Efficiently using terminal with screenreader

[Janina Sajka]

Reece:

To run Speakup on your Mac, you'll need a vm environment like those
offered by VMware or Virtual Box. The vm functions as the translation
layer between Linux software code execution and native Macintosh code
execution, i.e. OS X on your Mac is a variant of Berkeley System Unix
(BSD), which is very different from Linux at the very low levels where software makes hardware do its
thing. Even though many of the commands you can find in /usr/bin are the
same and function in very similar ways, the two environments are quite
different under the hood.

Note that the end result can out to be very similar to what you're
contemplating should you also install samba in your Linux vm and mount
the "remote" Mac filesystem. But, you cannot simply contrive the Mac
Terminal to run Speakup rather than voice over.

Also, you have the dual boot option on your Mac where you could run
Linux with Speakup rather than Windows as your bootcamp managed guest
OS.

Important about the vm approach -- While Parallels is another
application for providing vm functionality on the Mac, last I heard it's
not at all accessible to Voice Over, unlike VMware or Virtual Box.

Two more quick comments about this ...

You can in fact read line by line with Voice Over in a Mac Terminal
session, but there are more steps involved. My memory on how to do this
is a bit hazy. I believe you interact with the terminal object by first
pressing VO+Down-arrow. At this point you're "in" the text object and
can read line by line, word by word, etc.

Second, some folks associated with the San Francisco Lighthouse came up
with a screen reader for the Mac Terminal called TDSR intended to
simplify this interaction. I didn't look to see whether this is still
actively developed, but the link I have for this project is:

https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr

Best,

Janina

Reece O'Bryan writes:
> OK, I understand what you’re saying now! I’m definitely going to get one of these to play around with.
> 
> I very much appreciate your exclamation of the history of this. I’m sorry if my questions are obvious, but I have only been blind a few years and this part of computers is quite different without a GUI. 
>  
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Is it possible to compile speak up on my MacBook? I’m still having trouble navigating a terminal and if I could run speak up, I could set up an automated workflow to turn off voiceover, run speak up and run terminal? I don’t understand why there are not commands to navigate line by line in the native terminal on OS X.
> 
> -Reece 
> 
> > On Dec 17, 2020, at 2:04 PM, Zachary Kline <zkline at speedpost.net> wrote:
> > 
> > Samuel,
> > 
> > No, they definitely don’t. As far as I’m aware they use an entirely different interface. The adaptor exposes /dev/ttyUSB0 but the synthesizer is still in serial/rs232 mode. There’s a hardware toggle switch to select one mode or the other.
> > Best,
> > Zack.
> > 
> >> On Dec 17, 2020, at 10:59 AM, Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
> >> 
> >> Zachary Kline, le jeu. 17 déc. 2020 10:55:13 -0800, a ecrit:
> >>> but doesn’t support using synths in native USB mode.
> >> 
> >> Don't these simply expose a /dev/ttyUSB0 port?
> >> 
> >> Samuel
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> 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