[orca-list] How I got a pulse-free desktop with modern libraries and reiable a11y

[Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com>]

Hi, all,

I thought I'd post this on here since I can imagine there are others
who could benefit from knowing how to do this.

Problem:  Fully, reliably accesible graphical desktop system without
Pulse audio and yet with all modern gtk+3 libraries and most recent
version of Orca.


Solution in a nutshell:  install Debian Wheezy, leaving out the
graphical desktop when choosing software.  Then, tell aptitude not to
download suggested packages before installing gnome-session-fallback,
gdm3 and, lastly orca.

Step by step:

1.  Navigate to the page containing the Wheezy installation iso's and
burn one of them onto a cd:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
2.  In a virtual machine ready for it or at start up of your pc, pop
the disk in the cd drive and wait a few seconds.  You may  hear a long
beep if you are lucky.
3.  After the alotted 2 seconds or after hearing the beep, press s and
hit enter.
4.  Debian will start talking using speakup and espeakup.  If you are
on a VM, you will need to manually turn your volume up or wear
headphones or something for the rest of the installation as vmware
likes the volume way down for some reason on your virtual machines.
If you are doing it on bare metal, you will probably be fine.
5.  go through the different prompts answering the questions asked of
you.  These are pretty straightforward unless you tinker with debconf
settings or something until you get to the select software section of
the installation.
6.  Do not select 1 for graphical desktop.  You do, however want 10
for utilities.  Personally, I chose 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 since I use
Debian for webserver tinkering and need file server, sql databases and
ssh on there but, that's just me.
7.  Finish your installation and restart the machine when prompted.
8.  When the machine restarts, log in and become root.
9.  Bring up aptitude.
10.  Press control t to get to the options menu.  Arrow down to
options and press enter.
11.  Use your down arrow until you find "Automatically install
suggested packages" and turn it off with the space bar.
12.  Press q to quit and get back to your root prompt.
13.  At the root prompt, type the following:
   aptitude install gnome-session-fallback
14.  Instead of pressing y to install this, stop a minute and use your
numpad to read the area three or four lines above your cursor position
to find the suggested packages.  Among them, you will find xorg, gdm3,
and a few others along with the infamous pulseaudio.  Take note of the
ones that interest you, press n for no to get back to your root prompt
and then go back and do aptitude install and then all the packages you
want on a single line.  (Note, don't install gnome-shell, if you do,
you will need pulse audio since it depends on it for some idiotic
reason and you may as well not bother with this how-to.)  After
pressing enter, you will need to press y to confirm that you want the
packages you typed in.
15.  Type aptitude install gnome-orca.  Go ahead and confirm this as yes.
16.  Now, you need to configure speech dispatcher.  By default, it is
set to output through Pulse.  But, we turned our back on its awful
hideousness so, we need to tell speech dispatcher to output through
alsa.  To do this, press control d to stop being root and, as your
regular user, type spd-conf at the prompt.
17.  NO need to change anything until you get to the prompt asking
what will output the sound.  I'm afraid I don't recall the exact
phrasing of the prompt at the moment but, all you need to do is type
alsa and press enter.  Go ahead and say yes when it asks you if you
want to run a diagnostic and test out speech dispatcher.  This way you
make sure it is running.
18.  Once you have set up speech dispatcher to output through alsa,
type orca --t at the command line prompt and set up your orca
preferences in the console.  You may wish to toggle speakup off to do
this with numpad insert plus numpad enter.  This way the orca setup
script doesn't talk at the same time as speakup and you can
concentrate on it exclusively.
19.  Once your Orca preferences have been set up reboot your machine
by logging in as root and typing reboot at the root prompt.
20.  Once your machine comes up, you will find that gdm does not talk.
 You'll have to do this part on faith.  After you've waited a moment
to make sure your system is fully powered up, type your user name and
press enter and then type in your password.  Wait a few breaths for
this really minimal version of Gnome to come up.
21.  TPress alt f2 and then type orca and press enter to bring Orca
up.  Youa re in business.

You will notice that this is a really bare bones installation of x.
It is using the Gnome classic desktop so alt f1 brings up the menu
(not that there's much in it) and you have no nautilus desktop.  YOu
can then add all the programs you want manually one at a time using
aptitude and only have exactly what you want and always check the
suggested and packages to be installed section of the aptitude prompt
to make sure you are not accidentaly going to load up pulse audio.
It's not the system for the newbie or for the faint of heart but, I
only use it for tinkering with web aplication installations.  I am
currently trying out different learning management platforms for
deploying web-based courses, mucking about with Drupal, and trying my
hand at Prestashop.  All I have in my gnome desktop are iceweasel and
Emacs.  I'm going to add Libreoffice on there and figure out how to
run it as a server so that one of the web applications I'm testing can
display powerpoints using some of its components.  Either way, it's
nice to knwo that I have speech in the console and in the desktop and
that all the updates to at-spi2, Orca and all the gtk libraries and so
forth arre available to me.  If I fel like it, I can even do the
qt-at-spi thing on this installation and have it work well.  The
iterface is what I'm used to in Gnome (Unity and shell are nice but
the gnome classic interface is still quite nice!) and Orca really
feels responsive when speech dispatcher uses Alsa without PUlse Audio
in the way.  I even get Emacspeak without too much trouble.  If you
decide to try this installation method, let me know how it turns out.

Regards,
Alex M