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I’ve published Part 3 of “I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back.”

This one’s about the so-called universal interface: the console. The raw, non-GUI, text-mode TTY. The place where sighted Linux users fall back when the desktop breaks, and where blind users are supposed to do the same. Except — we can’t. Not reliably. Not safely. Not without building the entire stack ourselves.

This post covers Speakup, BRLTTY, Fenrir, and the audio subsystem hell that makes screen reading in the console a game of chance. It dives into why session-locked audio breaks espeakup, why BRLTTY fails silently and eats USB ports, why the console can be a full environment — and why it’s still unusable out of the box. And yes, it calls out the fact that if you’re deafblind, and BRLTTY doesn’t start, you’re just locked out of the machine entirely. No speech. No visuals. Just a dead black box.

There are workarounds. Scripts. Hacks. Weird client.conf magic that you run once as root, once as a user, and pray to PipeWire that it sticks. Some of this I learned from a reader of post 1. None of it is documented. None of it is standard. And none of it should be required.

This is a long one. Technical, and very real. Because the console should be the one place Linux accessibility never breaks. And it’s the one place that’s been left to rot.

Link to the post: fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-w

fireborn.mataroa.blogI Want to Love Linux. It Doesn't Love Me Back: Post 3 – Speakup, BRLTTY, and the Forgotten Infrastructure of Console Access — fireborn
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@fireborn I think the way this will ultimately be solved is by eliminating the console fallback entirely. Ideally, the GUI should work reliably enough, for both blind and sighted users, that we don't need anything else, and if you've done something unusual and you need to debug the state of your desktop, you connect to it from another computer, via SSH or maybe via serial console over USB.

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@matt @fireborn Indeed, the VT subsystem is not long for this world. Distros are actively working on removing it, and the various uses of VT are disappearing little by little

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@AdrianVovk @matt I still need it at least once a week. Because when I can access it, when it's set up, it rarely ever fails. I'll probably just end up on Gentoo eventually, unless they remove it too. At that point… BSD maybe.

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@fireborn @matt Note that removing VT does not mean removing the console. It's removing the console _from the kernel_, and passing those responsibilities into userspace. The benefit is that things like session-bound Pipewire will work correctly, because your console session will be a real session, using the desktop accessibility stack

In other words: instead of having 2+ screen readers installed for different contexts, you can have 1 for the whole system. One stack = one place to focus effort

@AdrianVovk @matt As it currently stands, though, I do like that speakup doesn't rely on speech-dispatcher, because it gives a recovery path when speech-dispatcher crashes.