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Thread: is there a modern Linux screen reader?
Number of posts in this thread: 5 (In chronological order)
From: Mike Warner
Date: Wed, Apr 29 2015 12:07PM
Subject: is there a modern Linux screen reader?
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Hello,
half of my dev team uses Linux, and I'm making them get more active in
testing for accessibility. They do keep accessibility in mind when coding,
but they don't have the means to test with a screen reader. Can anyone
recommend a good one that runs on Linux? I've seen references to Orca, but
it's no longer maintained and the last release was some time ago.
Thanks,
Mike
From: Steve Faulkner
Date: Wed, Apr 29 2015 12:16PM
Subject: Re: is there a modern Linux screen reader?
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On 29 April 2015 at 19:07, Mike Warner < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> I've seen references to Orca, but
> it's no longer maintained
>
Orca is maintained and development is ongoing:
https://github.com/GNOME/orca/commits/master
--
Regards
SteveF
HTML 5.1 <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/>;
From: _mallory
Date: Thu, Apr 30 2015 12:40AM
Subject: Re: is there a modern Linux screen reader?
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On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 02:07:40PM -0400, Mike Warner wrote:
> Hello,
>
> half of my dev team uses Linux, and I'm making them get more active in
> testing for accessibility. They do keep accessibility in mind when coding,
> but they don't have the means to test with a screen reader. Can anyone
> recommend a good one that runs on Linux? I've seen references to Orca, but
> it's no longer maintained and the last release was some time ago.
Orca is maintained, and has a lively group of users who also give
feedback and help with testing via the Orca mailing list.
You can always get the latest Orca master at github, but be sure
you have the latest Gnome when you do that. I'm running Trusty and
I'm already a bit behind latest.
Documentation does lag though, you really want to go through
the mailing list archives to figure out where to get started as
Orca's old way of starting up with a dialog has changed.
Keep in mind that Orca is very very very dependent on how Gnome
works and Gnome accessibility. Same goes for Gecko-based
applications (FF, Thunderbird). Webkit-based apps work now as well.
You really want to run Orca no older than 3.4.2 and that
is not the latest-- before the Gnome 3 versions Orca was at times
almost unusable.
Anything running GTK should work fine, stuff running Qt4 will suck
and Qt5 promised some a11y stuff but nobody's seen working stuff
yet.
MATE is another windowing env that supports Orca, people say it has
good accessibility. Vinux is an Ubuntu-based Linux which, on the plus,
will install and come up talking and have everything "on", but on the
bad side, tends to be behind current Ubuntu releases. Sonar (I'm not
really sure what that's based on) might be even better for your testers
as it comes with, in addition to Orca, a screen magnifier (very
important to test) and it has something that, if the computer has a
webcam, is supposed to allow people to move the mouse cursor with
their head movements, which sounds cool but I have no idea how well
it works.
_mallory
From: Matt Arnold
Date: Thu, Apr 30 2015 6:04PM
Subject: Re: is there a modern Linux screen reader?
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I find that Orca tends to be pretty sucky on most alternative desktops
MATE/XFCE/LXDE, but then again I haven't checked much since I wrote a
minimalist replacement
On 04/30/2015 02:40 AM, _mallory wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 02:07:40PM -0400, Mike Warner wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> half of my dev team uses Linux, and I'm making them get more active in
>> testing for accessibility. They do keep accessibility in mind when coding,
>> but they don't have the means to test with a screen reader. Can anyone
>> recommend a good one that runs on Linux? I've seen references to Orca, but
>> it's no longer maintained and the last release was some time ago.
> Orca is maintained, and has a lively group of users who also give
> feedback and help with testing via the Orca mailing list.
> You can always get the latest Orca master at github, but be sure
> you have the latest Gnome when you do that. I'm running Trusty and
> I'm already a bit behind latest.
>
> Documentation does lag though, you really want to go through
> the mailing list archives to figure out where to get started as
> Orca's old way of starting up with a dialog has changed.
>
> Keep in mind that Orca is very very very dependent on how Gnome
> works and Gnome accessibility. Same goes for Gecko-based
> applications (FF, Thunderbird). Webkit-based apps work now as well.
> You really want to run Orca no older than 3.4.2 and that
> is not the latest-- before the Gnome 3 versions Orca was at times
> almost unusable.
>
> Anything running GTK should work fine, stuff running Qt4 will suck
> and Qt5 promised some a11y stuff but nobody's seen working stuff
> yet.
>
> MATE is another windowing env that supports Orca, people say it has
> good accessibility. Vinux is an Ubuntu-based Linux which, on the plus,
> will install and come up talking and have everything "on", but on the
> bad side, tends to be behind current Ubuntu releases. Sonar (I'm not
> really sure what that's based on) might be even better for your testers
> as it comes with, in addition to Orca, a screen magnifier (very
> important to test) and it has something that, if the computer has a
> webcam, is supposed to allow people to move the mouse cursor with
> their head movements, which sounds cool but I have no idea how well
> it works.
>
> _mallory
> > > > >
From: Mike Warner
Date: Fri, May 01 2015 12:03PM
Subject: Re: is there a modern Linux screen reader?
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Thanks all. I read that Orca was no longer being developed. Thanks for
correcting me. I've sent the download link to my dev team. I read that
Orca comes pre-installed in some OSs. I'm just not sure which desktop
environment by team is using.
Mike