How to get screen to read in elinks for the blind

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

As someone who switched from Vanilla Debian to Knoppix due to vision loss and the Adriane variant of Knppix being the only viable blind man's distro I've found, I must say that, strangely enough, the graphical Firefox browser(rebranded to Iceweasel in Knoppix) is actually far more accessible than any text-mode browser I've tried(and I've tried a few). That said, 7.0.5 was the last public version of Knoppix where Iceweasel and Orca(the screenreader Adriane uses in graphical mode) worked out of the box. My experience with 7.2 has been that downgrading Orca and some of its dependencies(and the adriane-x package) is the most reliable fix(there is a hack mentioned on these forums that will make things work with the version of Orca pre-loaded in 7.2, but my experience is that it causes other problems in conjunction with my other customizations). If you want to try my fix in 7.2: Add Debian oldstable main to your /etc/apt/sources.list(I usually do this by copying the debian stable line and making he alteration) Downgrade(I use Aptitude): gnome-orca to 2.3 at-spi to 1.30 python-pyatspi to 1.30 adriane-x to 1.4 I'm hoping the problem found in 7.2 will be fixed with the next public release of an Adriane CD. Notes on naviagting web pages using Iceweasel and Orca: Up and down arrows read webpages line-by-line. left and right arrows read pages character-by-character. 1-6 on the number row will move the reading cursor to the next heading at that level. the h key will move the reading cursor to the next heading regardless of level. the t key will move the cursor to the beginning of the next table. Other letter keys will move the cursor to the next object of various types, but I've found these less useful. shift+any of the above mentioned navigation shortcuts will move backwards. Ctrl+Pageup/Page Down moves to the previous/next tab(and this works even without orca) Ctrl+Enter will open the highlighted link in a new background tab. ctrl+shift+enter will open a link in a new tab and switch to it immediately. I will warn you: Javascript elements tend to trip-up Orca and Orca can't do anything with Flash. For these reasons, I recommend having NoScript block everything that doesn't provide vital functionality. Also, even with scripts blocked, some fancy page layouts confuse Orca. Going to View > Page Style > No Style can make some webpages easier for Orca to navigate.

[cp1]

Jeffery, Thank you for your time that was very informative i am going to go over what you said. i am still using the Adian knoppix and will attempt to use what I have learned form you. Do you do any podcasting or watch youtube if so what do you use?

[knopper]

As someone who switched from Vanilla Debian to Knoppix due to vision loss and the Adriane variant of Knppix being the only viable blind man's distro I've found, I must say that, strangely enough, the graphical Firefox browser(rebranded to Iceweasel in Knoppix) is actually far more accessible than any text-mode browser I've tried(and I've tried a few). That said, 7.0.5 was the last public version of Knoppix where Iceweasel and Orca(the screenreader Adriane uses in graphical mode) worked out of the box. My experience with 7.2 has been that downgrading Orca and some of its dependencies(and the adriane-x package) is the most reliable fix(there is a hack mentioned on these forums that will make things work with the version of Orca pre-loaded in 7.2, but my experience is that it causes other problems in conjunction with my other customizations). If you want to try my fix in 7.2: Add Debian oldstable main to your /etc/apt/sources.list(I usually do this by copying the debian stable line and making he alteration) Downgrade(I use Aptitude): gnome-orca to 2.3 at-spi to 1.30 python-pyatspi to 1.30 adriane-x to 1.4 I'm hoping the problem found in 7.2 will be fixed with the next public release of an Adriane CD. Notes on naviagting web pages using Iceweasel and Orca: Up and down arrows read webpages line-by-line. left and right arrows read pages character-by-character. 1-6 on the number row will move the reading cursor to the next heading at that level. the h key will move the reading cursor to the next heading regardless of level. the t key will move the cursor to the beginning of the next table. Other letter keys will move the cursor to the next object of various types, but I've found these less useful. shift+any of the above mentioned navigation shortcuts will move backwards. Ctrl+Pageup/Page Down moves to the previous/next tab(and this works even without orca) Ctrl+Enter will open the highlighted link in a new background tab. ctrl+shift+enter will open a link in a new tab and switch to it immediately. I will warn you: Javascript elements tend to trip-up Orca and Orca can't do anything with Flash. For these reasons, I recommend having NoScript block everything that doesn't provide vital functionality. Also, even with scripts blocked, some fancy page layouts confuse Orca. Going to View > Page Style > No Style can make some webpages easier for Orca to navigate.

Orca and Firefox weren't working together for quite a while in ALL Linux distros, until the bug was discovered: It was simply an unexpected location of libraries, which is being fixed by symlinking /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/gtk-2.0 to /usr/lib/gtk-2.0.

As of Knoppix 7.4.0 the problem is already fixed, so firefox will talk again with orca, either standalone or from the full graphical environment with LXDE.

You can start it from the ADRIANE menu (boot option "adriane" or "adriane64") or from the graphical boot with orca activated (boot option "knoppix orca" or "knoppix64 orca").