Introduction
For the past year or so, I have wanted to try a good operating system built on top of the Linux Kernel. (A “Kernel” is a bit of software central to all computing. It works behind the scenes interpreting your mouse-clicks,, keyboard events, handles memory management and much more.)
I do most of my work in the graphical user interface of the Gnome Desktop and I will focus on that here.
In the past, I had run a GNU/Linux OS under Microsoft windows with a no-cost virtual machine, called vmware Player. This time, I wanted to try the Vinux distribution of the [Ubuntu GNU/Linux OS] and I wanted to know if I could really use it as my day-to-day operating system for work and for play.
I could not afford a new computer from dell, hp or even Wal-Mart. So I went online and searched for a while, ultimately finding a company called Blaire Technology Group. where I found a refurbished laptop for $190.
When my laptop arrived, I put the vinux4 64bit disk in it loaded up and the vinux version of Ubuntu came up. It did not talk right away so I used the keystroke (CtRL+ALT+o) to launch the Orca screen reader and I had speech and, if I wanted, refreshable braille.
A Few Definitions
Throughout this article, you will read the terms, “Vinux,” “GNU/Linux” and “Ubuntu” frequently. These three are related, very similar but not exactly the same things. For clarity, here are their definitions in the context of this piece:
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GNU/Linux is the generic term for all operating systems based on the Linux Kernel. This includes Ubuntu, RedHat, Debian and all others. Any of these different distributions of the OS can be made accessible and eau has its own special characteristics.
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Ubuntu is the specific version of the GNU/Linux operating system that we’ll be discussing in this article.
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Vinux is a special version of Ubuntu made by blind volunteers to contain as much of value to people with vision impairment as possible while also providing an out-of-the-box accessible installer and experience without having to make any modifications yourself.
Installing GNU/Linux with Vinux4
The installation of Vinux4 was quite simple. I found that, for a blind user, it is easier than installing windows because you have speech through every step of the process where, on the Microsoft OS, there are a number of things one needs to do before your access technology can be run.
Installing Ubuntu with the Vinux distribution was easy.. First it asks you to pick your language. You do that by choosing the language of your choice from a list box, tabbing to the continue push button and pressing enter. The rest of the installation goes smoothly with properly spoken prompts to make a choose a number of installation preferences. One needn’t fear missing anything during the installation as all of this can be done from within the Gnome interface later.
For the new computer user learning the Gnome desktop is pretty easy. While describing all of the cool features of this accessible operating environment is beyond the scope of this article, I can you assure you that even a computer novice can learn it all pretty easily. I recommend the Orca “Getting Started” document as the first place to learn about using a GNU/Linux system with this terrific screen reader.
finding cool Ubuntu apps
The easiest way to find applications is by getting them from either the Ubuntu software center or the Linux Free Software Catalogue . most programs have automated installation routines that make adding them to your system very simple.
Some Applications I Use
I enjoy using various media players. My favorites are vlc, and rhythmbox. I like using audacity for audio editing and sound converter to work with audio files. handbrake is a good program for ripping dvds. .
rhythmbox is similar to iTunes. It lets you record radio stations and add new ones. You can use rhythmbox to manage your iPhone. Brazero lets me easily burn disks both dvds and cds. gnu cash financial management software, is completely accessible, and works with quickbooks files.
These are just a few of the accessible apps that work with vinux. There are many more out there. installing something, trying it, and then removing it with software center or if needed with terminal is perfectly safe and will not damage your machine. It is also easy to add more software stores but this may be something most useful to more advanced users.
Some Applications Specifically Useful to Blind Users
the quantum omnidirectional barcode scanner works great in this system. My canon document scanner and others work good with speedy-ocr for scanning in books and handouts for school. One can use audiobook creator to turn your documents into audiobooks. If you need better sounding speech you could buy and use a third party speech synthesizer. You can use Calibre to convert ebooks into accessible formats.
