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[machinebacon]

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[alretz]

I have downloaded several versions of bbq but one thing that interests me alot is a 'blind' version, 32 bit Gnome starts speaking (i'm not familiar with using orca, but it was repeating some message) with only 8.5 mb install of gnome-orca - and I suspect the debian 'speak up' kernel could be easily added for a possibly 530mb iso - I would appreciate any advice you could give me on this - the goal would be a competitor to 'vinux' which is buntu based. Thank you!
if you want you can delete this (or I will) and contact me at my email or if you can make the message system here work

[machinebacon]

Hello Alan,

thank you a lot for your message. It is indeed an interesting idea and I have already worked on something similar, though not specially designed for visually impaired users.

Please give me a few days to check the available applications and possibilities of speakup in Debian (which is, as far as I know, included by default in newer kernels) and I will produce a 32-bit test ISO. I hope you can assist me testing it with a braille device. The only problem I see is that the live-installer used in BBQ releases is not the Debian default installer and I haven't tested a possible speech synthesis with it.

Best regards,
Julius

[alretz]

As a matter of fact I am not visually impaired and don't have access to any of the devices - I have been interested in this for some time however and indeed the debian netinst has a speakup setting - visually impaired people want a totally accessable install, they expect 'speech' from kernel boot and the only available distro is 'vinux' which is quite large, I have experimented with sawfish only debian which should work but somehow doesn't, your gnome version worked just fine, I apt-get installed gnome-orca in the livecd which resulted in 24 packages and a total download of 8.5 mb, the other major thing is the debian kernel which if I remember correctly was a pae kernel but it was on the netinst disk. I think a distro could be very successful if it only combined sid and visually impaired software in the smallest iso - the livecd is a bonus and I can see now that this can be done at approximately 530 mb which would be quite an achievement, the only other things that might add to it would be languages other than English but even an English only version would be exciting. At one time I was createing 140mb livcd with debian live-build using openbox and the emdebian repos.

[machinebacon]

Yes, size isn't a problem, a basic XFCE4.10 weighs in at 400MB so there are chances to get a few more languages in it. I have tested ORCA today inside of GNOME and XFCE with the 'robot-like' espeak speech synthesis which I find rather disappointing, compared to festvox or mbrola (IIRC, my last try with them was a year ago). Later this week I'm going to build it in a clean environment and pack something that will feature an accessible boot -- let's see how this thing works with syslinux. Not forgotten, just delayed ;) I'll post the outcome in a new thread then.

This one is a pretty good solution:
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html

[alretz]

from the visually impaired people I've talked to, only Gnome works good enough for them (I wonder about Mate or Cinammon) and I can't remember what the objection was to Knoppix-adrienne but that isn't satisfactory, they have a distro called 'vinux' and chat room on blufudge irc and I think an iso with just the two modifications would be all they need - biggest step is getting away from ubuntu as a base, personally I like testing much better than sid or sid with no dist-upgrades (it kills me to download even your small isos and within a couple weeks there are 200mb of upgrades

[machinebacon]

There's no objection against keeping sid "un-updated". Originally the BBQ spins are designed to be rolling releases, sorry about this, but I had more problems when I used testing for a few weeks than sid in the last 7 years. It's pretty easy to create a wheezy-netinstall plus X plus DE plus modifications and then run the bbqsnapshot tool to create a redistributable ISO, if sid as base is a problem.

BTW, I keep the ISOs updated and push them out like every 2 weeks, so there isn't much to catch up on a fresh install. Ubuntu's upgrade volume is similar, and as soon as Wheezy goes stable, testing will also pull in some new packages regularly....