Hello All, I am about to set up a USB stick as a bootable Linux installation for someone else who is blind. I am aware of the Adrienne audio desktop that comes with Knoppix, and that there is the Orca screenreader that some here use. I would appreciate any comments, recommendations or other suggestions, along with comments on pitfalls. One consideration is that they cannot use a braille output, they are a diabetic, and the regular pricking the finger to test the glucose levels makes a braille output device impracticable. If there are comments about enabling audio at login, or boot time, and comments about various loaders that might be relevant, that too would be appreciated, this will be my first foray in putting any Linux onto a USB stick. I would not normally consider autologin, but there is reason that it might have merit for this scenario. Regards, Mark Trickett
Mark Trickett <marktrickett@bigpond.com> wrote:
I am about to set up a USB stick as a bootable Linux installation for someone else who is blind. I am aware of the Adrienne audio desktop that comes with Knoppix, and that there is the Orca screenreader that some here use. I would appreciate any comments, recommendations or other suggestions, along with comments on pitfalls. One consideration is that they cannot use a braille output, they are a diabetic, and the regular pricking the finger to test the glucose levels makes a braille output device impracticable.
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.
Hello All,
I am about to set up a USB stick as a bootable Linux installation for someone else who is blind. I am aware of the Adrienne audio desktop that comes with Knoppix, and that there is the Orca screenreader that some here use. I would appreciate any comments, recommendations or other suggestions, along with comments on pitfalls. One consideration is that they cannot use a braille output, they are a diabetic, and the regular pricking the finger to test the glucose levels makes a braille output device impracticable.
If there are comments about enabling audio at login, or boot time, and comments about various loaders that might be relevant, that too would be appreciated, this will be my first foray in putting any Linux onto a USB stick. I would not normally consider autologin, but there is reason that it might have merit for this scenario.
There's also Vinux - vinuxproject.org. I haven't followed development there for about a year, but it was a good strong community then. Cheers, -- Trish Fraser, VVMZ4 91L2V -35.67910, 142.66607 Fri Dec 28 14:25:41 EST 2012 GNU/Linux 1997-2012 #283226 counter.li.org cassiopeia up 5 hour(s), 53 min. Mageia release 2 (Official) for x86_64 kernel 3.3.8-desktop-2.mga2
On Fri, 2012-12-28 at 14:27 +1100, Trish Fraser wrote:
Hello All,
I am about to set up a USB stick as a bootable Linux installation for someone else who is blind. I am aware of the Adrienne audio desktop that comes with Knoppix, and that there is the Orca screenreader that some here use. I would appreciate any comments, recommendations or other suggestions, along with comments on pitfalls. One consideration is that they cannot use a braille output, they are a diabetic, and the regular pricking the finger to test the glucose levels makes a braille output device impracticable.
If there are comments about enabling audio at login, or boot time, and comments about various loaders that might be relevant, that too would be appreciated, this will be my first foray in putting any Linux onto a USB stick. I would not normally consider autologin, but there is reason that it might have merit for this scenario.
There's also Vinux - vinuxproject.org. I haven't followed development there for about a year, but it was a good strong community then.
Cheers,
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Hi Trish, I notice in your sig that you are using Mageia. I was a true blue Mandrake/ Mandriva user for over a decade, but I needed a distro which maintained some mapping software I use, and the only one which was up-to-date was Suse, because the developer of the program was the maintainer of its RPMs in the SuSe repositories. I tried Mageia myself, earlier, but I missed the PLF and easyurpmi.zarb.org which were key to my experience. Oh, I was also a member of the Mandriva Club, and used to get the PowerPack versions of each release, and they were outstanding. Running OpenSuSe 12.2 has its difficulties because it package management processes are very time consuming. I sent some feedback to the developers but received no reply, and certainly nothing has changed. Does Mageia have something similar to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org on their side? How do they handle the non-free stuff like Adobe Reader, and Flash? Andrew Greig
Hi Andrew,
I notice in your sig that you are using Mageia. I was a true blue Mandrake/ Mandriva user for over a decade, but I needed a distro which maintained some mapping software I use, and the only one which was up-to-date was Suse, because the developer of the program was the maintainer of its RPMs in the SuSe repositories.
I moved to Mageia from Mandr* as soon as it was announced - didn't install immediately, obviously, but as soon as we had a release. I've been using it since and love it, and seriously like the kind of organisation.
Does Mageia have something similar to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org on their side? How do they handle the non-free stuff like Adobe Reader, and Flash?
Mageia uses urpmi, and handles the various levels of non-free with separate repositories. There are three levels of repository: core (free), non-free and tainted. When you install from a live CD you get free and only free, so if you want packages from non-free or tainted, you would need to add other repos after installation. It means that PLF is really not needed, unless they have packages we don't - and I have installed stuff from the Mandr* repos that weren't in Mageia's, and had it work okay. That mightn't be the case now, because the two distros have diverged some since the fork. More info here: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_2_Release_Notes#The_Mageia_online_reposito... or http://goo.gl/QnW37 in case the big one breaks. Cheers, -- Trish Fraser, VVMZ4 91L2V -35.67910, 142.66607 Sun Dec 30 20:14:18 EST 2012 GNU/Linux 1997-2012 #283226 counter.li.org cassiopeia up 11 hour(s), 5 min. Mageia release 2 (Official) for x86_64 kernel 3.3.8-desktop-2.mga2
participants (5)
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Andrew Greig -
Jason White -
Mark Trickett -
Trish Fraser -
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