseall so they won't necessarily get stuck. The red hat (start menu) has the same problem. I advise users to use keyboard shortcuts instead. Q. How do I change the morse code mappings? A. All code mappings are defined in a configuration file. /usr/share/morseall-data/morseall.conf If you want to configure morseall to work differently, copy this file to one of these locations and make your changes there. /etc/morseall.conf -- system-wide affects all users /home/username/.gnome/morseall.conf -- user-specific, user-editable When you upgrade morseall, the copied files will not be changed. Q. How do I set up morseall for someone who can only push a single button? A. Morseall can be controlled with a single button. For single-switch control, paddle_mode should be set to zero in the morseall.conf file. When paddle_mode is set to 1, the iambic keyer is enabled. The iambic keyer requires control over two buttons, one for dots and one for dashes. Q. What is an iambic keyer, and how do I use it? Morseall has an optional iambic keyer. To try out the iambic keyer inside morseall, switch to the "punctuation mode" and type the code for "iambic". Q. My kids like to pound on the computer. How do I set up morseall to make noise for them? A. Mine do too. Run morseall and type Alt-F4 to kill the terminal. When morseall becomes the active application, keystrokes will be called out by name. Mouse clicks will generate dit and dah sounds, as well as speaking the keynames. When you are done, kill morseall with Alt-F4. Q. I can't seem to get ^ and < to do the right thing under RedHat 9. A. On Redhat 9, we see a problem with caret and less-than. These codes will not generate the apropriate key. Fedora Core 1 does not have this problem. This problem may be fixed by upgrading to Fedora Core 1 (or newer). ----------------------- A rambling backgrounder: I've been mucking about with computer since I was 8 years old. Working with computers has always helped me. growing up isolated on a farm in rural North Dakota. The computer was a friend who was always there. The computer is a ruthless judge of intellect who never hesitiates to tell you when something was wrong. "Hello Computer, how are you today?" --Syntax Error-- "Hmm, I think I'd like to try out this new program I've been working on." --Segmentation Fault-- "Oh dear, well it looks like I've got some work left to do, perhaps you could help me figure out what is wrong?" --Illegal Instruction-- Well, The computer wasn't much a friend, but at least it was more communicative than my other friends, the animals. The animals were happy to just lie around waiting to get fed. I liked working with computers and studied how they worked. I thought it would be great if you could connect a computer directly to your brain. If a computer understood what you were thinking, you could use it all the time. It could take dictation as you merrily dreamed up all sorts of things. It could become a part of your thought process. I studied Electroencephalography. I read scientific papers about medical research, brain science, neural networks and such. I built an EEG and hooked it up to the computer. There was some software that could display the patterns of activation of various brain states. Different frequency components would stronger if you were alert or relaxed. It really wasn't useful for what I wanted to do though. I wanted to talk to the computer without having to speak. I wanted to enter commands without having to type. I wanted to be able to dream and have the computer make my dreams become real. Well, computers can't do that. Computers can't do much. You really have to poke them and prod them with lots of little keys and mouse strokes to get anything useful done. Ten years later, I noticed that there is one group of people who really need computers to be more accessable than they are. These folks would really like computers that would just magically do whatever they wanted without having to do all that poking and prodding. These folks are the folks that can't move their arms, or their legs, or their vocal cords. I don't now how many quadrapelgics there are in the world, but I know that if I were quadrapelgic, I would really want one of these magic computers. My mother told me one day about a person who had had a stroke and he could control a chin switch but that was all. He had no other motion available for his brain to control. He had some commercial software which cost a lot and kept crashing and he could sort-of use a computer with it but it really wasn't great. At that point I realized, I could do something useful. I spent a few weekends hacking togther a program for Linux, that alowed you to control the computer by tapping on the mouse button in morse code. It worked pretty well. The guy only had one computer so I bought him another one for testing. The nursing facility didn't have Internet access so I got a contractor to install a network so this guy could have Broadband. Brian Short has been testing this application for almost three years. I recently rewrote Morseall and expanded its scope to be resonably fully featured. The software is free, open-source, it runs on a free operating system. You can take any old computer, install Linux on it for free, add my software for free, and have a complete disability-enabled solution for only the cost of the machine. Since he started using this software, Brian has recoverd control over his first finger, and now is beginning to see some movement in his thumb. He had a stroke more than ten years ago and has been keeping busy sending lots of email since then. I'm excited to promote this software to disabilty solution providers. I hope to get a community of users that can help me make this into an even-better application. --pehr Building Morseall RPMS from Source on Redhat 1. Install some additional RPMs necessary for building from source. Redhat 8.0 requires the following: gnome-common-1.2.4.0.200210090339-0.snap.ximian.1.i386.rpm (rpmfind.net) at-spi-devel-1.0.1-4.i386.rpm (redhat 8.0 CDs) atk-devel-1.0.3-1.i386.rpm (redhat 8.0 CDs) 2. If you have the morseall tar.gz file, run "rpmbuild -ta morseall-xxx.tar.gz" If you have extracted the source tree and made changes to the Makefile.am files, or have bumped up the version number in "configure.in" then run "./autogen.sh". That regenerates the configure and Makefiles. Now you can run "make rpm" and it will produce an RPM with the correct version.