Categories: accessibility
A11y / refs
Linux-blogger Fireborn @ (05-2025) account on trying to use Linux as blind user documents many insights on what is wrong currently and some tips.
A11y / related wfs
Settup qemu devuan instances with sound support
A11y / related software
Linux Speakup
project site:@
Orca
BRLTTY
AT-SPI
A11y / sound
Fireborn (see refs) has interesting insights:
- Running ALSA as root had one huge benefit: If the desktop died, you could still get speech.
- With PipeWire or PulseAudio, audio is bound to a user session. That session can’t share audio with root.So if GNOME dies, your login session fails, or you drop to a root console? You get silence.
A11y / devuan installation
1. How can a visually impaired user 'get' devuan ? (we must suppose that s(he) already uses a a11y computer?)) Most propable answer is : Only through already established a11y channels.
So i think a11y installation can not be done for the moment. At least not all of it's stages.
2. How can a visually impaired user interact with bios ?
A11y / devuan installation / tests
tests / exclusive tty use
Testing using Devuan without a visual-display-server/pixel . (X11,Wayland). Test SpeakUP on a qemu devuan instance.
tests / installation
A test must be perfomed for installing Devuan :
No visual display monitor will be connected to the test computer.
- throught a tactile display only
- throught a refreshable braille display only
- throught a speech synthesis only.
Would the visuall impaired user needs access to bios ? How can the pc boot ?
A11y / devuan packages
One way to find the Devuan support for accessibility related workflow is using the debtag system to see the accessibility related tags and then the related software in Devuan repos. Lets see an example:
$ debtags tagcat | grep "Tag.*accessibility" Tag: accessibility::accessible-via:at-spi Tag: accessibility::accessible-with:brltty-braille Tag: accessibility::accessible-with:brltty-speech Tag: accessibility::accessible-with:orca-braille Tag: accessibility::accessible-with:orca-speech Tag: accessibility::accessible-with:speakup-speech Tag: accessibility::accessible-with:yasr-speech Tag: accessibility::input Tag: accessibility::ocr Tag: accessibility::screen-magnify Tag: accessibility::screen-reader Tag: accessibility::speech Tag: accessibility::speech-recognition