Introduction

I am writing this article because there is barely any documentation or even reviews like this about Linux accessability. I spent ages going through forum posts and old documentation that didn’t really apply anymore and came up with this.

Before I start, I don’t mean to bash the Linux community in any way because of the lack of documentation: I can see exactly why there isn’t much documentation online about this. First of all, how many developers are blind or visually impaired? And secondly, How many people who are blind or visually impaired run Linux? Turns out, at least a few people, but nobody who wants to spend hours writing comprehensive documentation … except me.

I myself have had blindness from birth, as well as light sensitivity (photophobia) all my life, so when I got interested in computers, I was quickly disapointed in the level of accessability that they provided.

I played with computers for years without a screen reader or zoom, just high contrast, although given my age, I didn’t really need a computer yet. Later I discovered Narrator on Windows XP and how bad it was, but at least it gave me a starting point. I also later found NVDA and how much better it was, but ultimately, I wasn’t really happy with Windows itself, especially after I learned of the direction Microsoft was going in terms of spying on users for monitary gain.

So, like I think most geeks would do …

I decided to get a mac!

Voiceover, the built-in screen reader on the mac, was very good, but again, the mac desktop still didn’t seem customisable enough. It wasn’t a developer’s desktop, just a standard, consumer focused desktop experience. And although I still use macOS for video editing, graphics and audio production, its still by no means perfect.

But then I found Linux

Linux, as far as I could tell by using my iPad to watch youtube videos (how else do you learn in the modern age?), was what I had always dreamed of and, as I got older, I also started to really respect everybody making all open source projects possible. I loved-and still do love-the idea of opensource. The only thing holding me back was:

1. my old pentium 4 IBM thinkcenter with 1GB of ram
2. the seeming lack of accessability software, more spicifically, screen readers out there for Linux.

I was going off barely documented ways of getting ORCA (what I say is the number 1 screen reader for Linux) to work on desktops other than GNOME. I was doing this because Gnome 3 had just been released and my old computer just couldn’t handle it properly.. Not only that, but I had another problem. It was pretty hard to get Linux installed because there was no accessible installer.

At least I thought

Well, after about 4 years of trying, (now 8) I have to say that my situation, as well as, I can imagine, the situations of various other blind Linux users, has changed.

Debian - the ideal solution

Yes. Somewhat surprisingly to me, plain old Debian was one of the best options. For a start, Debian has a command line speach installer accessible at least for the net install CD image and the main Debian ISOs.

By pressing s at the boot menu for the cd, it will load the TTY and start a completely accessible speach installer with all the regular options.

This enabled me to install a distro of Linux, but I originally thought I would still have to use Gnome, or modify an XFCE or Mate installation for it to work (which requires site). Amazingly though, that was not the case. I tried XFCE with a Debian base, got it installed, rebooted, pressed enter on the grub screen, waited, saw the log in screen come up and then, shockingly to me, heard espeak say “screen reader on”. Lets just say I was very happy to here those synthasised, robotic words.

Most of the XFCE desktop is fully accessible out of the box on Debian (if you use the command line installer) and I am actually using it to write this article. Some things are still not working though,such as the thunar powered XFCE4 desktop and icons and the file manager itself, but since I use a terminal for those things anyway, I don’t really care. For those of you who need a file manager, although it won’t help you with desktop icons, I can recommend using the pcmanfm file manager as a substitute.

I also tried Mate, thinking that the Gnome 2 fork would be lighter on resources than Gnome 3, but also accessible because of it’s roots and it worked flawlessly. I would really like to thank Debian, as well as the creators of the XFCE, Mate and not forgetting Gnome desk tops for making Linux completely usable for me as a main operating system.

ubuntu Mate

After using Debian for ages, I decided to buy another used computer (HP dc-5700, 2007). This shipped with Windows xp, but I replaced it with Ubuntu Mate, just to see if I could make it accessible. I was glad to discover that, not only were the accessability settings set correctly out of the box, but Orca was also pre-installed and fully working. You can even use it on the live CD by pressing Win+Alt+s when the graphical stack loads up.

I love this distro, as well as the team who made it and clearly they know what they’re doing. In fact, 4 years on, I’m using Ubuntu Mate 20.04 to edit this.

added usability - compiz

I originally thought that compiz would be more of a pain than a benefit, because of my older hardware, but actually, especially on the ubuntu-Mate machine, it ran really well and gave me access to one of the most needed features for me …

Negative

I used invert colours on my mac so much, I began to miss it on Linux. When I found out about the negative plug-in for compiz, I gave it a try. Not only can you invert the whole screen, but the plug-in is even better than the mac’s version, because you can choose to invert only the current window as well. I also played around with the “enhanced zoom desktop” function, and this also works very well with the scroll of a mouse. If you just want a floating-window zoom though, I would suggest installing Magnus, as it is much lighter weight and is very simple to use (Compiz can be heavyish and doesn’t work on Wayland to my knowledge).

One of the reasons I didn’t get very far with some compiz features, and this is a minor gripe I have, was that the compizconfig settings manager is not very accessible, in that Orca doesn’t speak the labels of text boxes and key selection fields. While I can live with this, it’s a major pain setting compiz up, as you need to use Orca’s “flat review” feature to read the labels, which sometimes won’t read the correct label depending on the physical positioning of the control.

I don’t have to mess with it now though, because all it takes is one tweak in the Mate-tweak control pannel in ubuntu Mate 18.04 and below (for 20.04 you need to install some Compiz packages) and compiz is my default window manager. Even better, the negative and zoom plug-ins are enabled out of the box so all you have to do is hit the correct key combo.

The Tradeoff - Application Support

Because I use Orca as my screen reader, which is based on Gnome, meaning it works best with GTK applications, I have had some problems with QT application support. Before anyone tells me, yes i’ve heard of jovie for kde, but I honestly can’t wrap my head around how to set it up properly or even what on earth it is. I have QT accessability enabled and that gives me some support (applications like kate and kwrite work), but if I try to run, say, kdenlive, I get no output from Orca.

Similarly, electron apps, meaning most cross-platform programs these days, also present their own set of problems. Very recently, a lot of effort has been put into making these accessible and, as of April 2020, it’s good enough that I’m editing this article in Visual Studio Code, which is a very accessible electron app. There’s still more to do to get these apps (and the Chrome / Chromium browser that they’re based on) to work perfectly, with text selection being something that isn’t perfect yet, but Orca has come a long way since just a year ago when these apps weren’t accessible at all. I plan to write a future article focusing on just this topic, so stay tuned.

I would love to see people working more on Orca’s application and GUI framework support, as it is the only thing holding me back right now.

conclusion

To some up, I honestly think that Linux is more accessible than Windows. I can’t, as far as I know, install Windows with a screen reader (edit: this is certainly possible, video coming soon, but it is in no way made possible by Microsoft themselves). Also, the gtk standard is pretty common, so I think that most applications are accessible, whereas on Windows or macOS, some software providers (microsoft office for mac) decide to use a none standard way of laying out widgets. Therefor, I have more of a chance of either getting accessability support out of the box with Linux apps, or somehow being able to modify settings or in the worst case code to get it to work.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, but that’s all for now. I may publish more articles about this subject in the future, especially how to get things working articles, but you’ll just have to wait and see. Linux command line accessibility is quite high up on the list right now