Post #3913320

For most of my time using Linux, I've been doing remote server administration. Even when I had a Raspberry Pi as a homeserver, I just connected over SSH. After way too many false starts involving old laptops with weird driver issues, I finally have an actual Linux desktop. It's a Beelink mini PC that came with Windows 11, but the hardware is generic enough that Debian seems to instal and run without any complaints. It has an Intel N150 and 16 GB of RAM, more than enough to run a desktop environment responsively. People say Linux accessibility is not in a good state, and I could argue that Windows accessibility isn't either. More work is going into the two primary screen readers on Windows, but I don't feel like the out-of-box experience of using a Windows machine is anything approaching great. I'm not switching to Linux (or maybe I am, but that isn't my plan). I do want to learn about what works and what doesn't. So I've been slowly hacking on this for the last couple of days. I decided I like the terminal too much to justify autostarting Mate, even though I want to be using it. I got the Apple Eloquence project working, and it's very responsive. There's a way to make Espeakup use speech-dispatcher, but that code has been abandoned. It might still work, but I'm using this as an excuse to test other screen readers, and right now I have Fenrir configured and running. I need to figure out why it isn't suspending properly in desktop environemnts, but I'm pretty sure that's just a setting. Some of this setup has been more manual than it should be--for instance, if I use the Debian installer and choose to install any desktop environment, the default configuration leaves me with no audio in terminal windows when the desktop environment is loaded--which is always, by default. I understand why this happens and there are documented workarounds, but that's the kind of thing that shouldn't need a workaround. But this is a learning machine, not a working machine, and I'm learning that I tend to exist in different headspaces for each. I expect my phone and my Windows computer to work, and I'm frustrated whent hey don't. I don't expect my Linux box to be completely stable, but it's Linux, so I assume there's a way to solve my problems cleanly and I might even learn something along the way.