Install Arch Linux with accessibility options - ArchWiki

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The official Arch Linux installation medium supports various Accessibility features:

- speech is provided by the espeakup package
- braille terminal support is handled by the brltty package

This document describes how to install Arch Linux using these features.

Note: This page describes only steps which are different from the Installation guide.

## Pre-installation

### Boot the live environment

Note: The bootloaders on the installation medium have a timeout of 15 seconds before they start the default menu item.

When the installation medium starts booting, press `Down` followed by `Enter` to boot with speech enabled.

USB braille displays should be detected automatically via udev.

### Multiple sound cards

If your computer has several sound cards, you will hear the following message: Please select your sound card for speech output.

When you hear a beep on the output that you would like to use, press `Enter` to select the card.

### Change speech language

To change the espeak-ng language/voice used by `espeakup.service`, edit the unit so that the language code is appended to `default_voice=` in the `Environment=` directive.

You can also change the espeak-ng voice variant by appending `+variant` to the language code. See espeakup(8) and espeak-ng(1) for more information.

## Installation

### Install essential packages

For speech support in the installed system, you need espeakup and alsa-utils. If you use a braille display, install the brltty package.

Append the required packages to the pacstrap(8) call when installing:

    # pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware espeakup alsa-utils

## Configure the system

### Sound card

If #Multiple sound cards were detected, copy the `/etc/asound.conf` file, which has been generated in the installation medium:

    # cp /etc/asound.conf /mnt/etc/

### Enable the services

To have speech support after booting into the installed system you need to enable `espeakup.service`. See also #Change speech language.

## Reboot

After booting into the newly installed system it should start speaking automatically.

## Troubleshooting

This article or section is a candidate for merging with Accessibility.

Notes: The listed issues are out of scope of the Arch installation process. (Discuss in Talk:Install Arch Linux with accessibility options)

Most graphical applications should work out of the box, such as Gtk-, Qt- or Gecko-based ones. You can verify the functionality by running accerciser. The application of choice should appear and have a deeply nested tree structure of children. Issues may arise if:

- You haven't enabled the assistive technologies setting for your distribution. There's usually a single checkbox somewhere to be found to enable it. After enabling, you need to reboot.
- The application is Chromium- or Electron-based. These programs typically need both the Environment variable `ACCESSIBILITY_ENABLED=1`, and an additional argument `--force-renderer-accessibility` when launching. For Chrome you can replace the latter step with enabling the accessibility options inside `chrome://accessibility`, however this seems to not persist after restart.
- The application is Java-based. In this case, you need to install the ATK bridge java-atk-wrapper-openjdk8 (depending on your Java version)
- In the rare case that the application is an exotic, old application built with Qt4, such as some programs that haven't been maintained since 2015, you need to install `qt-at-spi`
- As a last resort, any of these other environment variables may help: `GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge`, `OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=gnome`, `GNOME_ACCESSIBILITY=1`, `QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1`, `QT_LINUX_ACCESSIBILITY_ALWAYS_ON=1`

Categories:

- Installation process
- Accessibility

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