Emacspeak, an audible interface for Linux



Screen readers such as Orca work by describing the graphical environment to the user. They deconstruct an arbitrary visual environment that's built on top of an inherently text-based system. On some systems, this is necessary because there's no access—at least pragmatically—to the OS by any other means than the graphical interface. As most Linux users know, however, a graphical interface on a good Unix system is entirely optional in the first place, so there's no need to generate one, deconstruct it, and describe it; the computer can just spit out text.
I am aware of two efforts forging this path: Emacspeak and ADRIANE (on Knoppix). In this article, we'll take an in-depth look at the former.
Emacspeak is an audible interface that allows non-sighted users to interact independently and efficiently with a computer, entirely by way of text input and output. Emacspeak uses "audio formatting" and W3C's Aural CSS to produce a full audio representation of input and output.
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| Red Hat Hires a Blind Software Engineer to Improve Accessibility on Linux Desktop
Accessibility on a Linux desktop is not one of the strongest points to highlight. However, GNOME, one of the best desktop environments, has managed to do better comparatively (I think).
In a blog post by Christian Fredrik Schaller (Director for Desktop/Graphics, Red Hat), he mentions that they are making serious efforts to improve accessibility.
Starting with Red Hat hiring Lukas Tyrychtr, who is a blind software engineer to lead the effort in improving Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora Workstation in terms of accessibility.
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