I've been musing about a comment Samuel Thibault made a while back: > On Mar 2, 2020, at 07:57, Samuel Thibault <sthiba...@debian.org> wrote: > > Rich Morin, le lun. 02 mars 2020 07:40:42 -0800, a ecrit: >> ... More generally, is there a better way to provide accessibility at boot >> time? > > The question is how to detect that it is needed. We can't just install > and run a screen reader by default on all Debian systems, so something > needs to trigger the screen reader startup.
On a Mac, the user can hold down (sets of) keys during the boot process, in order to force a "single-user boot", etc. Might it be possible for the Debian boot code to do something similar, in order to bring up a blind-accessible system? For example, the user could power up the machine while holding down the "a" (for accessibility) key. At some point, the boot code would recognize this fact and create a magic file. (For extra credit, it could emit a confirming set of tones.) It would then be up to the OS release to decide how to support accessibility, based on the desktop software, etc. So, the boot code wouldn't need to get involved in these sorts of implementation issues. Comments? Clues? Suggestions? -r
