Hi all, I am Vincenzo Rubano and I am an Italian blind computer science student.
Since we need to use Debian at university, I decided to install it on a laptop to verify its accessibility for a blind screen reader user and, unfortunately, I am facing some issues. First off, I installed Debian 7.6 Wheezy by using the net-installer; the installer told me that the installation was completed successfully, but all the software I selected in the “software selection” installation screen was not installed. So, rebooting the machine after the installation, I was presented with the text console even if I chose to install the desktop environment; however, speakup started together with the console, so installing the additional software was a piece of cake. After installing the gnome desktop, however, I started facing an issue. When I boot the machine, I can hear a message that informs me that the “espeakup” service cannot be started; after that, I can hear the other boot messages regularly, but I am not able to stop speakup from reading them: neither the ctrl nor the shift key work. I’m guessing that the problem depends on the failure returned by espeakup; do you have any hints on how to fix this problem? To install the desktop I performed the following command from the console apt-get install task-desktop. The Gnome desktop works properly; however, I am having some issues with Orca; for instance, the web browsing experience with IceWeasel is simply terrible and Orca becomes unresponsive when using the network-manager-gnome applet to connect to a Wireless network, not to mention the fact that sometimes Orca crashes and I am not able to start it again. By performing gnome-shell —version in a terminal, I see that I am using Gnome 3.4; the Gnome version seems a bit outdated, so I was wondering wether upgrading Gnome would bring some benefits for accessibility; if so, could you suggest me the best way to do so? Should I migrate from the stable version to the testing one to get the latest Gnome stable version? Last but not least, to my surprise I noticed that Brltty was not installed by default; so I performed apt-get install brltty; however, the question is: how can I make Brltty use my MDV Lilli USB Braille display? What command should I type in the terminal? I searched for documentation onLine, but I didn’t find anything that worked for me. Thank you very much in advance for your help! Vincenzo.
