Hi,
To make this answer concrete for you, here is what happens:
- when the media boots, a beep announces that something is waiting
- pressing s runs the speech installer, via Speakup
- enter with a braille display connected runs BRLTTY
- the MATE desktop is automatically installed as the most accessible one
for all disabilities (due to its flexibility)
- the end of the installer sets things to reboot in braille and speech
in a terminal and/or in a graphical interface
Things to improve but requiring a high taskforce:
- improving the accessibility of the graphical installer
- enabling the capability to install some virtual keyboards programs
such as dasher
- installing more accessibility packages eg. ebook-speaker, daisy-player
- maing the liveCD work with braille
About Raspbian, I think there is more work to do. Not sure wether it is
for Debian or accessibility tools upstream.
Best regards
Jean-Philippe MENGUAL
Le 24/02/2020 à 17:46, john doe a écrit :
On 2/24/2020 5:22 PM, Rich Morin wrote:
I have some (probably naive) notions on improving the turnkey accessibility of
Debian and downstream distributions such as Raspbian and Ubuntu. Can folks let
me know whether any of these are feasible, already in place, etc?
The first notion has to do with the initial accessibility of the system. There
is probably a minimum set of tools (e.g., Fenrir, Orca) that would let a user
get started. If these were installed and configured properly on any
Debian-derived system, a blind user could hit a well-known key combination and
gain access.
This is the case for Debian but for fork/distro based on Debian it is up
to the maintainer(s) of those distros to keep that in mind.
Once the user can access the command line, their next task is to install a working set of
accessibility packages. This could be aided by the creation of a meta-package for
accessibility, including packages such as BRLTTY, MATE, and ratpoison. I realize that
there may be no consensus on the total list of such packages, but it should be possible
to agree on a reasonable "working set".
Debian does a pretty good job at this.
Finally, on systems based on the Raspberry Pi and similar devices, it would be
helpful for the OS to come up with SSH and Avahi enabled, allowing the user to
log in conveniently from another system.
This is the default if you install ssh during installation.
Basically, the points you are bringing up are valid but Debian has
nothing to do with them.
--
John Doe