I read comments like "Press s and enter", "press a and enter then s and enter", "press down arrow 5 times and enter", and all I'm hearing is that Blind people need to know something about the install media sighted people can be comfortably ignorant of.
This strikes me as backwards and as the kind of thing where if I just hand a Debian installation disc to a blind person, they are going to think I either handed them a dud disc or that Debian's installer isn't accessible. I don't know how difficult it would be to implement, but I would think the desired behavior would be for a message along the lines of: "Welcome to Debian, now speaking on [soundCard]. Press caps lock+s to toggle speech on/off." is Spoken when the install disc's boot menu is displayed, and repeated on subsequent detected sound cards if a set amount of time passes without user input, and with the message also printed to the screen and on any braille displays detected in the boot process. It makes starting up the installer with braille and/or speech self-documenting, removes a potentially show stopping hurdle for any blind person unfamiliar with the peculiarities of Debian's installation media, and while it arguably inconveniences the vast majority of people doing installations ofDebian, it would be a small inconvenience to disable speech when not needed while the current system presents a bigger inconvenience to enable speech when it is needed. And as weird as it feels to type something favorable towards Apple and Microsoft when comparing their offerings to Linux, I understand recent installers for both OSX and Windows start talking automatically if there is a delay when they expect initial input from the user. Also, assuming the talking installer has remained mostly unchanged since the last time I messed around with vanilla Debian, I'm not a fan of the "either memorize your choices before hand or listen to potentially very long lists of options and type in the corresponding number" approach, especially compared to the (n)curses(-like) arrow up and down menus of the text-based, non-talking installer I remember from my days as a sighted Debian user, though I assume there are some users out there that like the type the number of your option approach.
