On Monday 25 February 2019 at 00:58:31, Gregory Nowak wrote:

> 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'll assume that you meant to say that Orca works with xfce and mate, and
thanks - I didn't know that - I had always thought it was tied quite closely
into Gnome, so it's good to know I don't need that environment after all
(which I'm personally not keen on anyway, but would accept it if it gives me
the speech output needed).

> 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.

In fact it's a standard option on the installer menu, so I can simply select
it from there.

> 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.

Ah, neat, I hadn't realised it would make things easier than installing Orca
later; nice tip.

> 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.

Okay, thanks very much - I'll give this a go and see what I can end up with.

The person I'm doing this for is (a) not completely blind, just very visually
impaired, and (b) not planning to use the computer for much more than document
editing, so the variety of software which needs to be speech-enabled is pretty
limited. I'm thinking that that's going to make things easier for me.


Thanks,


Antony.

--
If my advice was worth anything, I wouldn't just give it away.

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