Re: [orca-list] Do we need "accessible" linux distributions anymore? was Re: Go to upper left and lower right corner in orca.

[Jude DaShiell <jdashiel shellworld net>]

On Fri, 25 Jan 2013, Kyle wrote:
Slackware has been installable without sighted assistance for a very long 
time.  A supported hardware speech synthesizer is required and an 
installer will be installing with the speakup.s kernel and will have a 
console-based environment to use once completed.  grml is a bit different.  
Hardware or software speech can be used to install and run afterwards and 
the last time I checked that out you needed the grmlmonster.iso to do it 
which fits on a dvd only.  You're left in a console environment after 
installation in grml too.  If you know what you're doing, it's possible to 
install orca and all the eye candy on slackware too but you need to get 
the slacke gnome distro which is an add-on for slackware and install that 
after slackware then you can start playing with orca.  With grml it's 
supposed to be possible to get all the eye candy and orca on the system 
but I haven't yet done that so don't know detailed steps for that so won't 
write further on that subject.  A real failure though is gentoo.  That 
worked for a short time a few years ago but so far as I now know the 
accessibility work died off.

> According to Alex Midence:
> # Trouble is, they are all essentially Debian based.  If you want to try
> # other stuff like Red Hat clones (Fedora, Centos, ETC.), you?re out of
> # luck without sighted assistance.  Same thing for Suse and Slackware.
>
> Not entirely true, at least for openSUSE. I did an install of the GNOME 64-bit
> CD in a virtual machine, and I didn't require any eyeball dependencies. I
> can't say the same for Fedora or Slackware, as I haven't tried them recently,
> but I know that I can use and install openSUSE. It's true that it's not as
> easy as Ubuntu, which plays a bongo sound, I press control-s, and it starts
> talking, or Trisquel, which just starts talking, but it is a bit unfair to say
> that no non-Debian-based distros can be installed or tested without installing
> additional eyeball dependencies. In order to get openSUSE talking, I booted
> the CD, waited about a minute and a half just to be sure the desktop was up,
> pressed alt-f2 and entered "orca" without the quotes. From there, I found
> openSUSE to be nothing short of amazing to work with, and I highly recommend
> it, especially to newer users who don't want a cluttered interface, and don't
> want to learn a lot of command line geeky stuff. I hear Fedora is as good, but
> it does still require some configuration after the initial installation, which
> sadly doesn't speak. I do understand, however, that it is a goal of GNOME to
> have a keystroke that will always activate Orca, as long as it gets installed
> into the distro, which is fortunately the case for most of the well-recognized
> names, so the number of mainstream distros we are able to use without hacking
> around or eyeballs is going to increase greatly, hopefully within the next 2
> to 3 GNOME versions.
> ~Kyle
> http://kyle.tk/

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jude <jdashiel shellworld net>
Adobe fiend for failing to Flash