Re: boot-time accessibility issues
I know this should probably be discussed on the Official Raspberry
Foundation mailing list if such a thing exists, but a few thoughts:
1. At present, Raspbian enables ssh by creating a blank file called
ssh in the boot partition and then booting the card. Could a similar
method be used for enabling accessibility?
2. I'm pretty sure the lightest widespread option for getting speech
at the console is espeakup or another front end to the speakup kernel
module. Considering that Debian's talking installer defaults to
installing and enabling espeakup when using the talking installer and
not installing a GUI, it's probably not an unreasonable request to
have it included in all official Raspbian images and enabling it on
next boot if a file that's treated as an accessibility flag is present
as suggested in 1.
3. Raspbian images that include a Desktop Environment probably should
have Orca bundled by default with the standard keystroke for
activating it on a system that doesn't autorun it.
4. Expanding on 1, perhaps the same access file can trigger making
Orca autorun on images that boot into a Desktop environment and enable
espeakup on images that only have the console.
That said, unless things have changed significantly since I last setup
a Pi, the only thing I had to do that I don't think would be needed if
I was using the Pi as a sighted user was enabling ssh and using it to
install and enable a text-mode screen reader, and I didn't have any
trouble installing piespeakup following the directions on the
Raspberry Vi website(though, admittedly, I used my PC to download,
extract, and copy the tarballs to the Pi's SD card before loading the
card into the Pi, and from there it was mostly running provided shell
scripts). Haven't tried installing vanilla espeakup or Fenrir over
ssh, so I can't comment on how hard they are to get up and running
starting from a Raspbian Lite image.
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