Hi Mark On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 11:09 PM, Mark Trickett <marktrickett@gmail.com>wrote:

Hello All,

I am making some efforts, in association with others, to set up a bootable USB stick with Knoppix for the Adrienne audio desktop for a blind user. Since they are a diabetic, and have regular finger pricking for a blood sample for the sugar levels, setting up a braille output device is not an option.

I am cooperating with another person by email (and snail mail, to the

US) in this endeavour. I would appreciate comments about which browsers are better with various audio environments, and to remember that the established system will require to be run solely by the audio, including confirming all typed keys for input. In this regard, it may even need to report the actual keys typed when providing the password. Yes, that is quite insecure, but will be necessary for the targeted user to be able to log in.

Mark Trickett

From a hardware point of view a small box with a 3,5 mm stereo male ended fly lead to the speaker output on the PC with a toggle switch selecting between two 3.5 mm female sockets. Plug the PC speakers in to one socket and a set of headphones in to the other.

This gives the user quick selection between speakers or headphones for privacy when entering personal or sensitive information. Of course if this is for a laptop or portable OS on other PC's this wont be a suitable method but for a home PC it works. I don't know if you can buy these of the shelf but 15 minutes with a soldering iron and about $10 in parts is all that is needed.. -- Mark "Pockets" Clohesy Mob Phone: (+61) 406 417 877 Email: hiddensoul@twistedsouls.com G-Talk: mark.clohesy@gmail.com GNU/Linux..Linux Counter #457297 - "I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code" "Linux is user friendly...its just selective about who its friends are"

Mark Trickett <marktrickett@gmail.com> wrote:

I am making some efforts, in association with others, to set up a bootable USB stick with Knoppix for the Adrienne audio desktop for a blind user.

I've heard of this environment, but very few Linux users who are blind actually use it. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to set this up, but only that support options will be limited because, frankly, it isn't what most people are running. For speech in an Emacs environment, install Emacspeak. For speech at the console, install Speakup. For speech under X11, install Orca (preferably version 3.8 with Gnome 3.8).

Since they are a diabetic, and have regular finger pricking for a blood sample for the sugar levels, setting up a braille output device is not an option.

That's unfortunate.

I am cooperating with another person by email (and snail mail, to the US) in this endeavour. I would appreciate comments about which browsers are better with various audio environments, and to remember that the established system will require to be run solely by the audio, including confirming all typed keys for input.

These days, a Javascript-capable browser is a necessity. With this in mind, I'll give you three options: 1. Orca + Firefox. This is what I use when not in Emacs or at the console (i.e., for Web sites that really require scripting). 2. Orca + Epiphany-browser. I don't know how reliable it is these days, although work has been ongoing. For best results, you would need the latest software releases - the same holds for anything involving Orca. When last I tried this combination, it worked well but tended to crash. However, this was under Debian/Gnome 3.4. 3. Chrome/Chromium + ChromeVox. For speech-only access this should be very good. You'll need a version of Chrome/Chromium that includes support for Native Client (NACL). Note that the packages in Debian and derived distributions don't include this, so you'll need to run a build from elsewhere. ChromeVox can be downloaded and installed separately. ChromeVox has excellent navigation features and is designed as a speech-only extension to Chrome/Chromium. I don't use it because it's speech only and I want my braille display to work too. If LibreOffice needs to be part of the package, then be aware that a major accessibility regression introduced in version 3.6 have been fixed as of versin 4.0.3. There are also various accessibility-related distributions (mostly Ubuntu variants) that have much of the above pre-configured - notably, Vinux and Sonar. I haven't used them, since I'm perfectly capable of doing the configuring and I find Debian a better starting point from which to customize a system to meet my needs. However, they do exist and have their adherents (mostly people who are new to Linux).