4 ms·

I'm a totally blind developer and have never gotten Linux to work very well. What distro do you use? I'm also curious if you run Linux in VM's with speach? I th

by jareds 8y ago

I'm a totally blind developer and have never gotten Linux to work very well. What distro do you use? I'm also curious if you run Linux in VM's with speach? I think part of my problem may be bad audio support in Virtualbox and I may have better luck with VMware. I use Windows 10 every day with Jaws and Windows subsystem for Linux. WSL has noticeably increased my productivity compared to Cygwin do to the larger volume of software that runs in it and no longer having the need to spend time compiling tools from source. I find NVDA to be a pretty good screen reader and you could probably use it full time. I've used Jaws for over 20 years though so it's worth paying the $100 a year to keep up to date rather then spending the time getting used to a new screen reader. It's also nice to have a company you can call for support and talk to someone instantly when your entire ability to do your job depends on screen reading software.

ndarilek 8y ago
I use Fedora. Most of my issues seem like potential leaks/performance degradations in the accessibility stack. Performance drops over time, and doesn't seem to improve when apps are killed/restarted. The only components I can't restart are a11y-related, and the only way to get performance back is to restart or log back out and in. Maybe the issue is gnome-shell, but I can't help but feel like there'd be a revolt if everyone experienced the performance issues I do, so unfairly or not I blame accessibility.
forthewyn 8y ago
Hi! I'm nosing in here but I'm a partially blind dev who recently came back to Linux and have had great success with the KDE desktop, specifically Kubuntu 18.10 in my case. They have excellent accessibility support baked in by default. Things are getting better all around in modern Linux though because in recent Ubuntu releases you can enable voice narration, full screen zoom (my show stopper must have) and screen readers from the login screen. Good luck!

by jareds 8y ago

ndarilek 8y ago

I use Fedora. Most of my issues seem like potential leaks/performance degradations in the accessibility stack. Performance drops over time, and doesn't seem to improve when apps are killed/restarted. The only components I can't restart are a11y-related, and the only way to get performance back is to restart or log back out and in. Maybe the issue is gnome-shell, but I can't help but feel like there'd be a revolt if everyone experienced the performance issues I do, so unfairly or not I blame accessibility.

forthewyn 8y ago

Hi! I'm nosing in here but I'm a partially blind dev who recently came back to Linux and have had great success with the KDE desktop, specifically Kubuntu 18.10 in my case. They have excellent accessibility support baked in by default. Things are getting better all around in modern Linux though because in recent Ubuntu releases you can enable voice narration, full screen zoom (my show stopper must have) and screen readers from the login screen. Good luck!