Re: Re: Re: accessible debian live cd
If Debian itself provides the requisite accessibility features, then
that covers most of it. There are then at least the following five areas
to be considered in respect to an accesible live CD built with live-build:
1) Use of the live-build tool itself (for building a custom live disc,
if you don't plan to use an "official" one): This is a script based
tool, so you're largely depending on using existing accessibility
features with a terminal, a text editor (for writing text based
configuration files, and reading log files), and finally a cd writing
tool to burn the image to disc. That's all external to live-build and
hopefully already meets accessibility needs. You would also need
up-to-date man pages and other documentation to support your use of the
tool (as does everyone). The man pages are currently out of date, but
recently I created a patch to correct this, just waiting on maintainer
to review and adopt it.
2) The live boot components: These are used in some way in booting the
live OS from the disc. I currently have little to no knowledge of these,
and so I can't say whether there would be any accessibility concerns, we
must wait on maintainer or someone else who is familiar with tools to
provide an answer here.
3) Adding accessibility packages: Making sure the requisite
accessibility packages are installed into the live OS is simple, it just
requires a custom package list be added, as already described in this
discussion thread. Perhaps a new "make-accessible" parameter could be
added to live-build however to automatically add the required packages,
making things easier, or at least the documentation could be updated to
provide details.
4) Loading things on boot/login: This also should be relatively simple,
just requiring a hook or an include to get a file created in the live OS
filesystem that makes it happen. Alternatively if an accessibility
parameter is added to live build, it could create this as part of the
build process if used.
5) Getting the boot menus accessible: Just yesterday I filed two bug
reports against live-build with patches to resolve four issues with a
particular aspect of boot menu creation. While building these patches I
noticed that the official install discs include an 'Install with speech
synthesis' menu entry, which live-build menus do not include. It is
actually on my to do list to get this added and to do a further
comparison with the install disc menus to see if there are any other
improvements that could be made. I will try to do this over the next few
days.
It is important to note that Debian is currently in freeze mode, with a
new version (8 aka Jessie) to be released shortly, and as such they are
only accepting patches of critical severity to it now, with few if any
exceptions, so it is unlikely that any such improvements to live-build
will make it at this point into the version that is going into Jessie.
However, after release of Jessie, a new version of live-build will be
available in Debian unstable, so such improvements I am certain will at
least be found there within the near future. Also, a new development
copy is currently available in Debian experimental, so it is possible
these additional improvements I will explore may find there way there first.
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