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Accessibility

From postmarketOS Wiki
Revision as of 20:07, 21 August 2020 by Rich Morin (talk | contribs) (Edbrowse)

Introduction

There are many types of disabilities and many ways to address them. At the moment, however, this page concentrates on ways to make postmarketOS more accessible to blind and visually impaired users.

Kernel Mods

Serial Adapters

Dave Mielke (BRLTTY's developer) says: It'd be very cool for the kernel to have support for all known USB-to-serial adapters, plus any indirectly needed serial support, enabled. That way, those with older braille devices that only have a serial port would benefit for the mere extra cost of the adapter cable. Sure would beat having to purchase a newer braille device.

Martijn Braam says: It depends on the device, of course, but I don't think adding support for usb-serial adapters would be a problem. I already did that to test some things on the PinePhone. I guess enabling prolific, ftdi, and ch340 would cover most adapter cables. Unfortunately, it would be a per-device kernel tweak. I'm not sure how much devices have usb serial support built in already. The allwinner kernel only has CH341 support currently. It looks like the generic driver is 14.4KB and ch341 adds 4.7KB. Serial drivers aren't really big...

Packages

This section is basically a "wish list", describing various add-on packages which could be useful. Unless otherwise noted, all packages are free / open source software. Feel free to add your own favorites, following the existing format.

Note: Because postmarketOS is based on Alpine Linux, the information on porting status is mostly derived from the Alpine Linux Packages page.

BRLTTY

BRLTTY is a background process (daemon) which provides access to the Linux/Unix console (when in text mode) for a blind person using a refreshable braille display. It drives the braille display and provides complete screen review functionality. Some speech capability has also been incorporated.

Ports for several hardware architectures are listed for the Alpine Linux edge branch.

edbrowse

edbrowse is a combination editor, browser, and mail client that is 100% text based. The interface is similar to /bin/ed, though there are many more features, such as editing multiple files simultaneously, and rendering HTML. This program was originally written for blind users, but many sighted users have taken advantage of the unique scripting capabilities of this program, which can be found nowhere else. A batch job, or cron job, can access web pages on the Internet, submit forms, and send email, with no human intervention whatsoever. edbrowse can also tap into databases through odbc. It was primarily written by Karl Dahlke.

No ports are currently listed for Alpine Linux. However, it is known to work on both 32 and 64 bit ARM and has been packaged for (at least) Arch, Debian, and Void Linux.

Fenrir

Fenrir is a modern, modular, flexible, and fast console screenreader.

No ports are currently listed for Alpine Linux.

ircII

ircII (pronounced i-r-c-two or irk-two, and sometimes referred to as IRC client, second edition) is a free, open-source Unix IRC and ICB client written in C. Initially released in the late 1980s, it is the oldest IRC client still maintained.

Ports for several hardware architectures are listed for the Alpine Linux edge and v3.12 branches.

Lynx

Lynx is a customizable text-based web browser for use on cursor-addressable character cell terminals.

Ports for several hardware architectures are listed for the Alpine Linux edge and v3.12 branches.

Orca

Orca is a free and open-source, flexible, extensible screen reader from the GNOME project for individuals who are blind or visually impaired. Using various combinations of speech synthesis and braille, Orca helps provide access to applications and toolkits that support the AT-SPI (e.g., the GNOME desktop, Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice and GTK+, Qt and Java Swing/SWT applications).

Ports for several hardware architectures are listed for the Alpine Linux v3.12 branch.

w3m

w3m is a ... text-based web browser and terminal pager. It has support for tables, frames, SSL connections, color, and inline images on suitable terminals. Generally, it renders pages in a form as true to their original layout as possible.

Resources

Alpine Linux

Pine64, PinePhone

postmarketOS