ArchLinux tutorials, and the state of accessibility in linux

[Kyle]

According to Arthur Pirika:
# Hi,
# First, I'm playing with arch again, and still loving it, I think of it
# as slackware, done right. Not that slackware's bad, by any stretch, it
# was my first distro, after all. Anyway, I'm about to record a
# step-by-step install guide, similar to what Michael Whapples did quite
# some time ago, now that arch's install methods changed again.

I say go for it. I've been meaning to do this, but I've been just a bit 
busy, what with the holidays and all. I still hope to record something 
similar in the near future. Either way, the more the merrier. Yes, Arch 
is indeed great. I myself migrated from Ubuntu, and I can't sing the 
praises of Arch Linux loudly enough <smiles>.

# I was then thinking of expanding it into something like the really old
# shows that featured on main menu, way back in 2000, through 2002 or so.
# So it would be a podcast of getting around, and doing common tasks in
# linux, focusing on the terminal at first. Thoughts or feedback?

Have a look at the Sonar podcast on
http://sonar-project.org/
It started by explaining what free software is and its philosophical and 
other reasons for existance, and has since then gone into detail about 
different distributions of Linux and desktop environments. The aim of 
the podcast seems very similar to yours, so feel free to join us, 
whether or not you record your own podcast as well. We use Mumble, which 
is accessible to Orca using the qt-at-spi-git package from AUR, to 
record the podcast, as well as for weekly discussions that are not 
recorded, so anyone is welcome to contribute either time. Information 
about connecting to the server should be on the Sonar website, but if 
you can't find it for any reason, there is a support e-mail list for 
Linux and accessibility that is linked from the site. If you are looking 
to contribute to the podcast, many times we use this list to communicate 
recording times and other things, but it is also a friendly place to 
discuss anything related to Linux and accessibility, irrespective of the 
distro you are using.

Looking at the Sonar website, you will notice that Sonar is in itself a 
Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. However, the podcast receives 
contributions from Ubuntu, Sonar, Debian and Arch users, and attempts to 
be as distro agnostic as possible. As a matter of fact, we hope that 
Fedora and OpenSuse users will contribute as well, since these major 
distros are currently underrepresented, although some of us regulars 
have dabbled a bit with them. In any case, feel free to check it out and 
contribute when you can.

# Second, what are peoples experience with tools like emacspeak,
# speech-dispatcher, and gnome/KDE accessibility, things you don't hear a
# lot about these days? Are they still viable options for access,
# especially emacspeak?

I am a GNOME/Orca and Speakup user, so I really can't/shouldn't comment 
on Emacspeak. I played with it years ago, but found that Speakup worked 
better for me when using command line applications, and then GNOME 
gained accessibility, and now I have the best of both command line and 
graphical applications at my fingertips. That said, I haven't seen any 
posts about problems with Emacspeak, and as far as I know, it should now 
work with speech-dispatcher, so you should be good to go with the 
default setup.
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/
-- 
"Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"