Another thing, about the installer, even if you don’t know how to get speech on, this is for anyone new, they can just press the down arrow 5 times on the boot menu on an refi system, plus on supported systems, like my old Lenovo, you hear 2 beeps, I believe the current project leader is also visually impaired, if I could, I could back port orca41 since I’ve had no trouble using it
> On 30 Dec 2021, at 17:52, D.J.J. Ring, Jr. <n...@arrl.net> wrote: > > Hello, friendly list, this discussion was inside another discussion and > perhaps partly because of my poor choice of words, was thought to be a distro > flame war, but that was never my intention or desire. > > I want to make a point about Accessibility in general and Accessibility in > Debian in particular. Nothing I say should be taken as an offense to any of > the developers who have done an amazing job in making Linux, and Debian in > particular accessible. > > My two favorite Linux distros are Debian and Slint. I have some favorable > comments about how robust Slackware is opposed to Debian - or most other > distributions - but that's way off topic. Suffice it to say, that being a > Debian is the only way to go type person, I've been very impressed with the > robustness of Slackware, especially the accessible International version, > Slint. > > Now on topic. > > Part of accessibility is having accessibility features known about by users > and have them easily used. Debian does this very well in their installer > which speaks to blind or visually impaired users, and provides visually > impaired users with a high contrast graphical installer. Excellent. > > My original post - which I take responsibility of not wording as well as I > should have mentioned "ease of use". I was attempting both to tell the > members of this list, which are both users and developers about how Slint > based on Slackwware has succeeded in having almost all of it's accessibility > features accessible to the new non-technical user. As the blind that go to > the museums say: "What's good of having guided tour headphones available in > the manager's office when the only notice of them is a written notice we > cannot see?" > > None of the accessibility features in Slint require any user effort other > than running a script to use. With Debian you first have to know these > features even exist, then you have to install them. In Slint, thanks to > Didier Spaier's work these features are documented in an accessible console > document. Of course, his work depends in part on your wonderful work on > brltty and other features, again, this is not an invitation to a distro war, > it's just about accessibility features being accessible and my recognizing > these features have been wonderfully achieved in Slint. > > If such wonderful achievements aren't at least mentioned, some or all of them > will probably never be brought into Debian to improve accessibility. > Certainly as Samuel pointed out, all these features are available in Debian, > but unfortunately it takes a bit of digging to find out about them. > > Again, thanks to everyone for their efforts in achieving accessibility of > Linux. This always was a team effort of many selfless persons world-wide, and > for that I am personally grateful and appreciative. > > David
