On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 03:56:33PM +0100, Antony Stone wrote:
> I need to set up a machine for someone with Orca for speech output, therefore
> it needs to run the Gnome desktop.

Uhhhm, no, it doesn't. Gnome works with xfce and mate, though mate
provides a more accessible experience for orca users than xfce does.

> I'd very much prefer to do this without
> systemd if I can.

No problem, just choose one of the two desktops mentioned above during
the devuan install.

>
> Therefore I'm wondering what the current status of doing this on Devuan
> (preferably Ascii) is.

I'm not yet running an Ascii box with a GUI. However, if the Ascii
install is anything like Jessie, which I seem to recall it is, then
you just need to press "s" and <enter> when the boot menu comes
up. This will start a text install with speech. The beauty of doing it
this way is that it will setup everything for use with orca if you
choose a desktop during the install. You can do the install without
speech like you would do for yourself, and install gnome-orca after,
but there are some specific steps that need to be done for orca to
come up after the install. I believe the steps are described on the
debian wiki accessibility page.

>
> https://devuan.org/os/documentation/dev1fanboy/migrate-to-ascii and
> https://www.heise.de/select/ix/2018/8/1533453649894916 both tell me that I
> can't run Gnome at all, so I'm hoping that these are out of date.

Correct, gnome is tangled with systemd, so you can't run gnome without
systemd. If the person you're installing this for really needs gnome
specifically, then I'd suggest you install debian for that individual.

>
> Doing a fresh installation of Ascii doesn't offer me Gnome as a desktop
> envoironment choice.

Correct as mentioned above.

>
> However, installing without a graphical environment does then allow me to
> install "gnome" and "gnome-orca" as packages, which suggests to me that it is
> now supported.

Yes, with xfce or mate as mentioned above.

>
> Rebooting just leaves me with the standard text terminal login prompt, though.

Right, as expected without a desktop environment installed.

>
> So, in summary:
>
> a) can I use the Gnome desktop on Devuan Ascii?

No.

>
> b) if yes, how do I get the machine to present a graphical login prompt on
> startup?
>
> If anyone has any additional comments specifically related to using the Orca
> screenreader for speech (not Braille) output, by all means email me offlist.
>

Slim isn't accessible, so install lightdm and lightdm-gtk-greeter as
the login manager. some people have also had issues with orca and
speech-dispatcher not playing nice, while others didn't have these
issues. You'll know if you have them if orca and speech-dispatcher are
running, but there is no speech after login. I think I described how
to resolve this somewhere on this list. If you can't find that post,
and seem to have the mentioned issue, I'll either dig up the link to
it myself, or will provide a brief recap of what needs to be done.

Also note that if you use the accessible install, the installed system
will have both speakup for the text console installed, as well as orca
for the GUI. This also includes pulseaudio, which doesn't play nice
with speakup/espeakup. This is because espeakup expects to access the
audio hardware through alsa, while by default, speech-dispatcher
expects to access the hardware through pulseaudio. There are a few
work arounds, but the simplest is to purge pulseaudio, or at least
stop it from running at all, and configuring speech-dispatcher to use
libao through spd-conf(1). You can also do this by configuring things
in /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf, and killing
speech-dispatcher. If you can, it's best to reboot whatever
configuration method you used, since there are sometimes problems with
speech-dispatcher coming up and using the new configuration. I believe
debian wiki's accessibility page mentions this too, but I could be
wrong on that.

Also, I see no need to take this off list. As I understand it,
accessibility is one of the pillars of devuan. Feel free to ask if you
can't hunt down answers to other questions on your own, and I'll do my
best to help.

Greg


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