Re: [orca-list] Accessible Installation, not Ubuntu

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

It depends on what you want and mean by accessible install (eg. do you
want speech, Braille or magnification, do you want it to use Orca or are
you prepared to use some other software to get it installed, do you have
a Braille display). As none of these have been specified I will give you
a general outline.

As far as I know ubuntu is the only one which currently uses Orca for
the install, but I believe other distros may be heading that way (they
may have got there and I may not be up to date with them all).

Next I would suggest GRML. This uses speakup for speech output and
brltty for braille. It also is configured to use software speech output
by default (so no extra equipment needed if you just want speech
output). GRML is mainly text based, but I think it is possible (I don't
know how much is involved) to get gnome and orca working on it.

Some distributions include speakup on the installation media, but in
most cases they don't supply any software synthesiser support on the
install media, so you would need a hardware synth. Slackware is the one
I know the most about, but there probably is others (I know gentoo did
used to include speakup, but then they dropped it, but I think they may
be looking at putting it back in the distribution in some form).

Some distributions don't include speakup on the standard install media,
but there are sometimes speakup modified versions available (fedora is
one, debian I think is another).

If you have a braille display, then some distributions include brltty on
the install media, I am not quite sure of which ones other than GRML do
as normally for install I just rely on speech.

If you have access to another computer other than the one you are doing
the install on, an option might be to do a remote install (either using
a serial console, telnet or ssh). I am not sure how many distros support
this, but probably this is the most widely available accessible install
system as it could be of use to others. I know fedora has supported this
(and probably still do).

Other than the above, it might be worth noting, although distributions
may include software in the distro, it does not necessarily follow that
it is on the install media as alot normally needs to be left off these
to allow for packages and other things required for the install.

Hopefully this gives you the general overview. If you provide specifics
then may be someone could name specific distros which meet your needs.

Michael Whapples
On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 07:24 -0300, E.J. Zufelt wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> Is there a linux distro, other than Ubuntu, that has an accessible 
> installer?
>
> Thanks,
> Everett