DISCUSSION: Making sure screen readers are available during setup

[Adriaan de Groot]

Replying as a formerly-paid-full-time and now only-incidentally-volunteer 
maintainer of a Linux system installer used by dozens of distro's ..

On Friday, 6 October 2023 23:33:20 CEST Joshua Goins wrote:
> I've been doing some screen reader things recently (such as the
> recommendation to pre-install Orca, which some distributions have already
> picked up on) and wanted to remind distros with an installer to look into
> making sure they are accessible to those who need screen readers.

Frederik and I (mostly him) fixed this for Calamares + Qt5 at Randa in, like, 
2018 or so, but it required a patch to Qt that never landed. It still is not, 
to my knowledge, possible to use Orca with a Qt application that is running as 
root. Maybe Qt6 is different.

That's sort of the crucial point there: an installer needs to do gnarly stuff 
to the computer it is running on. There are two routes to getting Orca working 
with a Qt-based system installer:

- let Orca (running as live user or as root) read the installer (running as 
root)
- run the installer not-as-root but have setuid helper programs to do the 
gnarly bits

One depends on careful configuration by the distro and -- presumably -- patches 
either to Qt or to Orca. The other is a shitton of work.

The issue filed against Calamares to better support this is at least five years 
old. I've never gotten around to it (and almost certainly won't if my efforts 
are limited to an hour or two a week as a volunteer). Nobody *else* has ever 
cared enough even to start a merge request for it.



> I need to explore some distro installers and see, but I'm curious how many
> can at least prompt for enabling screen reading? If your distribution
> supports that I would like to hear (or maybe you can push on someone else
> to implement it!)

If enabling a screenreader after reboot is just a single setting in a config 
file -- as your comment below suggests -- then adding that to the infinitely-
configurable Calamares is very straightforward (Calamares-speak: packagechooser  
+ contextualshellprocess or something straightforward with a bespoke QML UI to 
pick some accessibility options and a mechanism for writing them).

In any case for this to happen you will need to *tell* installer-writers that 
these capabilities exist. Knowledge of KDE Plasma internal configuration files 
does not exist naturally outside of the Plasma developers laboratory. Please 
file an issue at 
	https://github.com/calamares/calamares/issues
hopefully with a useful scenario + techical details. Ideally, something like 
this:

"""
To enable Orca screen reader after installation when the user first enters 
(logs in to) KDE Plasma, install the Orca screen reader software in the target 
system and write the relevant key in kaccessrc.
 - On my favorite distro, which is KaOS, the name of the package is 
killerwhale-screenreader
 - The key is "enable-screenreader" and kaccessrc is usually at ~/.config/kde/
plasma/plasma5/kcm/accessibilitykcm/settings/kaccessrc
"""

Oh, I see that you've already provided that last bit of information in the 
email, below.


> By the way, if you want to enable it in the KDE session if a user explicitly
> enabled it in your setup that's easy to do. KAccess (the accessibility
> daemon) reads for the Enabled key the [ScreenReader] in kaccessrc, however
> distributions prefer to set those 🙂

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