Efficiently using terminal with screenreader

[Janina Sajka]

You should learn about something called "consoles," often referred to as
tty consoles. By default, on most installations you have 7 of these. One
is for the graphical environment where Orca runs, and the other six are
for text only apps that you run from a shell like bash (or, these days,
perhaps zsh).

Speakup does not work in the terminal you can access from Orca's
graphical environment, though Fenrir will work there.

Note that a console acts a like like a terminal, but the two
technologies aren't really the same. I presently still use screen to get
terminal sessions in my consoles. I have 23 consoles, by the way, with
about 10 of those have multiple screen terminals within them. For
example, my console on tty10 is where I do my text based mail using a
mail user agent called mutt. I open 10 terminals in that console using
screen. In each of those terminals I launch mutt on a different folder
of email that has been pre-sorted for me by procmail.

Note also that you can adjust the size of your text consoles. Mine are
currently 75 rows by 112 columns.

Bottom line here is thatneither Orca nor the desktop graphical
environments are really designed to provide compelling terminal
services. If you really want terminal, there's nothing like the real
thing.

Having said this, I'm perfectly aware that some people get all they want
from terminal sessions with the terminal available with the graphical
environment. I'm just not one of those people.

hth

Janina

Reece O'Bryan writes:
> Thank you, this is great information. Is it difficult having both running at the same time; speak up running in terminal and orca running for everything else? Wouldn’t orca still try to speak when you open the terminal. 
> Which other window managers are orca friendly? Do I have to stick with gnome or can I go with something like XFCE, KDE, etc? I know these are simple questions, but I do not want to risk doing something to my machine that would require someone with vision to help me fix it.  
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> -Reece 
> 
> > On Dec 14, 2020, at 4:28 PM, Didier Spaier <didier at slint.fr> wrote:
> > 
> > You can't use Speakup (not to be confused with Espeak) in a graphical environment at all, only in a console.
> > Speakup is a console screen reader, Espeak is one of the TTS engines (with associated voices) that can be used with Orca.
> > 
> > Further as your question is actually about Orca, you could get more answers posting in the Orca mailing list.
> > In case you didn't come across it, here is a link:
> > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> > 
> > Didier
> > 
> >> On 14/12/2020 21:56, Reece O'Bryan wrote:
> >> This is great to hear. So can I run both Espeak and Orca at the same time or will I need to close orca when I want to open the terminal and use espeakup?
> >> Thank you,
> >> -Reece
> >>> On Dec 14, 2020, at 2:04 PM, Zachary Kline <zkline at speedpost.net> wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> Hi,
> >>> 
> >>> To be perfectly honest, I recommend using Speakup for good terminal support. Orca is rather sub-par in this regard, and Speakup was designed to fully support command-line output from the start.
> >>> Best,
> >>> Zack.
> >>> 
> >>>> On Dec 14, 2020, at 10:52 AM, Reece O'Bryan <reece.obryan at icloud.com> wrote:
> >>>> 
> >>>> Hello,
> >>>> 
> >>>> I’m having trouble efficiently accessing outputs from terminal in Orca. I need a fully functioning screen reader, is there an easy way to navigate line by line of output from terminal in espeakup or orca?
> >>>> 
> >>>> Thank you,
> >>>> 
> >>>> -Reece
> >>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>> Speakup mailing list
> >>>> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> >>>> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> >>> 
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> Speakup mailing list
> >>> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> >>> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Speakup mailing list
> >> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> >> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> > _______________________________________________
> > Speakup mailing list
> > Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> > http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 

Janina Sajka
https://linkedin.com/in/jsajka

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Co-Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures	http://www.w3.org/wai/apa