Improvements to make fedora more accessible to the blind

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
I recently mentioned in response to another message that I am interested 
in making fedora more accessible. Let me give a little information of 
what I find the state of accessibility in fedora is at the moment.

The first task is to get fedora installed, at the moment the LiveCD 
looks like the best option (there is a speakup modified version but this 
has serious limitations, some coming from the limitations of the text 
based installer of fedora and some relating to the speakup screen reader 
eg. I think speakup modified fedora requires a hardware speech 
synthesiser connected to an onboard serial port). At the moment the 
LiveCD contains all the correct packages to make it possible for a blind 
individual to perform an install of fedora independently without any 
extra hardware (IE. all they need is a computer which allows X to run 
and that the sound card works by default, my dell 510m laptop meets this 
fine, so probably do many other computers).

Although it is possible to install fedora independently as a blind user, 
I do hit a number of issues which can catch out even an experienced 
linux user, and so may entirely block a new comer. I will list two 
possible improvements which shouldn't take much to alter.

1. Add a log in sound to the default sound theme, otherwise how does a 
totally blind user know when the LiveCD is booted? That is particularly 
a problem when using a USB drive instead of a CD as there are no 
mechanical parts which make a noise while the drive is reading.
2. Once a blind user has the orca screen reader running on the LiveCD, 
if they select the icon on the desktop to install to HD orca sees the 
installer window as inaccessible. This is due to the installer running 
with extra privileges and fedora not being configured to allow orca to 
work with applications running like this. This can be simply solved by 
adding a file named /etc/orbitrc containing the following two lines:
ORBIIOPIPv4=1
ORBIIOPUNIX=0

How possible would it be to have these changes made (particularly to the 
LiveCD)?

There are a few more changes which would help, some of them possibly 
having a greater impact but may take more work to solve, I think I will 
leave those for the moment, little by little.

Michael Whapples