Wider Tech Discussions: AppleVis Forums Expand Beyond Apple

I'd love to learn and use linux more, I've had several false starts. Once I ran some linux apps on my chromebook (orca ran surprisingly well, all things considered) but that was an entertaining disaster. I tried Ubuntu in a vm on my decently powered windows machine and there was some weird boot up bug where I could only get Orca running in guest mode and gave up before I could set up BRL TTY. I found this new tutorial for replacing Chrome OS with whatever distro entirely, instead of running it through the container thing. That's my next step and has been for about a year, I know enough to know I can probably figure that out with a lot of difficulty maybe and, anyways, all that is to say I really, really want the blind Linux community to move beyond mailing lists. I need help.
That said I can't think of anything more anti Apple than Linux. I'm not talking in a cage fight which is better way, not saying there aren't plenty of people who use and enjoy both. It's more that I can't think of two more diametrically opposed design philosophies than Apple, the pinnacle of in house closed source fine tuning and Linux, the pinnacle of the infinitely breakable and infinitely customizable open source world. For all the debate and surface level differences iOS and android are mostly alike and emulating each other more with every new release. Windows and MAC are fundamentally GUI centered platforms with secondary terminals while Linux, if I've learned nothing else in my aborted experiments, is a terminal centered system with secondary desktop environments. This is obviously more or less true depending on your distro and desktop environment but I can see how this mix could frustrate a lot of not super geeky people if the linux forums cross pollinate with the rest of the site, much more than if android talk spills over into the iOS topics now and then. That is only natural in a way, even people who don't like it generally understand why it's happening. mods just move it to the right place and that's that. Get a hardcore linux geek arguing with a hardcore apple fanboy because someone accidentally asked for help running a Mac OS virtual machine in Kvm on the Mac OS forum and that could make all the Android or iOS playground fights look almost desirable. Anyways, the TLDR is I want this as long as it's done carefully.

I'm not a lynix user and honestly doubt i'd need it but more in this case is always better.

The open-source nature of Linux has always intrigued and confused me. I've been looking for helpful answers to questions like how to get started and what distro to use. I once came across a website that listed accessible distros and hosted other useful resources, but can't find it now.
I have an ancient laptop lying around that now has left no battery to power it so the BiOS thing shows up with beeps that worried me so much when I first heard them when you power it on after long enough. This is probably because it requires me to specify the date and time. It takes about a couple of minutes to start up and possibly even more to shut down, as I once made the stupid mistake of installing the 32-bit version of Windows 10 on it. Now I want to be able to somehow install and use Linux on it, which would technically mean the revival of that old machine. We would call it the wooden computer among friends because of that characteristic noise it would make particularly when hitting the space bar.

After googling around, I found this link with distributions accessible to blind and visually-impaired users.
https://itsfoss.com/visual-impaired-linux/

It certainly answered a few of my questions anyway. Hope that helps.

A lot of Linux distributions allow you to enable Orca with a keyboard command, including in the installer. I personally use Arch Linux, but I would probably not recommend it to beginners since you have to set everything up yourself, and it has a steep learning curve. If you press down arrow followed by enter after you hear a beep after booting the installer, it will start Speakup, a command line screen reader, as well as brltty, which communicates with Braille displays. The Mate desktop is the most accessible and easy to use desktop environment I have tried, and when I use the GUI, that is almost always what I use.

Virtual machines are indeed a good way to try Linux. On Windows I remember Virtual Box being pretty accessible, as well as VMWare Player, although its been a long time since I used either one. On MacOS, UTM is an excellent application for running virtual machines, and is fully accessible. It can run on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, and all three of these programs are free. Also, if you try to create a virtual machine, make sure to enable sound, and if you think the screen reader should be talking and you don't hear anything, choosing different emulated sound hardware might fix it.

I have been using Raspberry Pi's for a long time, and I'm pretty sure Raspberry Pi OS, the official Linux distribution for them, includes Orca by default. However, since I use Arch Linux on them, I have never tried to turn on Orca on Raspberry Pi OS. I think the keyboard command to turn it on in most Linux distributions is Alt+Windows+S.

