On Mon, Feb 25, 2019 at 11:16:08AM +0100, Antony Stone wrote:
> 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.

Let us know how it worked and what you did to make it so. I too (and
probably many others) have a visually impaired neighbour.

-- hendrik