[NFBCS] Linux Screen Readers

[Bryan Duarte]

Primarily I am interested in having access to not only the shell but also the graphical side of the Linux OS. I use different flavors of Linux all the time through a SSH connection but I only do that to deploy software. I am doing my development on my Mac where I have access to Microsoft Visual Studio Code and other tools' but I would like to be able to boot up a Linux distro like Ubuntu and have access to all of those tools without a second parent system to interface with it. Does that make sense? 

I know there are ways of accessing Lynx or other browsers from the terminal, but to my knowledge there is no way to access graphical applications such as VS code, Firefox, or other tools. If Orca is the best screen reader we have to access the graphical side of Linux I feel we need to bring it up to date with other screen readers in terms of usability. Windows and Mac osX both have full desktop and terminal access with a screen reader. Since NVDA came out it has changed my belief that we could have a high quality, free open source screen reader for Linux.  Bryan Duarte Ph.D. 


> On Aug 22, 2022, at 2:44 AM, Doug Lee via NFBCS <nfbcs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> I'm not running YASR or similar; I'm using JAWS or sometimes NVDA on Windows. I'm currently writing this email
> in a Vim session on top of Mutt, a Unix mail reader for the text environment which is also full-screen.
> 
> I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for with cursor positions. If you mean you can't see where the cursor
> is, perhaps I scripted for that many years ago and still use it in JAWS; haven't done as much in NVDA with
> full-screen apps I suspect. I was under the impression though that cursor finding works natively most of the
> time now. Of course, some apps need to be told; for example, Lynx (the cat) needs the -show-cursor option, and
> Mutt needs "set arrow_cursor" in its .muttrc file.
> 
> As for actual numeric position, Alt+Del in JAWS gives me a good idea. In older JAWS versions it was
> pixel-based, but now it's character-based. Not sure about NVDA. Vim's Ctrl+G command presents position
> information on the bottom line as well.
> 
> Let me know if I missed the mark entirely here. :)
> 
> On Sun, Aug 21, 2022 at 10:40:06PM -0700, Brian Buhrow wrote:
>    hello Doug.  All of that makes sense, but when ever I use the cmd window in Windows, I
> can't get row and column information for the cursor position or for which line I'm currently
> reading from anything in that window.  Are you running something like Yasr in the WSL window to
> get speech directly from the virtual Linux box?  If not, how do you track row and column
> information?  That is, if you're cursor is on line 5 column 20, how do you determine that?  Or,
> If you're looking at some text, how do you determine where on the terminal screen that text is?
> -thanks
> -Brian
> 
> -- 
> Doug Lee                 dgl at dlee.org                https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.dlee.org__;!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ!Z3tn2Nja_By3lW0amC4sro7NCUWzMNgOPvwJcGOpNYeET-9A9yznWjIkmYi6Isa5yFFt0vUyEiwH7g$  
> No one alive is beyond hope; every second of life is a chance.
> (08/29/02)
> 
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