As a low vision / blind user, So, I'm looking to install Linux after a 10+ year hiatus - Any advice, distributions or other articles or list servs someone can point me to? BlindArch, seems dead #a11y #blind #linux
I would say Ubuntu in X11 mode would be your best bet, but check their documentation before making the leap to see if it fits your needs: help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-…
Sorry, accessibility is still one of Linux's weak points. It's known but it's taking a bit of a back seat until Wayland is fully rolled out and accessibility support is worked out on that side.
If you can, I would recommend sticking with Windows for now. For all of Microsoft's faults, their accessibility efforts are some of the best in the industry.
Pinging @pixelate and @esoteric_programmer because they have Linux solutions and links where someone, totally blind, can get started. I'm playing with Linux on a virtual machine and actually really like it! @the9thdude @JStark
ok so, it all depends on what you want to do with your computer, but in the meantime, here's a list of what you should try, take it in the order it's listed here, ranked by how advanced you should be with linux before trying it. General advice will follow after the list, but this list is important, so I'll write it here at the relative top
fedora mate or linux mint mate, those are equivalent here. A windows xp like interface, with a very familiar desktop for that kind of user. Also, very beginner friendly because of that, so you should start with that one
fedora workstation, with the gnome desktop. This has some accessibility issues here and there, but for the best part it's even easier to use than mate, because you got a graphical application store and stuff like that, which you may not get with fedora mate. This one is higher involvment than mate, so I recommend you try it only after a week or so working with mate. To get to the top bar in there, where you could open the settings and all that, you use ctrl+alt+tab
fedora kde or kde neon. This is what you use if you want a windows like experience, specifically windows 10. The start menu will feel quite familiar, so will a lot of apps, and so will the top pannel accessed with alt+windows+p. Settings are a bit lame, but that's a very solid, and modern looking, option. Wayland here also works better than gnome, because they implement a bunch of legacy features and stuff like that, it's also the most extensive and compatible with lots of things desktop to date, but it's also very advanced when it comes to customisations, so it should be tryed later perhaps
arch with any of the above. If you feel that your experience with the standard distros I mentioned above is slow and bloated, I recommend you use this. Talking arch isn't needed anymore and hasn't been for a long time, you grab an arch iso and boot it. Once it's booted, press down arrow and enter once, then you're in speaking mode, enjoy, all speakup commands aply. Arch now has an installer included in the iso, called archinstall, which makes life a lot easier if you're looking for that. Once you're booted into speech mode and connected to the internet, you go to highlight tracking in espeakup by pressing capslock+ctrl+8 afew times perhaps, then type archinstall and you're off to the races
Now, some general advice, I have no way of knowing how to make it more specific because I dk what you use your computer for
If you want to change audio profiles from time to time, or move apps between audio devices or sinks as they're called in the nomenclature, the app you're looking for is called pwvucontrol. If you want to route sounds from one app to one or more other apps, jack tooling comes in handy here, the most accessible one I know is called qjackctl. All of those can be found in the graphical application stores, their technical names are packages, though sometimes you might hear them refered to as flatpaks, think of those as the same thing.
If you need a graphical mastodon or go to social compatible client, tuba is a very good app. If you play audiogames, audiogame manager can do a lot of the difficult work, though note that that's not in your package stores, so you have to download it manually. Musescore is accessible, if you're using midi sequencers, and I'm working with a person to make a full DAW accessible for some time now, so stay tooned. I heard on the audiogames.net forum that there's a DAW which is already accessible for us on linux, but I forgot how it's called, so unfortunately that's how it is for now. As an email client, like on windows, thunderbirt works very well. Also, because of how it functions on linux, it doesn't block or crash the screenreader or whatever. If you need a reliable torrent client, fragments or transmission are very good options, though I recommend fragments because its ui is far less cluttered. For podcasts, in my opinion there's nothing better than gnome-podcasts, especially after I reached out to them and had the accessibility conversation with great success. If you want to watch youtube videos with privacy, I recommend pipeline, even if there are other apps out there, just search for youtube in your application store and you'll find lots of things. It can connect to peertube as well, which makes it even better for this kind of stuff If you want a whatsapp client, there are lots of them actually, I dk really what to tell you about those because I use whatsapp through a matrix bridge, however I heard whakarere is a good one, so perhaps try it. For telegram, I recommend either the official client, or one called paper-plane, although you'll have to type a command or so in the terminal, but you'll have to do that from time to time anyway, so yeah. It doesn't support calls yet from what I know, but it's still under active development. For matrix, I recommend fractal, although element is also a good option. For signal, flare is very good from what I heard. For virtualisation, another gnome app but that's what I got the most success with nowadays, I recommend gnome-boxes. Not the best accessibility wise, I have to get in contact with them and ask them about stuff, I said I would, but I forgot and didn't have much time lately, perhaps someone here can as well?
For more apps and app recommendations, gnome-circle has a lot of great apps, but also you can just ask on mastodon or dedicated linux communities and someone will point you towards an app that would suit your workflow. If that app has accessibility issues, well, you're in a position to start the accessibility conversation, which is a good thing actually!
Warning for electron users! in order for your apps to work, you have to type this command first: sudo echo ACCESSIBILITY_ENABLED=1 >>/etc/environment. I hate it, it's not required with recent enough chromium embeddings, probably likewise for very new electron versions, but meh, it's how it is I suppose because apps don't update their electron versions in like forever.
