@Mike Gorse For me on arch linux orca is starting up fine on a GDM greeter session before logging in.

@Zvonimir Stanecic When comparing orca 50 to orca 49 there are nice improvements such as:

• The screen reader preferences window is now rewritten to be inline with all the other gnome dialogs, for example it now feels similar to gnome control center when navigating it. Generally use up and down arrow or tab or shift+tab to navigate, enter to activate, escape or left arrow key to go back.
• All the orca settings are now global meaning all the settings are now available in the main non app specific screen reader preferences window. For example controlling the layout mode used to be available within orca settings for firefox, chromium, thunderbird and all the apps that it made sense. Now there is a way to configure defaults for these settings in the non app specific screen reader preferences window and there is a way to override these in the app specific screen reader preference windows the same way other settings are handled.
• There is an ability to activate automatic language switching. So not only you can configure multiple settings profiles and manually cycle between these like we used to do when we wished to switch presentation into different synthesizer / language, it now automatically switches languages when the synth supports it similar to NVDA on windows. Also this is something that is already being worked on more for the orca 51 release, so we will get the total control which voices and which languages we wish to be considered for automatic language switching. This is called Voice sets. This allows various kinds of personalized setups e.g. I like to read all the english content with the slovak voice eventhough it does not provide correct pronounciation but I like to read czech content with the czech voice. And this is now doable for orca 51.
• Since orca 50 Browse mode can now be used in other document types besides the web for example when reading pdf files in the papers app, when reading any kind of documents in libreoffice writer and libreoffice calc. So called sticky focus mode has been tweaked to be automatically enabled with electron based apps such as deltachat and others.
• Some ground work is now in place for mouse review under wayland. It's not wired everywhere so gnome shell and some GTK4 apps might benefit from this in gnome 50. Except orca changes the shell has to implement this too so this applies to gnome as a whole and it's not yet available on mate and other environments.
• There is a D-bus based remote control feature for orca meaning it is now possible to make some self-voicing apps speak through orca similar to how folks are using NVDA controller client to speak through NVDA on windows. In fact many more orca features can be controlled this way. Again for orca 51 more work related to this is ongoing. There will likely be a way to write orca specific extensions or I'm not sure how the feature will be called but it will eventually be possible to load python scripts into orca at runtime to use all the features that can be controlled remotely and more.

Besides orca improving all the time, there are other accessibility related improvements that have accumulated throughout the year or even more but I think these are worth mentioning:

• Gnome calendar is now fully keyboard navigable with almost all the features being accessible to orca
• Firefox now supports reading tagged PDF documents. And this is also working fine with orca.
• There are loads of accessible GTK4 based apps e.g. gnome podcasts, Shortwave for listening to and even recording internet radio, Eartag for editing metadata in audio files, Gapless and Amberol as a nice music players, Gpaste for clipboard history, Fractal matrix client, Tuba mastodon / fediverse client, pipeline for watching and browsing youtube.

I think you most likely know all of this I am just pointing it out to showcase there indeed is a nice progress recently.

@Superdave! Oh actually it looks simple enough. Within the Online accounts part of the gnome settings UI there is connect an account grouping and inside that grouping there is an interactive list with services you can login to. Google is listed. So after selecting google here and pressing the enter key I am presented with a dialog called Google account. In this dialog there are two buttons one is Sign in, and the other is called Copy link. If the first one called Sign in is not working for you for some reason, you can press the second one labelled Copy link, paste that link to the web browser and once you manage to login using that authorize link you have just copied, the online accounts window should refresh with your account logged in. Then depending on your setup, you can see your google drive in the nautilus sidebar, you can see your emails within evolution and your calendar in the gnome calendar app.

I haven't logged into google specifically on my machine but I expect it to work anologous to the other services such as Microsoft 365 or webdav I have got setup here.

Let me know how it goes for you and in case you need more hints I'm happy to add more if you find it helpfull.