Re: [orca-list] desktop environments

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

I did play around with xfce a bit. It seems that it's pretty hit or miss 
as to whether or not I even get speech now. The first time I started it, 
although Orca didn't start on its own, I was able to get it running, 
although I still had to enable assistive technologies and restart the 
system, because some apps, most notably Pidgin, did not speak. But then 
I lost speech after restarting, and had to delete ~/.config/pulse to get 
it back. Once I did, I found that neither the panel nor the 
notifications speak, and Thunar icons are also silent. Workspace and 
window switcher pop-ups are also silent, but that's something I can work 
around easily enough, although that's only because I run few windows on 
each workspace. Although I could work around the panel issue by using 
the panel settings menu and various applications and settings in the 
applications menu and finder, that application finder is really nice by 
the way, not being able to get to the panel really was an inconvenience, 
although that may have had more to do with the fact that there may be a 
shortcut to get to the panel that I didn't know about. I didn't try to 
switch out the notification daemon, because although that may have been 
trivial enough to do, I didn't get that far before I started having even 
more trouble getting the system speaking at startup. I did enable Orca 
in the startup applications, but that seems to be when my problems 
started to the point that I was unable to recover. Given the issues I 
had, I'm not sure I can recommend xfce for everyday use, though I did 
sign on with their gitlab so that I can report bugs.


Alexandro Jurgensen said:
What I’d love is a desktop environment overtop of which I could use Chromium in kiosk mode. I am aware that 
without a desktop environment behind it, chromium’s save and open dialogs would not be accessible with Orca. 
Any suggestions? The lighter the better.

I use MATE extensively here, and have used it without too many major issues for years. It's light, fast and 
quite accessible to Orca users. However, Storm's Ratpoison idea sounds like it would be better for your 
specific needs, since it makes Chromium fully accessible with Orca without getting in your way. The other 
thing I have done is run Chromium and Orca under jwm. This should give you Orca and Chromium running in the 
most minimal environment possible. I ran a script as an argument to startx as I recall. That script ran jwm, 
which is a very minimal window manager, Orca and the app I wanted, in your case Chromium, and nothing else. 
For what you're trying to do, this seems to be by far the best option.
~Kyle