Speaking of, @WeirdWriter, I remember having an interesting discussion with you about linux, where I wrote a lot of stuff similar to this, but it was much more detailed in some respects. I didn't bookmark it though, but yeah, if you could find it, that info would be useful now, because I feel I'm forgetting something, however I dk what exactly. If people have more questions, I'm glad to answer them
thanks for all this information. I did linux heavily 30+ years ago and don't remember a lot from back then. Dabbled since losing my functional vision... 20 years ago... dabbling here and there every few years... Really just want a working easy linux distribution that I can run in vmware and pop in to play with it. Looking for smething that doesn't combust with updates or require a lot of maintenance.. The fact that the accessible coconut install worked great gave me hope until i went to do updates and barf....
don't use so called blindy distros. They only fragment the ecosystem, while reinforcing the myth that devs don't have to work on making the accessibility of their app better, because we'll make our own special distros which work in the same way gamers make slightly altered distros made for their kind of workload. Meanwhile, on this side of the pawnd, we have to use old, half accessible apps, not update whatsoever, and pretend it all works fine. All this tends to absolve people of responsibility, on both sides of the coin, living everyone kinda happy, but only on the surface, similar to AI companies and their relations to blind people, where even we hipe this kind of stuff because it does half of a good job badly, but good enough to give us some false confidence that we'll one day live equally in this ableist society, because of technology which shall make us whole again and stuff like that. The former is not quite as bad as the latter, but I hope you get the point either way. Any mainstream distro will certainly be better than anything built for us in this way, because we benefit from the work everyone else does in making this ecosystem awesome, while they benefit from us because we work together with them to make this place more inclusive and possibly even better than existing platforms. We can only do all of this imense work together, segregation is the problem, not the solution
Omonarc
in reply to Jeffrey D. Stark • • •Accessibility
help.ubuntu.comJeffrey D. Stark
in reply to Omonarc • • •Omonarc
in reply to Jeffrey D. Stark • • •Sorry, accessibility is still one of Linux's weak points. It's known but it's taking a bit of a back seat until Wayland is fully rolled out and accessibility support is worked out on that side.
If you can, I would recommend sticking with Windows for now. For all of Microsoft's faults, their accessibility efforts are some of the best in the industry.
Robert Kingett
in reply to Omonarc • • •the esoteric programmer
in reply to Robert Kingett • • •ok so, it all depends on what you want to do with your computer, but in the meantime, here's a list of what you should try, take it in the order it's listed here, ranked by how advanced you should be with linux before trying it. General advice will follow after the list, but this list is important, so I'll write it here at the relative top
Now, some general advice, I have no way of knowing how to make it more specific because I dk what you use your computer for
If you want to change audio profiles from time to time, or move apps between audio devices or sinks as they're called in the nomenclature, the app you're looking for is called pwvucontrol. If you want to route sounds from one app to one or more other apps, jack tooling comes in handy here, the most accessible one I know is called qjackctl. All of those can be found in the graphical application stores, their technical names are packages, though sometimes you might hear them refered to as flatpaks, think of those as the same thing.
If you need a graphical mastodon or go to social compatible client, tuba is a very good app. If you play audiogames, audiogame manager can do a lot of the difficult work, though note that that's not in your package stores, so you have to download it manually. Musescore is accessible, if you're using midi sequencers, and I'm working with a person to make a full DAW accessible for some time now, so stay tooned. I heard on the audiogames.net forum that there's a DAW which is already accessible for us on linux, but I forgot how it's called, so unfortunately that's how it is for now.
As an email client, like on windows, thunderbirt works very well. Also, because of how it functions on linux, it doesn't block or crash the screenreader or whatever. If you need a reliable torrent client, fragments or transmission are very good options, though I recommend fragments because its ui is far less cluttered. For podcasts, in my opinion there's nothing better than gnome-podcasts, especially after I reached out to them and had the accessibility conversation with great success. If you want to watch youtube videos with privacy, I recommend pipeline, even if there are other apps out there, just search for youtube in your application store and you'll find lots of things. It can connect to peertube as well, which makes it even better for this kind of stuff
If you want a whatsapp client, there are lots of them actually, I dk really what to tell you about those because I use whatsapp through a matrix bridge, however I heard whakarere is a good one, so perhaps try it. For telegram, I recommend either the official client, or one called paper-plane, although you'll have to type a command or so in the terminal, but you'll have to do that from time to time anyway, so yeah. It doesn't support calls yet from what I know, but it's still under active development. For matrix, I recommend fractal, although element is also a good option. For signal, flare is very good from what I heard.
For virtualisation, another gnome app but that's what I got the most success with nowadays, I recommend gnome-boxes. Not the best accessibility wise, I have to get in contact with them and ask them about stuff, I said I would, but I forgot and didn't have much time lately, perhaps someone here can as well?
For more apps and app recommendations, gnome-circle has a lot of great apps, but also you can just ask on mastodon or dedicated linux communities and someone will point you towards an app that would suit your workflow. If that app has accessibility issues, well, you're in a position to start the accessibility conversation, which is a good thing actually!
Warning for electron users! in order for your apps to work, you have to type this command first:
sudo echo ACCESSIBILITY_ENABLED=1 >>/etc/environment. I hate it, it's not required with recent enough chromium embeddings, probably likewise for very new electron versions, but meh, it's how it is I suppose because apps don't update their electron versions in like forever.Speaking of, @WeirdWriter, I remember having an interesting discussion with you about linux, where I wrote a lot of stuff similar to this, but it was much more detailed in some respects. I didn't bookmark it though, but yeah, if you could find it, that info would be useful now, because I feel I'm forgetting something, however I dk what exactly.
If people have more questions, I'm glad to answer them
GitHub - paper-plane-developers/paper-plane: Chat over Telegram on a modern and elegant client
GitHubPeter Vágner likes this.
Jeffrey D. Stark
in reply to the esoteric programmer • • •the esoteric programmer
in reply to Jeffrey D. Stark • • •