Some of the reasons why I use Linux include:

• Customizability: Unlike other operating systems, you can make Linux into anything you want. If you don't like your desktop environment, which basically controls the whole GUI experience and things like the applications menu, there are many others to choose from. Or if you want something simpler, you can use a window manager and configure more things yourself. Or you can not have a GUI at all and just use the command line. And for distributions, they range from ones meant for desktops, to ones meant for servers, to ones meant for small embedded systems. You can even compile the kernel and all the applications from source code if you want to.
• Hardware compatibility: Linux usually uses a lot less resources than Windows or MacOS, so it runs a lot better on older hardware. Additionally, it runs almost just as well on other CPU architectures like ARM, which is what the Raspberry Pi uses. Also, since most Linux programs are open source, it is usually pretty easy to compile them for other architectures, meaning you rarely need a compatibility layer for X86 like you do on Windows or MacOS. These compatibility layers effect performance, so its best to use them as little as possible. You can even run Linux programs under Android or iOS, using Termux or iSH, and ChromeBooks can also run Linux programs now.
• Cost: Linux and most of its programs are free, and run well on inexpensive hardware.
• Strong foundations: Linux is the most used operating system on servers, and the Linux desktop benefits from this. For example, Linux has some extremely robusts and feature-rich filesystems, supporting things like compression, RAID, encryption, subvolumes, snapshots that can be taken instantly and don't duplicate data, checksum verification, etc. There are also many security features, and if you set everything up right, you can make it more secure than probably any other operating system. You can even turn a Linux computer or a Raspberry Pi into a router, a web server, an email server, or whatever else you want by configuring a few programs, rather than buying expensive enterprise software.
• Command line: Linux has the best command line experience of any operating system, and command line programs are almost always accessible because they only output text. There are command line programs for a very wide variety of tasks, including editing files, converting documents, email, web browsing, playing media, etc, and using the command line can be extremely efficient, especially with scripting.

I knew about servers and stuff like that, but it's interesting about the security stuff. I'll have to have a play around one day. Thanks again for the info.

Thank you to those who have suggested adding a Linux forum. This was absolutely an option that was on our radar when determining the initial set of technology areas to include in the pilot.

Ultimately, we decided to keep the scope fairly narrow for now. However, Linux is definitely an option that we will consider if we opt to expand the forum areas after evaluating the success of this pilot.

For now, I'd ask that we refrain from steering the present discussion too deeply into the specifics around Linux and the various distribution options. While this is certainly an interesting topic, going too far into those details would stray from the intended focus here of gauging overall community interest in broadening the scope of our forum beyond Apple.

Thank you all again for sharing your thoughts and suggestions!

I have bee waiting for something like this for a while. I've noticed that there are a few other online spaces you can go and talk about tech as a visually impaired person, but they are often times older and in need of some TLC. This place was the first forum I joined, as back when I joined there weren't that many other good places to speak about tech. I always felt relatively safe posting things, and replying to people. Now I have more tech that is not necessarily apple stuff. So it will be cool to discuss other stuff without having to scour the internet for other places to speak.

for reasons previously stated I think should just stay focused on Apple.

I’m just wondering what the worry is. What do you think might happen?

This has been a apple forum. Applevis worked very hard to work with Apple to get things solved. I don't want that diminished.

are so close with apple in the first place. If you look closely in the forums here it's sometimes hard to differenciate misinformation from frustration of real bugs. Not a critique, apple especially for mac have a lot to improve if they ever do it, but it's a fact.
As for the name of the site, keept it as it is please. We would have a very hard time to find a decent short form for applevis anyway. Accessibility policies for people loving electronics? :P Like. Domain redirections are a horrible things to manage for older websites like this one, and if you ever do that then the chance of apple removing any consideration for applevis are very very high then.

