Here is my devember project. It’s an installer for blind users to get arch up and running without spending days trying to figure out how to enable speech services and the like.
A little over a year ago a blind user reached out to me to help him fix the talking arch distro. At the time, the version wasn’t compatible with the latest archiso build system and so we built a version that worked.
I’ve been working on this project for over a year and this month began building in some scripted features for blind users to complete installs without having to tab back and forth between the installer and the wiki. Also, the scripts make some changes to the default installs to turn on accessible features that normally would prevent a blind user from finishing the install on their own.
Currently I have the system built with the talking version of espeak as the default selection and I have also written a systemd service to change the fonts on both the talking and silent version to sun12x22 which helps folks with low vision get around in the terminal. (In order to run scripts in the new archiso build system, developers must add them to a systemd service now.)
I have built out the install for i3 and have it running fully accessible from the get go. I have numerous other DEs to add such as Cinnamon, Gnome, XFCE and KDE to name a few. Some of these are less or more accessible out of the box, KDE being one that I know has serious issues due to it’s reliance on QT.
The basic idea here is to have an arch install that can be built in about 20 minutes or so with the most basic options, the user can get into their main system and then customize afterwards. I just want it to get the install done, have orca running and the speech-dispatcher cooking.
Things I’m working on over the course of the next month or so:
add more customization to packages, currently there is a broad list of packages installed, so giving more options seems wise
build out accessible installs for Gnome, Mate and Cinnamon similar to how I have i3 running
add more readme data and create a sub directory to house them
add a list package option for each grouping of packages
add a more detai…
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