If you’re tired of paying for duxbury braille translation software?? You don’t need to in this system as. odt2braille and brailleBlaster are free alternatives. They are powerful braille authoring tools.
libreoffice
I use the applications above for fun and profit but we do need to consider programs useful when we need to work. For your daily work you’ll need an office suite. and you’ll need to buy an expensive one right? nope, wrong. Vinux comes with an easy to use powerful Microsoft Office compatible suite of applications called libreoffice. It’s “Writer” application is just like word, and it’s calc is just like excel. In fact, LibreOffice can save all your work in Microsoft office format so you can easily share your libreoffice documents with the rest of the windows using world and no-one will ever know you are not using windows.
conclusions
Overall the Vinux 4 flavor of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux operating system is a good alternative to Windows. It is fast, stable, unlikely to catch a virus and even has some accessible games available.. You can run windows inside a virtual machine if you want or need to. ,
My Plans
Inspired by this excellent and accessible software, I’ve decided to try to start up a small business selling refurbished computers with vinux preloaded and ready to go. So when your computer arrives in the mail you can just turn it on and start using it with speech out-of-the-box.
. I hope this review will help alleviate people’s fears about trying something new, and in many cases something better than what the commercial AT and operating system companies can offer.
Hello there, Josh well written article, I have to agree on allot of this material. Vinux is very accessible and I can navigate paypal with no issues with Orca. I was able to navigate the Pennsylvania Council for the Blind and fill out their registration form with no problem. I was able to navigate Facebook as well and many other websites much easier than using windows. Vinux has come along way and the distrubution is getting better all the time another distribution I also like is Sonar which is also very good with acessibility as well. It’s another distibution of Ubuntu 1304 and it is GNU linux as well, upi can find Sonar at http://www.sonar-project.org well written article.
Newer versions of Orca than can be used with Vinux4 offer a much improved experience with Firefox. The soon to be released Vinux5 will have the latest stable Orca release pre–installed on it, and should be able to run Orca updates for a while, hopefully quite a while. Vinux5 will also have three distinct graphical interfaces available to choose from, all pre-installed, only requiring a log-out or reboot to switch to. One of these is a somewhat lighter weight graphical desktop called Mate. Mate is menu-driven, i.e. it has less search functionality in the interface. Instead it has an easy to navigate set of categorized application menus where one chooses programs to launch. For those who prefer starting their software this way or with keyboard shortcuts Mate offers the advantage of not using system resources on intensive indexing of applications and their usage and search driven interfaces. This can also be a more responsive solution for older or slower computers including netbooks and computers with limited memory. The default unity desktop is much like that found in Vinux4. Unity uses much more memory, and probably will not run well on computers with less than 1GB of RAM, and I find starts responding much better with 1.5-2GB of RAM, the more the better, especially if you like to leave more than the minimum of apps open at once. It is very easy to use the search driven dash and HUD, heads-up display. Just type the name of a program you want to launch after a single keypress opens a run dialog and usually well before you finish typing the program has shown up. If a string of characters typed matches more than one program or a key word that can represent a program then a list is shown that one can select from. The HUD works in a similar way but for commands used by the program you have open. There are some good articles on the vinux wiki that explain much more about how this all works and other features of Unity. http://wiki.vinuxproject.com will take you to the wiki. Finally Vinux5 offers you the gnome desktop. It is similar to Unity in that it offers advanced search features and a very modern look for those who can see it. Gnome is less memory intensive than unity, more so than Mate. On the negative side the gnome interface may have the steepest learning curve for folks coming from older Linux flavors like Vinux3.x, or Windows XP, 7, etc. Some users, I’m one, find gnome shell is missing too many customization options that one expects from Linux. All three let you configure keyboard shortcuts, and oldschool desktop launchers if you like those. The only thing I can not do that I do occassionally need or want to do on Vinux or other flavors of Linux as well as I can on Windows is high quality OCR, i.e. there’s nothing as fancy as Kurzweil or openbook, and no free OCR engine that gives the quality of results that the best non-free OCR engines can. That being said, many people find Linux OCR software, free stuff, meets all of their needs, and I’m much more likely to boot my one Windows installation to make sure things are more or less up to date, or to try and help a Windows user with something than to actually use it. I went Linux around the middle of 2010 and have not looked back. There are people who must use Windows because of some windows only program they must use for school or work. I am very glad I’m not one of them! Vinux is not the only Linux that a screenreader user can install and start using with no sighted help, and it’s not even the only Linux distribution that is optimized for blind users, but it is one of if not the easiest GNU-Linux for the Linux novice or someone new to computers in general to install and start using. The Vinux google group/mailinglist is also one of the friendliest and most helpful places on the internet.