Unless the wayland dramma around orca is resolved, or we get another real screen reader with proper funding for the poor dev this time, I am no longer seeing linux gui as an alternative worth the try. Terminal are the ideal of accessibility as virtually everything is text, but with web browsing you're struck. Links2 or whatever its clones are called are more a proof of concept than anything else in my humble opinion ast they don't have any JS or dynamic webpages. 99% of modern site won't work there. But yeah, if we had speakup in 1980s it would have been the golden age for blind people able to afford computing device at that time. The online resources are very outdated too for documentations and stuff about linux and accessibility.
If someone can tell me how to have proper speech output on raspberry 3b+ or pi400 with speakup on terminal I'd glad to hear that. Oh and raspberry pi imager is not accessible for mac if you want to install raspberry pi os and don't look online for how to generate ssl encrypted password and where # how to create a user in the mounted image because it's made in qt. Diet pi or others would be your best bet then.

I'm enjoying all the other discussions - think this was a good move.

How about a forum for console gaming? Or is that going too far off topic?

Not much to say other than it's nice to know there's somewhere people such as myself and others can go and get help about platforms other than Apple.

This is done, AppleVis did it. What I did not like is that they did not ask and just did it. Like parents to kids where they decide and the kids just goes along.

Unless all gaming topics (both mainstream or specialized) should go under one forum, they would probably need to be split up among the following areas:

1. Console Games (both local and online)
2. Mobile Games (both local and online)
3. Assistant Games (Siri, Alexa, Google, Bixby, Etc)

Hi Olly,
Audiogames.net does discuss playable mainstream games as well as audio games.
https://www.audiogames.net/
There is also a website called 'Can I play that?' for disabled gamers who want to play mainstream games. It might be worth checking that out. That was mentioned on RNIB tech talk so they do include stuf for blind gamers.
https://caniplaythat.com/

Yeah, fair enough - I just got a little excited by a post elsewhere on this site.

I follow Can I Play That, but I think for information on blind gaming specifically it often falls a little short. I think there is a difference between a game that someone who is extremely determined and quite skilled can manage, and a game that a lazy old man might stick on after a hard day at work when trying to unwind. I rarely read anything on there and feel that I have a good feeling of whether I would personally be able to play the game or not.

My feeling on gaming is that there are a lot of near misses. I I was following Sightless Combat on Twitter and he was getting incredibly excited about Ragnarok to the point where I had to scroll past an advert for Ragnarok stuck in his name before I could read his tweets. And then when he finally reviewed it, it felt like a case of it being nearly accessible but with some problems which meant that you couldn't really get through it on your own. Although maybe things have changed.

Audio games is probably the best bet for gaming info, but I think the people on there are in a different league to me. My suggestion on here was that maybe it would be a more accessible way to talk about things in a casual manner.

But I get the point that if you open it up for gaming then it does open up a whole new world of other stuff and then where does it end.

I've never really understood reddit. I guess I've only just come across posts when googling for answers to questions and the site has never felt very accessible. I guess you need to be using a different app to get anything out of it.

Anyway, apologies I have yet again managed to go off on a tangent.

Hi to both,
Thanks for the heads-up about 'can I play that', I think I'll give that a miss. I used to play audio games a lot more about 15 years ago or more, and coming back to it was relatively hard since audiogames.net, though a good resource, tends to be full of abbreviations and jargon, understandable since people are regular players and know what they're talking about. So I ended up having to google a tonne of stuff, or having to go back through the audiogames.net forum archives to find out what exactly people were talking about. Maybe there should be somewhere for beginners, not here though, we probably should have some limits!

Only technology donot use other than technology

I'll warn you that the place can be full of drama and the website is very old, they've not updated the design in years.

I don't like it for reasons stated previously. This was not my call or it wouldn't have happened. I rarely disagree with the applevis team but I strongly disagree on this. This is a site to help apple users. That is what it should stay. nOW IF THEY WANTED TO LAUNCH A SEPERATE SITE THAT'S FINE.