Welcome to the home of the Remote Access Bridge

The Remote Access Bridge, RAB for short, is a project to facilitate access to the Linux desktop and the assistive technologies available on the Linux desktop for blind and low vision Windows users. We hope to support other platforms in the near future, but currently the Remote Access Bridge has been mainly tested with the Windows environment.

The CSUN 2007 conference

On Thursday Mar. 22, Sina Bahram and Mike Grace demonstrated the Remote Access Bridge at the 22nd anual CSUN conference for persons with disabilities. Below is a link to an annotated version of the slides from the presentation, some upcoming features to check back for on this site, and an overview of what the Remote Access Bridge is all about.

Please use this link to download the slides:
The CSUN 2007 Remote Access Bridge PowerPoint Slides

Coming Soon

As discussed at CSUN and in various side conversations, there will be posted on this website a fully accessible Fedora Core 6 LiveCD with Orca, LSR, and the modifications needed to use them successfuly in a remote environment.
We hope to set up a download section soon so that we can have a much more widespread beta testing group. This initiative will include mailing lists, direct contact with the developers, iterative releases of the Remote Access Bridge software, and more.
NC State University has promised to make the Remote Access Bridge part of the open source community. The mechanisms for doing so, methodology of final distribution, and more are still being discussed and established. In the meantime a binary release will be available for testing.
The Remote Access Bridge has wiki documentation, instructions, and other forms of support. Check this website for updates, or join our rab-news and rab-users mailing lists.

Mailing Lists

rab-news mailing list

The rab-news mailing list is for news about the Remote Access Bridge, information on website changes and additions, and more. To subscribe to the rab-news mailing list, please send an email to rab-news-subscribe@lists.RemoteAccessBridge.com with the word "subscribe" in the subject line, without the quotes. You can also use the above link to automatically start your email client with this email already filled in and ready to be sent.

rab-users mailing list

The rab-users mailing list is for discussions about the Remote Access Bridge, information on beta releases, a place for users to discuss their experiences, and more. To subscribe to the rab-users mailing list, please send an email to rab-users-subscribe@lists.RemoteAccessBridge.com with the word "subscribe" in the subject line, without the quotes. You can also use the above link to automatically start your email client with this email already filled in and ready to be sent.

How It Works

The RAB tunnels protocols such as SSIP and ESD from the Linux environment, facilitating the ability of the RAB to drive a text to speech engine for screen reading and play system sounds from the remote machine. In this way, the screen reader user can use a screen reader on a Linux box remotely, while still hearing the system sounds associated with the closing of dialogs, error messages, startup sounds, and more.

How to get the Remote Access Bridge

The RAB is going through Beta testing currently. Due to licensing issues, a general release is not available at this time; however, please contact beta-request@RemoteAccessBridge.com to become a Beta tester and download a copy of the RAB.

Contact Information

Name:	Email:
Mike Grace	mcgrace@RemoteAccessBridge.com
Sina Bahram	sbahram@RemoteAccessBridge.com