Paul, As a sighted person I was having trouble getting audacity verbal recording to work on Lucid Lynx until I chanced across Vinux (Linux for the Visually Impaired based on Lucid Lynx.) Vinux comes preconfigured in ways I found very useful. It is also the test bed for the accessibility options in Ubuntu. But this is a stable release.
If you do nothing the Vinux-3.0 DVD boots into the live mode with a 10 second delay. Booting took about 2-3 minutes but there was no sound until the Desktop was up and Orca was launched. There are live CD, live DVD and live USB versions. These may be downloaded from http://vinux.org.uk/downloads.html Here is the explanation from http://www.vinux.org.uk/about.html Vinux is a remastered version of the popular Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx distribution optimised for the needs of blind and partially sighted users. By default it provides three screen-readers, two full-screen magnifiers, global font-size and colour changing facilities as well as support for USB Braille displays. When you boot the live CD you will be greeted by the Orca screen-reader/magnifier which enables you to navigate the graphical Gnome desktop using keybindings, as well as providing full screen-magnification if required. For those who prefer to work in a simple text based console there is the Speakup screen-reader and as an emergency backup we have installed YASR, a hybrid screen-reader which can be run in either console mode or in a virtual terminal on the Gnome desktop. A second full-screen magnifier is provided by the Compiz Window Manager, which uses 3D technology to allow you to magnify and navigate the whole screen using the mouse, or move a resizable virtual magnifying glass around the screen. The Gnome Desktop Manager itself provides you with global keybindings to change the font size and/or the colour scheme on the fly. Finally, Brltty provides Grade 1/2 Braille output via the Orca screen-reader. By default all of the screen-readers use the same Espeak Speech Synthesizer via Speech-Dispatcher which provides a seamless experience for the user when switching from one screen-reader to another! Best Wishes Maurice -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
