Re: Accessibility for blind and low vision users on FreeBSD 14

On 2024-05-04 01:37, Daniel Wolak wrote:
> 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.

Orca is available for FreeBSD in the accessibility ports category. Since 
IIRC it's part of Gnome, you may want to install that instead of just 
Orca. Installing Gnome is explained in 
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/desktop/#gnome-environment .

> 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.

Correct for those relying on the Linux kernel to function.

> I'm just wondering if there has been any work done on accessibility,

There has been. There is a proof of concept CLI screenreader, but 
installing it is a protracted process if you're just getting started on 
FreeBSD. Installation and testing instructions are available at 
https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-accessibility/2022-October/000014.html 
(you can skip the "beep" commands). Unfortunately, the developer died, 
but someone else has registered interest in moving this forward toward a 
usable solution.

> people who have successfully gotten screenreader or braille output 
> working
> who wouldn't mind sharing some insight into how they did it?

I think there are (or were) screenreader users subscribed to this list. 
Hopefully one can answer.

> 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.

Which hypervisor are you using for that VM?

> 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.

That would be very nice. The FreeBSD handbook currently lacks a section 
on accessibility.

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