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These ideas and most of the descriptions are taken from the Fedora Documentation Project The original text and illustrations in this document are licensed by Red Hat under a Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 3.0 Unported license ("CC-BY-SA"). You can find more about it on the first site.
Contents
Screen Readers
Screen readers are important accessibility tools that allow a person with limited vision to have the computer read what is on the screen. There are numerous solutions that provide this service. This section covers some of the ones available to Fedora users.
Orca for GNOME
GNOME supplies its own screen reader, Orca. This package is installed by default on all Fedora systems. Additional information on Orca may be found by visiting [1]
To enable Orca you may run orca from the command line. This first time you will be asked a number of preference questions. After the initial configuration, run orca a second time to start orca. The graphical application which starts has options for changing the preferences, quitting the program, and obtaining help. During the initial setup, the questions are also said aloud as they are displayed in the terminal.
Alternately, from the graphical menus select System -> Preferences -> Assistive Technologies and check the box labeled Enable Assistive Technologies then click Preferred Applications to ensure that either Orca or Orca and Magnifier is selected.
Jovie for KDE
Jovie is the KDE system for Text-to-Speech, previously known as ktts. Jovie consists of a Text-to-Speech Daemon, a Konqueror plugin, and an extension for the Kate text editor. The Daemon provides text-to-speech functionality to applications, such as KMouth and KNotify, via D-Bus. It also provides an icon from the system tray, for additional features. From this tray icon, Jovie can speak the contents of a text file, speak the contents of the clipboard, and access the control module for configuration. Comprehensive information on jovie can be found on the KDE website: [2]
To start Jovie in Mageia, run jovie from the command line. To start it from the KDE graphical menus, select Startmenu -> Tools -> Access aid -> Jovie.
Speakup
Speakup is a screen review package written by Kirk Reiser and Andy Berdan and is available under a free license. Speakup gives users with visual or mobility impairments the ability to have audible console feedback using a speech synthesizer. Speakup is useful to blind users because it provides an audible installation and is fully supported by the blind open source community.
Speakup works with the following hardware synthesizers:
- DoubleTalk PC and DoubleTalk LT
- LiteTalk
- Accent PC and Accent SA
- Speakout
- Artic Transport
- Audapter
- Braille 'N Speak and Type 'N Speak
- Dectalk External and Dectalk Express
- Apollo2
For more information about 'Speakup, or to contribute to the Speakup project visit: [3]
Using Emacspeak with Fedora
Emacspeak is a speech interface that allows visually impaired users to interact independently and efficiently with the computer. Emacspeak has dramatically changed how hundreds of blind and visually impaired users around the world interact with the personal computer and the Internet. A rich suite of task-oriented speech-enabled tools provides efficient speech-enabled access to the evolving semantic world wide web. When combined with Linux running on low-cost PC hardware, Emacspeak provides a reliable, stable speech-friendly solution that opens up the Internet to visually impaired users around the world.
Before using Emacspeak, you should familiarize yourself with some documentation. Start with [4] by Gary Lawrence Murphy.
The following sections describe how to perform various tasks using Emacspeak and Fedora.
| Note: The Meta key At various points, the following sections refer to the Meta key. This key is fundamental to Emacs (and therefore Emacspeak) commands, but is very seldom found on modern keyboards. Most keyboard layouts map the Alt key to take the place of Meta |
Reading news using Fedora and Emacspeak
Gnus is the news reader included with Emacspeak. Gnus gets the appropriate data from the .newsrc file in the user's home directory. To post and read news through Emacspeak, refer to [5] for manuals, tutorials, HOWTOs, and more. To start Gnus, press Meta+X, then type gnus and press Enter.
This command displays all the newsgroups you are subscribed to. To select a newsgroup, highlight your selection and press the space bar. Next, specify how many articles you would like to open: type a number and press Enter. This splits the screen into two buffers. The top section is the summary buffer, the bottom section is the article buffer. You should now be able to read your news.
Sending and reading email using Fedora and Emacspeak
There are several email clients available in Emacspeak. The Gnus utility can actually be used for both email and news. Press Meta+X to start Gnus, then press M to use the mail client.
The easiest tool to use is RMAIL. To send a message using RMAIL, press Ctrl+X, then type rmail. When you are in RMAIL, press M Fill in the To: and Subject: fields. Put the body of the message below the line that reads -text follows this line-. To send the message when you are finished, press Ctrl+C twice in succession.
To read a message using RMAIL, press Meta+X, then type rmail and press Enter.
For more information on using RMAIL visit [6]
Using Emacspeak to execute Linux shell commands
It is not necessary to leave Emacspeak to execute a Linux command. To execute a command within Emacspeak, press Esc, then type ! followed by the name of the command when Emacspeak' prompts you. To exit the command output window, press Ctrl+X, followed by 1
This functionality is extremely useful. You can even print and compile files you are working on within Emacspeak. For more information on Linux shell commands refer to Josh's Linux Guide or any other comparable command resource.
Josh's Linux Guide is available from [7]
