I am visually impaired (VI). Up until about 2 years ago I daily drove Windows because I thought I couldn’t get a usable and accessible environment going in Linux and also because I like to play games and thought that Linux couldn’t do that either. Oh how wrong I was. I would like to share my experience and tools that I have cobbled together to get GNU/Linux working better than Windows ever did for me.
My hope is that I can get some comments and suggestions on some of these tools from the community. Furthermore, it would be great if someone found this useful.
As a VI user, I need the following:
- A full screen magnifier
- Text to speech that:
- Lets me select text and hear it spoken
- has a good voice; I like MS Zira
How I have met the requirements:
- I use the KDE Plasma desktop environment. It comes with a full screen magnifier that, by default, has the same key bindings as the windows magnifier. So when I tried a live KDE Neon environment, I was thrilled when I just happen to hit the (Meta +) shortcut by muscel memory and it worked.
- This one was, and continues to be, much more involved. There are Linux screen readers available, such as Orca, but I don’t need a screen reader. I also happen to not enjoy the voices available in espeak or festival. If you like those, it’s quite easy to adapt my solutions to those. So, my scripts focus on text to speech functionality.
I will post updates here as I go.