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Re: linux accessibility

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From: Vsevolod Popov
Date: Jun 30, 2022 2:41PM

Hello,
29.06.2022 19:04, Nathan Clark пишет:
> Are their any screen reader users who have tried to learn Linux? What
> was your experience like?
I have currently Arch Linux installed on my laptop as the second system
and use it periodically.
The screen reader that is used for GUI is Orca as stated earlier.
The most accessible desktop environment is Mate.
Now Orca is usable in a lot of cases. Thunderbird, firefox are
accessible, chromium is accessible too but you need to perform some
tweeks to make it such.
Visual Studio Code is accessible for Orca too the developer of screen
reader and VSCode try to improve it.
Orca has some issues with LibreOffice and other things, but they are
fixing slowly due to the fact that Document Foundation works on
Libreoffice's accessibility. Also Orca'sdeveloper is appreciating any
feedback and tries to resolve the issues as good as it's possible.
I would recommend to begin with Debian with Mate installed.
The console screen readers you can use are eSpeakup and Fenrier.
After learning using Orca which is practically the same as Jaws and NVDA
I'd recommend you to learn how to compile it from source, it can help
you to keep up with the latest changes, also subscribe to Orca List and
send feedback for improving it.
After you feel that you can move to something more than preconfigured
Debian, I'd recommend you to try looking at Arch Linux. It always has
the latest packages including Accessibility and this is one of the huge
plusses of it. However, it's not friendly at all to beginners, don't do
my mistakes with installing Arch as your first distro! You will ruin
your user experience in Linux and won't really want to return to it for
a long period of time, I can tell that from my experience.
I hope that the information I gave is any helpfull.
Feel free to contact me and I can try to help as much as I can.
Thank you!
Vsevolod
--
Best regards,
Vsevolod
https://t.me/vsevapopov2
https://github.com/sevapopov2