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swarfendor437

Member

From: Somewhere off Atlantis

Registered: 2020-10-28

Posts: 107  

Devuan 4 "chimaera" - LXF copy Pants. Accessibility great, 1 exception

Firstly wanted to congratulate the accessibility team who created the possibility of installing for a user with little or no vision. Great job!
LXF has let Devuan down - tried to install off their cover DVD and kept stating invalid media when searching for the DVD installation media.
So I downloaded the iso and it installed great. Greatly impressed with the more human sounding voices now available in Orca (screenreader) and my favourite is Hugo. I used to work in a service that provided modified texts in Braille and Large Print and I have always tried to provide good examples of Free Software being better than other Operating Systems. Devuan 4 clearly offers the best. The only teething issues I have had is that I made the admin password the same as my user and when trying to launch synaptic have had issues saying that it was incorrect (authorisation failure). KDE (Plasma) had to have its menu switched to Application Launcher and I appreciate that you don't set the default menu in KDE but once set to Application launcher, the cursor keys announced the menu entries correctly - the mouse after a couple of attempts, but a user with no vision is reliant on keyboard and has little use for a mouse unless modifier keys allocated to buttons on the mouse. I chose Devuan default DE (=LXQt?), xfce, KDE (Plasma) and Gome flashback. All work great with the screenreader.
I installed it with accessibility options so as to prevent pulse audio being installed as I read in LXF magazine that Pulse Audio interferes with synthesised speech.
I would now like to turn off the Accessibility option completely but not at expense of Pulse rearing its butt ugly head again. On another OS I have been playing with I found an interesting 'solution' to prevent pulse from launching by creating a 'pulse off' folder in /etc and then cuttig and pasting the pulse folder into the 'pulse off' folder. Works for me - just need to remember to block future updates to pulse.

Way to go Devuan team!