B.H.
First, sorry about the typo in my original reply in the web site field. The website is still under construction anyway, but does have some links to useful resources already, and will have more as well as more custom scripts, and information on using GNU-Linux, especially from a screenreader user’s perspective.
Second, a minor correction to the original article; Vinux4 does not use the Gnome desktop. It uses Ubuntu’s Unity graphical interface. Unity is based on Gnome, but is very different in its look and feel. One can install Gnome on to a Vinux4 machine, but this greatly changes the user experience. It should not be hard to do and get things configured for blind users, but I’ve never done so myself. As mentioned in my first comment, Vinux5 does come with Gnome installed along with two other graphical desktops, but Unity is the default there as well.
One of the greatest strengths of Vinux5 in my opinion is the ability to try these three graphical desktops on the same machine, and to do so out of the box with no need to install or configure anything to do so. Users who have no prefference, e.g. those who have little or no Linux GUI experience, and who have a bit of time should take advantage of this to see which they like and which works best for them and their hardware and computing style.
Vinux is also one of the few GNU-Linux distros that comes with both Orca and accessible graphical interface(s), and the Speakup screenreader so that true command line consoles are also out of the box accessible. (you’ll perhaps have to type one command to start this, but this can be bound to a hotkey if still needed when the official release comes out.
B.H.
Great article Josh. I used the AppleII product line back in the day, and then in 1995 my parents got me my first PC as a high-school graduation gift. It ran mainly in DOS, but I did try to tinker around with the version of Windows that was on there. I think this was Windows version 3.1 . I’ve been a Windows user ever since, with the exception of high school when I was given a Toshiba laptop outfitted with speech. It had its own operating system, which now that I think about it might’ve been something akin to Linux but I’m not positive. Anyway, Windows has worked well for me for the most part. I say for the most part because I’m not that good at trouble-shooting computer issues, which I’ve been experiencing now for over a month. But I digress. Perhaps I’d like to expand my horizons a bit and try out VoiceOver and Orca, but for the time being I’m happy with Windows. I’m excited for the future of Serotek, and I’m also thrilled with what the NV Access Foundation has done with NVDA.
This article is too high-level to be informative. Yes, there are Linux screen reader solutions. Yes, there are apps to do many things that can be done with other operating systems. None of that is new.
What would have been useful is if you would have talked about what features worked well, and which did not. For example, Many blind Linux distros have had problems in the past with using speech and sound at the same time through a single sound card. Is that different now? In the office suite, how well is Orca able to track/announce formatting styles, embedded objects like tables and forms, and so on. When using the web, how does the experience compare to FF/IE on Windows?
Simply saying that it works and is great isn’t useful, as we all know that there are always areas where it does not work, and isn’t so great, no matter the operating system and adaptive tech.
Orca works very well from an end-user’s prospective. I’ll write up a list of things orca does well and rate them from 1 to 10 10 being the best accessibility and 1 being no accessibility at all.
firefox, rating nine. Works great with forms on the internet. I can use ebay, paypal, my phone.com phone company website, amazon, and more. Vinux is designed so in most cases I can use websites better and faster than I can on windows.
thunderbird mail, rating nine. You have to change one or two things in preferences and then it works great. I have messages open in a new window. thunderbird also has a calendar addon called lightning which is very accessible. lightning calendar, rating 9.
libreoffice calc-spreadsheet, writer-word equivalent, rating nine. Both on the web and in libreofice there are commands for table navigation. and with libreoffice like jaws, orca has quick navigation keys. You can set Orca to tell you as much information about formatting as you wish. Orca is like window-eyes in that its hotkeys are completely customiseable. With NVDA you have to edit files and making or changeing hotkeys is considered very advanced with NVDA. not so with orca. With Orca just go to the keybindings tab, arrow down to the hotkey you want changed, right arrow over to key combination, hit spacebar, press the new hotkey, hit enter to confirm, tab to ok hit spacebar and you’re done. similar to window-eyes.
sound themes manager, rating, four. Mostly accessible but the buttons are not labeled so you don’t know what you’re pressing when you hit enter on the buttons to add remove or edit sound themes.
handbrake, rating 10. rips audio from dvds and is also an audio converter.
disk utility. rating 10. lets you ormat disks and eject cds and dvds, mount and unmount drives. to mount a drive just means make it ready for the computer to use. unmount means turn the drive off and stop using it completely, until you hit the mount button. you would unmount a drive to remove an external hard drive or flash drive.
