Linux Distributions for the Vision Impaired?

MoreDruid asks: "Not long ago, I was asked to do some research for a blind relative from a friend of mine. I tried searching the sites of Red Hat, Debian, and some other distro's, but only SuSe came up with really useful information. I did find Blinux, but I think it's not really mature yet. Do any other Slashdotters have any experience in this field? What is a good distro to start with? This research is geared towards a blind newbie user, so are there any decent resources for vision impaired people so that he can get going with Linux?" This topic was discussed, in a more general sense, some two years ago, and there have since been questions dealing with several pieces of the puzzle. However, is there anything else out there, aside from the developing Blinux, that puts it all together in one nice package?

Comments

Any distro will do..

[zcat_NZ]

My blind friend uses RedHat. I set up getty on a serial port for him and he logs in using his 'companion' voice-synthesiser laptop. For surfing (links) reading email (pine) and playing mp3's (mpg123), this works out pretty well.

I'm trying to set up another box for him using Debian and festival, but I haven't had much luck so far.

Gnome and Gnopernicus

[ZarKov]

I don't know what sort of stuff different distros will have installed by default. However, Gnome in general seems to be coming along very nicely with accessibiity. It was even given a Hellen Keller award last year. You should check out the Gnome Accessibility Page and Gnopernicus.

Debian (Re:Any distro will do..)

[Mensa Babe]

I myself was thinking of using Debian, but I never heard of Festival... I'll definately look it up though.

Festival is a speech synthesis system. Under Debian, just type "apt-get install festival festival-doc" (and festival-dev if you want to use it in your own programs). It has a nice built-in Scheme-based command interpreter.

I think Debian is a great choice for vision impaired users. Take a look at the Debian Accessibility Project and Accessibility HOWTO. There are even speakup enabled boot floppies for Woody (Debian 3.0, the current stable version).

Also, take a look at BrlSpeak, a Braille and Speech Mini-Distribution of GNU/Linux. It is based on Debian, developed by Osvaldo La Rosa, visually impaired Debian user. Let me quote the website:

Objective:
BrlSpeak is here to make life easier for blind people who wish to install a GNU/Linux distribution on their computer WITHOUT ANY assistance from a sighted person. The objective is to create and develop a blindfriendly GNU/Linux distribution enabling a blind user:
a) To preconfigure the braille driver config file before running GNU/Linux
b) To compile the braille driver without having to see (or to hear)
c) To have the braille display immediately operational when booting GNU/Linux for the first time

BrlSpeak can be installed on a FAT partition. There's a 36MB .zip file or CD ISO9660 image for download.

There's also Free(b)deb, a Free(b)soft's specialized linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux. From the website:

The goal of the Free(b)deb project is to provide a specialized distribution of complete Debian GNU/Linux operating system including specialized software, which enables blind and visually impaired users to work with computer.

However I'm not sure how to install it and where to download it from.

(I don't talk about Blinux, as it has already been mentioned in the story.)

Good luck.