[nfbcs] Some questions about the linux world

[John G. Heim]

Here at the University of Wisconsin Department of Mathematics, we use 
nothing but debian. Debian always has a stable release, a testing 
release, and an experimental release. I use the stable release on my 
office workstation. But there is a problem in that when a new release of 
firefox or thunderbird comes out, it often does not work with the screen 
reader for the linux gui, orca. So I am stuck using old versions of 
firefox and thunderbird. And while I haven't checked for about 6 months, 
  last time I checked, the orca site did not have instructions for 
building orca on debian. I've never been able to get the latest orca 
source code to compile on debian stable. Orca has dependencies and those 
dependencies have dependencies and I always ended up breaking my 
installation by trying to update just the packages I needed in order to 
compile orca.

On the other hand, I use the debian testing release on my workstation at 
home and it's been very good. If you need to use debian, I think I'd 
recommend going with debian testing, currently code named jessie. 
However, I do actually manage to get my work done with the packages in 
debian stable. So I think you'd be okay either way.

But about those custom distros ... I think even the sonar andvinux 
developers recognize that in a perfect world, their work would be 
superfluouss. But it's just not a perfect world.  These custom distros 
do make it easy for people to get started with linux and the developers 
work really hard to get their fixes into the mainstream distros. In 
fact, the vinux and sonar developers are kind of on the cutting edge. 
When accessibility fixes get into the mainstream distros, they often 
come from the sonar and vinux developers.

Vinux is based on ubuntu which is, in turn, based on debian. So you 
might consider trying vinux. I used to have sonar on my workstation at 
home and it was excellent. I dropped it when they switched over to 
basing their distor on arch. If your instructor uses debian, it could be 
a problem for you to use a distro based on arch.

Finally, I'd suggest you subscribe to a list for linux users. There is a 
list for the linux gui screen reader, orca. orca-list-request at gnome.org

On 10/13/14 04:31, Vincenzo Rubano via nfbcs wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> my name is Vincenzo and I am a blind Italian computer science student. Looking for various information about linux, I came across this list and I decided to subscribe.
>
> Starting from this year, I’ll need to use linux for various projects at university; however, before beginning to test various distros, I’d like to ask you some questions. I am a novice in the linux world. I only have experience with Mac OS X (my primary system) and Windows.
>
> 1. First off, I was wondering wether anyone managed to get any linux distro with AT features enabled working on a single-board computer, like the Raspberry P or the Banana-p. Was the machine usable, or did it have too much latency/was it too slow to let you be productive?
>
> 2. Searching for information, I came across two distros that claims to be designed with accessibility in mind: Vinux and Sonar. Honestly, I noticed that these distros are popular only among blind users and could be considered something like a custom product for blind people. Since I don’t like this philosophy, I was wondering wether anyone had experience with “mainstream” linux distros and could recommend me what distro to start with.
>
> 3. Since my classmates and professors at university are going to use Debian, I’d like to know wether anyone knows what the most critical accessibility issues in Debian are and if there are some workarounds to bypass them. For instance, I read that Debian can be installed by a blind user on his own only if he has a USB Braille Display plugged-in during the first boot, so that Debian can enable Brltty and switch automatically to the text-based installation. However, I learnt that orca on this distro must be downloaded separately after the installation. Is that correct?
>
> 4. In some pages on the Vinux website, I read that Orca works better with Speech dispatcher than with Gnome speech (which is the default speech engine in Gnome, if I understood correctly). Can you confirm that? If so, how hard switch from Gnome Speech to speech dispatcher is?
>
> 5. From what I’ve understood, the most critical points to get an accessible GUI in a distro are the login manager and the window manager. Do you have any recommendations about which ones to pick/avoid?
>
> 6. Last but not least, do you know wether Orca works properly with gnome-terminal? If not, is there any alternative to make it accessible for a blind user?
>
> Thank you in advance for your help. Sorry for asking so much questions, but I’d like to make productive tests instead of wasting time on something someone else already figured out. I do believe that putting together all the information we have it could be even easier to communicate our issues with mainstream distro maintainers and, maybe, get their interest in fixing them.
>
> Looking forward to hearing back from you.
>
> Cheers
>
> Vincenzo.
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