Vinux sound works great. USB headphones with mics have no issues working. I can use the internal laptop speakers or external speakers. And I can listen to music or internet radio and record it to mp3 if I want using rhythmbox. I can adjust volume of speech and music independently of each other. speech can be louder than music or I can make the music or radio louder than the speech.
system settings, like windows control panel. rating 10. works great.
When I press insert f for font Orca tells me all the information about the formatting I need to know and even that can be customised using the Orca preferences dialog box. Insert space brings that up. for app specific settings its insert control space.
I found an addon for NVDA called google speech recognition. It lets you dictate text and paste it into documents. You need an internet connection because the google servers do the speech to text processing. I would love it if this were also available for vinux.
There is now such a beast, but more powerful and flexible for Arch-Linux, and if no one else does it pretty soon I’ll port it to the Debian family of Linux distros including Vinux.
B.H.
I found a new speech recognizer for linux called palaver. When I get a USB headset with mic I’ll try it out but it may not be accessible because a button turns a certain color when you can speak into the mic. Palaver’s accessibility may need improveing and I am unsure if it uses google as its speech recognizer.
Can i just download Ubuntu and Vinux from the internet?
What do i have to do when i have a computer with windows on it?
Would you suggest removing Windows from my spare laptop and loading Vinux on it?
How does the virtual machine work?
This post inspired me to install ubuntu on a laptop with no working screen and too old to run any other Windows than XP. Having difficulty doing the number one thing I do with PCs, that being listening to streaming audio. Installed VLc and RhythmBox for this purpose. Must I actually copy mp3 files to the linux box so it will then get the codecs. Is there not something like K-Lite Codecs for Linux to ensure it plays all audio and video thrown at it. I have had this issue with every version of Linux I have played with and is likely what has kept me from adopting it as a viable alternative to Windows. The other thing of course would be the voice. Eloquence orh the IBM variant in SAPI4 would go a long way as well.
you can install mp3 playback and a bunch of other codecs permanently by using software center to install the ubuntu restricted extras package.
I put vinux on my macbook pro using vmware fusion, and ran into a weird issue where caps lock can’t be used as the modifier key for orca for some reason. No one seems to have a fix for that as far as I can tell. That is partially fixed by plugging in a USB keyboard, clumsy but doable. I seemed to have issues navigating certain websites like cnn and facebook with firefox, but that could just be my limited exposure to it or perhaps I didn’t give the system enouGh ram. If I can change the modifier key to something else not in that dropdown box I might be willing to give it another try. Perhaps the tilde key?
you can change the orca modifier to insert its in orca preferencces under keybindings.
How accessible is libreoffice? Can you read and apply heading styles to text? Is the track changes feature accessible?
I’ve used various flavors of Linux for over ten years and have a love-hate relationship with it. My problem with Orca is that when it reads well it’s wonderful. But if it sees nothing to read, you cannot use a mouse cursor, or an invisible cursor, nor a virtual cursor nor any other method to explore the screen and try to figure out what Orca is missing. I always fool for a while with some graphical program, get frustrated, and go back to good old Speakup and the command line. And one thing many readers might not realize is that Orca makes Gnome, just one of many window managers accessible. I administer a home server which runs MythTV for my family. MythTV is a PVR that costs nothing and works a lot better than commercial products like TiVo. But unfortunately, I cannot access the MythTV interface because it insists on running under a different, and inaccessible window manager. For me, playing with my Raspberry Pi using the command line is just a heck of a lot more fun.
I know this is an old post but I feel that it is worth pointing out that the situation has, I feel, changed somewhat with regards to Linux accessibility. While Vinux may have been good at a time, Ubuntu’s own accessibility has somewhat overtaken it and the recent Ubuntu MATE spinoff of Ubuntu offers the best accessibility support with the most accessible desktop environment in all of the Linux distros that I have tried. You can read more about it on my blog: https://micheal65536.wordpress.com/2015/11/09/most-accessible-ubuntu-mate/.