Accessibility for blind and low vision users on FreeBSD 14
Date: Sat, 04 May 2024 01:37:08 UTC
Hi folks, I'm a longtime linux user and administrator, and am interested in exploring free bsd. As I have no vision, I use either text to speech (through a screenreader such as orca in the GUI or speakup in the CLI) or output to a hardware braille display through brltty. Unfortunately as most of these solutions are linux based (speakup as an example is a set of Linux kernel modules), they aren't that applicable or transferable to free bsd as I understand it. I'm just wondering if there has been any work done on accessibility, or people who have successfully gotten screenreader or braille output working who wouldn't mind sharing some insight into how they did it? I see reference to a screenreader called yasr through various internet searches, although it doesn't look as though it has had an update since 2008. It may still be useable for reading the terminal though, and if anyone knows about this please let me know. Another option I'm contemplating is trying to get a virtual serial console setup. I'm currently running free bsd in a vm for testing, and theoretically I should be able to pipe a text console's output to my screenreader on the host system so I can at least get ssh enabled and access it that way. Currently I'm having to use OCR (optical character recognition) to read the terminal which isn't ideal. Thanks in advance for any ideas on this, and i'm happy to describe my setup more or expand on some points if it would help in this situation. I'm also happy to contribute some documentation back assuming it doesn't already exist if/when I get this working for the benifit of others going forward. Daniel