Re: [Blind-sysadmins] [program-l] Accessibility of linux

8 Oct 2014


      Thanks for your advice all. I am planning on writing a web application
using Ruby on rails, which i'm told works best outside of windows
because of its gems. Ben, I agree with you in that the learning curve
for a new operating system is often much longer than sighted people
and to become productive it can take time. I've now been made aware of
something called Vagrant, which helps you to configure a virtual box
machine and its possible to use ssh to run the necessary commands.
This way, the development itself can be done on windows as well as the
testing. The only thing that needs to be done through ssh (for rails
at least) is to start/stop server and to run commands for basic db
operations.
I wil very likely be going with this option since it seems the one
with the least curbe.

Thanks
Chamandeep


On 10/6/14, Bram Duvigneau  wrote:
...
Depending on the language/environment you're working with, a UNIX like
platform might be easier to work with.
It's not about editors or IDEs, but about the tooling that is more
tested on Linux and Mac OS than on Windows in many circles. Especially
if you know you are going to deploy something on a Linux server later
on, it's nice to have a matching development environment.
I run a Linux VM on my Windows PC all day and do most of my development
in there. When I'm doing web stuff I run Firefox+NVDA on Windows to
test. The VM just has a basic command line and no GUI what so ever. I
use Brltty and pass the USB connection to the braille display to the VM.
Hope this helps,
Bram
On 6-10-2014 18:22, Ben Mustill-Rose wrote:
...
Hi,
It depends on what you're wanting to develop really. Remember that for
actual coding you'll be working inside some form of IDE, so for
writing code on its own I can't really see why one platform is going
to be better than another. I'm sure some of your developer friends
will be extremely productive when coding in VI (a really geeky & hard
to use text editor) but becoming productive in that sort of
environment won't have happened over night so you may / will most
likely find that switching actually decreases productivity, at least
in the short term.
I'm going to get put in my place here by people who know more about
Linux than I do, but I very rarely find that things work out of the
box when it comes to using Linux with a screen reader unless you're
using the CLI; even then depending on some things there can still be
issues. The only times that it's worked painlessly for me have been
when I've been using so called blind distributions such as Sonar or
Vinux. Said distributions definitely have their place, but personally
I'd prefer something a bit more mainstream (although I am aware that
the distributions I mentioned are based on Arch & Debian
respectively); I also wonder how successful you'd be in getting an
administrator to install an operating system such as Vinux that they
won't have heard of onto one of the desktops that they'll have to
support.
Obviously we then have the option of mainstream distributions. The
problem with these, as per above, is that it's very rare for them to
"just work" with something like Orca. If you Google you'll find
postings to mailing lists & IRC logs from people who have managed to
get Orca working with their setup, but said postings usually don't
include instructions & if they do in my experience they rarely work
anyway.
You need to determine if the time required to get up to scratch with a
new operating system & screen reader will be justified by the
potential productivity increase. Bear in mind that unless you go the
blind root, with the overwhelming majority of distributions you will
have to do a large amount of experimenting, even before you are able
to do the most basic of tasks.
I love using Debian based distributions over SSH, be that on one of my
Raspberry Pi's or my server, but *for me*, there's absolutely no way
that I could use it for day to day tasks.
Cheers,
Ben.
On 10/6/14, Bill K. Dengler  wrote:
...
And so is the text based installer.
S tab space priority=low enter
Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: Blind-sysadmins
[mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of
unix
Sent: Monday, October 6, 2014 11:48 AM
To: Blind sysadmins list; program-l@freelists.org
Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] [program-l] Accessibility of linux
Just wanted to point out as well, the Debian live cd is itself
accessible,also, There is one more distro, Debian based Kali Linux, a
fork
of backtrack, but if your not a pen tester etc, this info is probably
irrelevant.  I've heard of people using slackware, and hints about orca
being available, but I think thats a hole nother ballpark entirely.
On 10/05/2014 05:26 PM, kendell clark wrote:
hi
are you looking for how linux and windows differ or which distros to
try? There are currently ... 5 distros that are the most accessible,
although any linux distribution which includes orca  is usable by a
blind person, although not all are accessible to install. Thery are:
sonar. A distribution based on arch which has both gnome and mate
flavors available. Orca is preconfigured to start when the live cd
boots, and braille support is also available out of the box if you
have a braille display. I use this one. Mate is more similar to
windows xp/vista/7 in terms of look and feel, while gnome is more
similar to windows 8.1. Arch linux. If you want to use this one, you
want to download the talking arch distro from
http://www.talkingarch.tk. Arch is probably more geared towards the
linux advanced user, although it is installable and usable by a
novice, if you are willing to follow the tutorials available on the
arch wiki. There are three others, all debian based. Ubuntu, trisquel,
and vinux. Ubuntu uses an interface called unity, which is sort of a
hybrid between windows 8 and 7, having both touch screen support and a
traditional desktop, menus, icons, etc. Trisquel is a "free software"
only distribution, so you won't find support for hardware that needs
binary firmware, and a lot do. There's also ubuntu mate, which is
ubuntu without the unity interface, but with mate instead. Vinux is
basically ubuntu with orca preconfigured to start by default, and a
different sound theme and wallpaper than ubuntu itself. As for how
linux and windows differ accessibility wise ... it's not black and
white. There are applications that work better in windows than in
linux, such as firefox, although orca's recent improvements in this
area make it a lot less of a gap than it used to be. There are also
programs taht work better in  linux than in windows, gimp and pidgin
being good examples. Libreoffice is supposed to work in both windows
and linux with screen readers, but I couldn't get it working in
windows at all last time I tried. It works out of the box with orca.
Things in linux are said slightly differently. To give you an example.
A button in linux is said as push button, or toggle button. Toggle
buttons are buttons which have either an on or off state, whereas push
buttons are just ... well, buttons. The area of the desktop where your
icons go is typically said as desktop. Icon view layored pane, instead
of "desktop list". text fields are usually said as "text" in
applications other than web browsers, and "entry" in browsers. NO idea
why. If you can get used to the way things are said, it shouldn't be
too difficult. I'm not a programmer, so I can't speak to whether linux
or windows is better to develop under. There are people who are on
both sides of the fence I'd expect. I do know that there are at least
a few accessible ides, bluefish being one, eclipse being another,
which work out of the box with orca.
Hope this helps, this is a lot to write.
Thanks
Kendell clark
On 10/05/2014 04:54 PM, Chamandeep Singh Grover wrote:
...
...
...
...
Hi all,
I keep getting advised by other developers that Linux is a better
platform to develop under compared to Windows. I wanted to explore
options for how Linux is accessible and what is available? I've
never
used Linux so any advice on how things work and how to get setup
would be appreciated. I would still like to use my windows machine
for day to day work. But would like to have Linux either as a
separate installation or a virtual machine.
Thanks for any help you can give with this.
Regards, Chamandeep Singh ** To leave the list, click on the
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