Dick, to try to answer your questions as a former support guy with
some experience of accessibility issues as well as screen readers on
Windows, Mac and Linux...
I don't think you are going to get far with Haiku. It is a nice little
O S, a personal favourite of mine, but it is an unfinished,
preliminary test version of a free-software recreation of a minority O
S from the 1990s. It has relatively few apps and drivers, and things
like proprietary streaming media do not work very well yet, nor are
they likely to work in the near future.
No, it has no text console, unlike Linux. It is not a Linux distro nor
a Unix-like OS at all, although it bears some faint resemblances. The
terminal app is a graphical app on the graphical desktop and cannot
run full-screen.
Currently there are only 3 fairly accessible general-purpose operating
systems for blind users: Windows, which is the best, but due to
third-party tools which are often expensive. Mac O S ten, which has
pretty good built-in accessibility tools, but for which third-party
app support is weaker than on Windows. And Linux, notably with the
GNOME or Maté desktops and the Orca screen reader.
GNOME 3 suffers from an accessibility perspective. (To be honest, in
my opinion, it's not all that accessible for sighted users, either!)
You might be better off with Maté, which is a fork of GNOME 2 and had
a more mature version of the Orca screen reader.
Linux is very capable and accessible at the command line level, as you
have discovered.
There were some graphical meta-distros specifically intended for blind
users, but they are dead now. I tried Vimux, a modified Ubuntu. There
was also Sonar, based off Arch Linux.
There is some useful info here:
https://pjb.com.au/blin/
On Fri, 7 Dec 2018 at 10:21, Dick <dick@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,
thanks for your reply.
I use ubuntu myself now, i always work in the console. I have no idea: is
the haiku console realy text-mode or is it just part of the graphical
environment? For example: in ubuntu it is possible to login to the
consoles in full text mode. in this mode brltty can provide all
information to the braille display. but you can also enter the terminal
with gnometermilan, but this terminal is in fact part of the graphic
environment and brltty will show noting, unless orca(the gnome
screenreader) is used. so if haiku has a real text-console porting brltty
to haiku would make it accessibel for the blind.
suggestion: maybe it is a good idea to add a package to depot something
like(nightly vs beta1) so the whole list of missing packages form a
nightly build can be installed at once.
I googled around a bit but some things are not clear to me:
has someone already watched netflix with haiku, is that already possible
with the webpositive browser? or watching tv-show from other sources like
fmovies.to does that work?
The problem is a hp pavillion with amd a4 6210, 6gb ram 1tb harddrive,
radeon r3 video, broadcom bcm43142 wireless card. In windows it is
unusably slow, in ubuntu it is still slow, and wifi is unstable. so i
wanted to try something completely different, haiku sounds as a nice os.
best regards, dick
