This post is being fully written only with raw metal asahi linux fedora 42 with gnome, on firefox with orca. It's actually something usable now, thanks to the EU and Matt Campbell's incredible work.
I am writing this in the hope that it will be useful to someone... My mac is getting hot now like any average laptop, but yo it works!!! It's probably just way more unstable than any of the first developer beta of macos... I mean the accessibility. I am very very very very excited to test this out.
I don't mean anything by this but like the spell check actually works in this edit field! Just sayin.
No vim for me yet :( , at least with orca. But options are plenty...
Please buy any rim or scribe subscription you can!!!
Again thank you to everyone who is doing this incredible work for a niche within a niche within a niche.....
No, aside terminal, firefox, the installer itself :) , and alt f2, I literally haven't tried anything yet. Wonder how to get the classic menu of gnome classic, the like of mate? ...
See ya.
Please like and subscribe, but for the moment we can just subscribe so do that if you want.
No, I am not smiling like a kid currently. Not at all.
PS: this thing is actually very very faaast!
By TheBlindGuy07, 4 July, 2025
Forum
Assistive Technology
Comments
So I installed this yesterday and...
Gnome was pretty bad, but there were a few saving graces for it. The built in onedrive/google management for one. I couldn't really use the thing unless I switched to gnome classic and it wasn't much better. DNF groupinstall mate-desktop , and mate-appplications I believe from memory were the commands to install the thing but there was work to be done for it to show up on boot. I went through formatting because I couldn't stand eSpeak, but one day I will purchase vocalizer so it's a more viable platform for me, since eloquence isn't available on arm. Firefox and chromium were a joy to use compared to the Mac counterparts.
Does mate work with wayland?…
Does mate work with wayland? Would it share all the improvements made to gnome? Like so far it's just usable and it wasn't in October last year. Yes VO is really bad on the web. I don't want to break anything.
This wayland x11 thing is very confusing, I saw during update that it was getting some x-wayland things or something... Plus it's my first time to be outside debian/ubuntu roots for package management so I'm learning that at the same time. But we have something now! Thanks to the government, literally. If kde-connect can work on gnome I'll try it. And emacs+emacspeak. And libreoffice and Calibre. ... :) and I'll ask on those lists how best report accessibility bugs there.
No it does not work. I was wasting my time :D
From my research, Gnome is best with wayland for us, but it's possible the things I'm reading could be wrong, but I don't think so. Maybe building current Orca would have helped me, or maybe assistive technology checkbox is unchecked, but I don't know where that would be in Gnome. There's lots to love about it if you look past it though, for what works, IMO. We'll be using it soon enough if they work on it.
OMG Tables work well in…
OMG Tables work well in LibreOffice Writer as well as formatting. This is wild guys. I mean with my testing currently.
Back on mac (stable) now,…
Back on mac (stable) now, there are known obvious problem with proper battery/power management which I was expecting, like I plugged my mac for 2-3 hours and it was stuck at 62% in asahi and when I just rebooted on mac it's at 90%. Today it didn't even get hot at all, and I learned how to navigate in the new gnome, their shortcuts list is very helpful.
I will keep testing this thing, now it's... did I say it's very interesting? :)
Also when you install this with gnome, I don't know what happen but I was stuck on the timezone selection dialog, Orca didn't see anything other than the edit field to type a city and the previous button, I had to do random things with my trackpad and be lucky enough to get the next button after that.
Did I say tables in Writer, just because of the lack of nested hierarchy, are almost a fun experience? Caps lock + f give so much richer information than even nvda on windows, both in writer and even on the web.
Of course I haven't done anything production/serious on it yet, but I really wasn't expecting that much usability. Last time I had a good time with linux accessibility was in 2018 where x11 was still around, I mean more than today.
And orca is much much faster than VoiceOver on mac has ever been, closer t o speakup in tty mode which I am really surprised about. Beating NVDA on most average windows config (the key word here is average).
And personally I do love espeak but will definitely buy from voxyn soon.
I didn't even know that orca let us choose to use the screen reader cursor thing on the web like it's common on windows or let the app manage it, so f7 in firefox for example, and there the focus even follows, which isn't the case on mac and in chrome this could solve so many problems at once.