Just spent today at work with Linux. Fedora's Mate spin still works well generally, and Orca is much more stable. And, according to Orca, the system never even ran over about 3 of the 16 GB of RAM on that Intel NUC. I set up Emacs and Emacspeak, Firefox, Bitwarden, VS Code, and never even took my laptop out of the bag. Of course, I really miss a lot of NVDA addons, like the OpenAI one, sounds for entering browse and focus modes, and the Thunderbird addon most of all. But I was able to log into, and use, Salesforce and Google Sheets. So now when I get a good workflow with Markdown and such, I think I'll just about, maybe, be able to start using it more. Packages are all up-to-date, Orca will alwasy be current, and hopefully I can one day move to a desktop environment with a proper notification center! Oh, and I'll have to see if Pidgin still takes up more RAM the more I use it.

Note that I still wouldn't expect a regular computer user to get into Linux, as far as setting it up. But, honestly, having the #BTSpeak out on the market makes me hope that more power users and programmers will hammer Linux into more of a shape that blind people can be at home with.

#accessibility #blind #Linux #Fedora #foss #Orca

For a different audience who may not have seen this.

Watching discussions surrounding the BTSpeak here on Mastodon and on the main BTSpeak support list, I agree that there needs to be a discussion list for advanced users for various reasons. Surprisingly for me, I've created such a list. This is not an official list sponsored by Blazie Technologies. Take all warnings to hart. But join and have fun.

groups.io/g/BTSpeak-Advanced
#BTSpeak

BTSpeak-Advanced groups.io Group

This group is dedicated to providing an advanced forum for the users of BTSpeak and other potential hardware devices by Blazie Technologies.

^groups.io