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

On 5/4/24 03:37, Daniel Wolak wrote:
> 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.

Hi Daniel,

Thank you for your interest in FreeBSD and your feedback.

Unfortunately I was inactive for several months for health reasons,
I restarted to be in front of a computer since 2 months and Vision
Accessibility is on my TODO list; I hope to start and to complete soon.

> 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?

We have orca in packages and ports. I used it on XFCE to develop and
to test 'portoptscli'. It is an utility designed to be suitable for a
speech synthesizer for compiling and installing Third-party software on
FreeBSD. To know more:

Announce: 
https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2023-07-2023-09/#_portoptscliports_collection_accessibility

README: https://gitlab.com/alfix/portoptscli/-/raw/main/README.txt


brltty on FreeBSD in on my todo list.
We have also a Proof of Concept screenreader (properly a console reader)
for FreeBSD implemented in the kernel. It has to be redesigned and
completed. Also this is a TODO.

> 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.

I know somebody uses ssh to connect to a FreeBSD server using a
screen reader on the client.

> 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.

Again, thank you for your feedback.
I' ll send my Work in Progress to this mailing list to find the better
solution and to test.

> 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

Good to know, thanks for your help.

Best regards,
Alfonso