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.
Welcome @francesco ! I find it a huge issue that accessibility is often an afterthought, while it would be a lot easier for everybody if accessibility were taken into account from the very start and really built into the core of the system - whether that be an operationg system, an application or even things like events, buildings, public infrastructure, etc.
Generally it is a good idea to look at the age of the last post before making further comments. The other thing that it’s a good idea to check is the profile of the member you are responding to. In this case the new member @francesco has the following info on their profile:
Joined: Nov 5, 2023
Last Post: Nov 6, 2023
Seen: Nov 13, 2023
From this profile information we can see that the user was only briefly active on the forum, and hasn’t even visited in 11 months. This being the case, we can likely deduce that @francesco is no longer checking in on the forum any longer.
That is why we try to discourage necrobumping old posts, as things often tend become outdated over time.
Nice of you to reply to @francesco, but I think it might have been rather pointless in this case as @francesco seems to be no longer active on the forum.
I’m going to close this thread, as it seems rather pointless to continue discussions here.
yeah, at the moment I use Gnome, though I find myself wanting to switch over to KDE more and more for several reasons.