Mark Trickett <marktrickett(a)bigpond.com> wrote: In that case, the interesting tools are: Speakup - a screen reader that loads as a kernel module and provides access to the console. Emacspeak - a speaking UI for Emacs. Orca - a screen reader for Gnome (and increasingly for other desktop environments such as XFCE). This last is the most complex of the tools and it relies on accessibility features (API implementations) in the underlying UI tool kits, desktop environments and applications. For this you'll want Gnome 3.6 and preferably a distribution that will keep pace with later releases as they come out with improved access. For speech synthesis I would choose ESpeak, at least as a starting point. The largest pitfall is that for distributions that use PulseAudio, integrating the above solutions can be awkward, so you may encounter tricky audio configuration problems that have been much discussed on relevant mailing lists. There are specialized distributions such as Sonar and Vinux which pre-configure these tools; both distributions are based on Ubuntu if I remember correctly. All of the above (except Emacspeak) are packaged by widely used distributions, including Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu, so the choice of distribution should be based on considerations other than accessibility, since they all supply essentially the same packages in this respect. This is just the start, of course, but I hope it helps.