Re: KDE-based Distro for Testing Accessibility

Robert cole <[email protected]> wrote:
> From what I heard on yesterday's episode of the Linux Action Show,
> it seems like Arch would be a great base, but I have no idea what I
> would need to install to get accessibility up and running.

You would need the latest KDE with QT 4.8, a recent version of Orca and the QT
to AT-SPI bridge.

There seems to be a small community associated with Arch Linux that is
maintaining Orca and other accessibility-related packages, so if Arch are up
to date with their KDE, you should be able to satisfy your Orca requirement
easily. Fedora, OpenSuse and Ubuntu all have KDE versions as well.

I'm running debian but I don't have KDE installed at the moment. I've created
local packages of the very latest development versions of AT-SPI 2 and Orca
for testing purposes (and because I need an accessible Web browser to get real
work completed on a laptop which I inadvertently upgraded to Gnome 3 as the
result of not placing packages on hold which I thought I had done).

I've also installed the QT to AT-SPI bridge 0.1.1 after acquiring QT 4.8 from
the Debian Experimental repository. I haven't tried to run a QT application
yet, though.

Choice of distribution is ultimately a question of personal preference.
They're all essentially similar, but some will satisfy your particular needs
with less effort than others - think of a distro as a starting point that you
customize by selecting software and configuring everything according to your
preferences. Choose one that will give you the most straightforward path to
what you want.