Screenreader - accessibility

[Reece O'Bryan]

Hello,

I am wondering if anyone has any ideas as to how I could run a screen reader in Qubes. I use Orca with Debian-based systems, would it be possible to do the same thing?
I do realize that bond people that want privacy or an extremely small minority. However, I think that people that are blind or that have became blind such as myself deserve the same right to privacy. :)


Thank you all very much in advance,

-Reece

[Reece O'Bryan]

Hello,

I am wondering if anyone has any ideas as to how I could run a screen reader in Qubes. I use Orca with Debian-based systems, would it be possible to do the same thing?

I do realize that blind people that want privacy or an extremely small minority. However, I think that people that are blind or that have became blind such as myself deserve the same right to privacy. :)

[Sven Semmler]

On 12/13/20 4:17 PM, 'Reece O'Bryan' via qubes-users wrote:
> I am wondering if anyone has any ideas as to how I could run a screen
> reader in Qubes. I use Orca with Debian-based systems, would it be
> possible to do the same thing?

I am afraid that's going to be a though one. The way I understand how
screen readers work is that they interrogate the UI and then provide
some form of output be it audio or haptic.

In Qubes a lot of energy went into preventing exactly this scenario. My
high level understanding is that each VM renders their windows onto a
virtual screen. The areas of these windows are then sent securely as a
bitmap to dom0 where those bitmaps then get rendered onto the screen.

The entire point being that no VM can see or interrogate any of the
output of the other VMs and dom0 cannot be compromised because it is
only dealing with bitmaps.

There might be a way to get Orca or similar tools to work on a per VM
basis, which might be OK with audio output -- I don't know. But things
like system wide focus management would require a Qubes specific screen
reader implementation in dom0 with stubs in each VM.

With the upcoming version of Qubes GUI management will be removed from
dom0 and instead happen in a dedicated GUI VM, which is even more secure
and is meant to also make it easier to support different environments
like GNOME, KDE etc. My hope would be that in this new architecture
there would be an easier way to support this.

[Michael Carbone]

Hi Reece,

We are interested in implementing screen-reading support and have an
open issue about it here:

https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/5907

as Sven mentions there are some technical/security aspects that make it
difficult to implement right now, though with a dedicated GUI VM which
is on the Qubes roadmap this will be made easier.

Michael

[Reece O'Bryan]

Thank you for the replies! This definitely helps me to understand Qubes better. If this is the process for an application being passed along with dom0, would it be possible to actually use this process to an advantage in my case? If you are saying what I think you are and essentially a scanned image (bitmap) of the application or whatever you have open is passed on, wouldn’t it be possible to implement an OCR program at this stage to convert the image into plaintext, which could then be read by any screenreader.

My original plan was to try installing orca on dom0. I’m not sure if it is even compatible, but it may be worth a shot after reading the link to the “issue” on Github.(?) Reading that link also gave me an idea. Blind and visually impaired people obviously cannot benefit from the colored ribbons like those of you with vision. However, somewhat of an equivalent thing could be done by changing the voices spoken for a given app or Qube. A subtle change in pitch would suffice. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Step one is just virtualizing my first Qube.

FYI: please edit this bid out if not allowed. I couldn’t find that this wasn’t, but I understand if it is... I want to use this operating system and have it available and accessible for people like me so bad that I would even pay for it to be something incorporated.