I just found that the latest #linuxMint installer is #accessible with #orca. I was using the #MATE spin. Someone at the Mint team clearly checked this; love to see it. Please don't break it.
I was able to enable the screen reader at the login screen with the same shortcut I used at install time. Login was accessible. Speech worked. Audio worked. I had to activate Orca without any notification after install, slightly frustrating. But once done, it stayed activated. Braille worked too. Whatever the people on the Mint Mate edition team are doing; keep doing it. And if it's just an accident that this works, it does. If you could keep it working, that would be lovely!
Am I going to switch my setup to Mint? Probably not. But only because I have things working the way I like. If I was just coming to Linux, Mint seems like a solid choice.
I did try to switch one machine and fail. I had speech in the installer but not after. I think sound cards got reassigned somewhere and trying to hot plug another one didn't work. So I guess if you have a laptop that exposes fake HDMI, YMMV. Laptop makers, stop fucking doing this. Register connected/disconnected devices properly. All connecters have pins for them. Use them!
@fireborn hi,
is it based on ubiquity? ubuntu's older installer?
@mhussain Believe so, but they could have changed it with the latest version and seems like they chose not to.
@fireborn Can you run the latest Orca with Mate or is it lagging behind in Gnome versions? I tried Ubuntu mate 24.04 and the version of Orca they shipped was ancient and also had some compatibility issues, namely keyboard help didn't work at all.
@tuukkao Don't bother with Ubuntu in any flavor. It's a joke if you want to use Orca. Fedora is better, Debian or even mint if you want something that uses apt. Arch or gentoo if you want the distro to just get out of your way.
@tuukkao they give absolutely 0 care to desktop accessibility. They break the accessibility of gnome in their flagship flavor, have no login accessibility or persistant speech in others. Some just don't include orca at all.
@tuukkao you can run any version of Orca in any desktop. Just install the package if it's not installed by default. It's primarily tested against gnome though.
@fireborn I tried mint cinnamon, and I got through the install sort of OK, and then everything exploded
@evilcookies98 try mint mate instead.
@fireborn @evilcookies98 speaking of mint mate, I got someone on fedora workstation yesterday, and it worked the way you described. No way to know whether the installer finished loading but that's true for everything except elementary OS, sometimes speech starts at a kinda low volume in the live installer, but either way, we got it installed, and brailling soon after that. Apparently, cursor routing keys, whatever those are, don't work, or I dk what to tell this person to do in order to enable them, but yeah. All goes to say, accessibility is rapidly improving, and no, it's definitely not an accident. When I tell people that more has been done in the last two years than in the last two decades, I'm not exagerating or anything, I lived it, and while I didn't live two decades with linux, I did read plenty of mailing list archives and I concluded it was pretty horrible, but I definitely did live the last two years, fine maybe three, and there's a huge difference across the board, with gnome in its apps and the gtk toolkit generally, and kde with their desktop, kde apps don't work that well still. Yes, this involved sometimes me going to application developers and dumping on them a list of what's unlabeled, what could work better, etc, and then the next release, or soon after, most of what I reported would just be fixed, or it may involve me contributing to speech dispatcher to add a raw pipewire audio output method, so you can turn off pipewire-pulse and still get speech, or people making a huge effort trying to write an entirely new accessibility stack for wayland, but still, the amount of frankly bullshit bugs and stuff I've seen over the years, the stuff which never should have existed, the stuff I got used to being there, is starting to disappear bug by bug by bug. Ubuntu will have broken everything pretty much forever now, starting with their new flutter installer bullshit, continuing with deliberately keeping a lot of accessibility critical packages locked to very old versions considering that this space is moving so fast nowadays, and ending with them just not caring whatsoever about fixing it, because I'm sure they know of the issues. Same for fedora mate, they don't have a matrix, it's hard to contact them, they only respond in...what was it...the redhat bug report system from what I was told by a bunch of fedora people I talked to, stuff like that, so don't expect them to be very responsive to anything breaking. The only reason fedora mate worked for so long is that anaconda gtk was solid, a very good piece of software actually, and its successor, anaconda the web ui, is even better, so yeah, the anaconda team is really awesome for doing all it does to make things be as accessible as they can, considering they don't have someone on the team who actually needs a screenreader for example, so they can test it. The other reason fedora mate worked so well is because of the mate desktop, which as you said before, it's awesome on its own. So yeah, I wouldn't recommend fedora mate to people anymore, for the same reason I don't recommend ubuntu in general, mate or no mate. Lightdm can be configured with a config file to start orca at login time, which linux mint apparently took care to add, while neither fedora mate nor ubuntu mate ads. Sddm is inaccessible unfortunately, but gdm works just fine, without configuration. So yeah, a lot of the weird linux issues we've been having for a long time are either because nobody cared to fix it, or also and this is an important amount too, because distros don't do their due dilligence to add a couple config files, env vars and such, to make it not incredibly surprising to turn on your computer, especially after setup, first boot and such
@esoteric_programmer @evilcookies98 Review keasy should just work in Gnome 48. What exactly were they having issues with?
@fireborn @evilcookies98 apparently cursor routing keys on the braille display itself. There's a button on top of each braille cel that you can press to have the cursor go there apparently, from what this person says. I'm not sure if this is supported at all, I never had a braille display so I don't know what they're talking about, if they have to turn on something in orca, but yeah, that's the only thing not working. O yeah, and braille at the gdm login screen, unless they drop to single user mode, which makes braille appear on there as normal. Meh, probably the orca running as the gdm user doesn't have braille turned on or something, should be an easy fix as long as orca can write to its own config file in there
@esoteric_programmer @evilcookies98 Will look into it. Thanks. I do have a display, I’ll try it and see what happens.
@fireborn @evilcookies98 do you have the cursor routing keys on the display too? apparently not every display has them
@fireborn @esoteric_programmer I just wish I could install linnux on a flash drive and boot from that or something instead of having to deal with a vm. Dual boot is not an option because of the whole the boot loaders don't talk thing, and I have some windows software I need
@evilcookies98 @fireborn I mean, you technically can, but
- it's slow
- it's gonna be quite, ahem, fun, and by that I mean cursed, to set it up
- I only know how to do it for arch, but I dk if it's very much different for other distros
- the key there is have two usb drives you plug in, one where the install media is flashed, another which you want to use for installing linux on. Dangerous, terrifyingly so, but there goes
@esoteric_programmer @fireborn If I could dual boot without erasing oth drive and if the boot loader was nearly as easy to use as apple startup manager, i totally would. vMs lag
@evilcookies98 @fireborn you rarely have to use the bootloader anyway, but yes, it's possible, it's easy with fedora's installer at least
@esoteric_programmer @fireborn If I want to pick which OS to load, I would need the menu
@evilcookies98 @fireborn yes, but linux is always first, windows is always last. So for linux, don't do shite and it'll boot, for windows, press down arrow like 5 times or whatever and press enter, then that'll boot
@evilcookies98 @fireborn yep, and for the vm, there's always the option of giving it an external soundcard, because it's audio that actually lags, not the vm
@esoteric_programmer @evilcookies98 If you’re using grub you can also set up hot keys for this. I don’t have windows installed but I have L set to boot normal Linux, S for the LTS kernel Z for the Zen kerneland see for the cacheOs Kernel.
@efi@chitter.xyz@fireborn all the debian based distros are supposed to support tts as far as I know
@efi ehh, it's hit or miss. Debian does. Ubuntu not so much. Generally anything based off Ubuntu is going to just follow whatever they do, in this case be awful.
@efi but what I'd like to think happened here is that someone at mint tried the latest Ubuntu install/first login flow and said "No we can't ship that."