I am a blind user who has been using Linux on and off for a year and a half or two.
Only six months ago have I started using Linux as a full time OS, and oh boy am I loving it!
I am a blind high-school senior in Italy who uses Linux both at school and at home for… well… almost everything nowadays.
For the last six months I have been using vanilla Arch and I am very happy with my setup.
To integrate better with my sighted colleagues, however, I am thinking about switching to the main KDE Garuda, since, from what I’ve heard, it looks awesome!
“Looks are subjective” you might say, I say: “I know, but when you’re blind statistics are the only thing that matter to ya heh!”
So yeah, that is me.
Hi @francesco ,
welcome to the Garuda Linux forum.
KDE Garuda, some find it excellent, for me, it is too pink, LOL.
But KDE is certainly a good choice and easy to configure.
It would be interesting to know which programs you use.
Orca or are others better?
Has the speech output improved in the meantime?
Everything sounded very synthetic to me and my settings adjustments only made it worse, and I quickly gave up.
Have a great time here on the forum.
By the way, GNOME would be a good alternative as well.
Edit:
OMG, I overlooked that you are using GNOME, damn
hey there! yeah, at the moment I use Gnome, though I find myself wanting to switch over to KDE more and more for several reasons.
Firstly, it looks better than Gnome, at least for my colleagues.
Secondly, it’s becoming more and more accessible and, in some cases, surpassing Gnome!
To answer the question of what programs I use, I use Orca, since it’s the only available screen reader for now, LibreOffice and the Google WorkSpace stuff as my office suites, Firefox as a web browser and Edge as well, for Xbox cloud gaming.
I also use Steam, with the help of a small utility called ocrdestop that basically recognizes the screen for you and allows you to simulate mouse clicks and other stuff when stuff is not natively accessible.
I also use Fenrir as a TTY screen reader and Gmail’s web interface as my email… client?
When it comes to TTS orca still uses espeak-ng, so it’s just as synthetic. However, there are voices from a company called Orelux based in France which, even though they cost 29 euros each, offer natural and very nice voices.
Especially in Orca’s latest release, 45, a lot, and I mean a lot, of stuff has improved, so us BLinux users can use stuff more comfortably.
Consider that most of us use the latest and greatest orca from it’s master branch on gitlab.
Long post, I know, but I hope it’s of interest to you all.
yep, I do. everytime I see an emoji I hear something like “Wave, image” or “Smile, image”. I can also insert emojis like you’ve seen because tab completion works, which I found out by accident.
yeah, at the moment I use Gnome, though I find myself wanting to switch over to KDE more and more for several reasons.