I will admit straight off that these are my findings and opinions after only a brief time of using Fedora 12. You may have different results or find that things work better.

But, let’s dive straight in.

Was the installer accessible? No. Not from what I could tell. The live CD ran for me but obviously, it would require a log out for the gnome accessibility settings to be applied so in a live CD environment, that’s out of the question.

When trying to make a USB live environment, the system loaded, I applied the gnome accessibility settings however after a restart, the USB key would not boot. It’s surprising and currently unexplained, but I’m not sure why it suddenly stopped booting after I made a minor change that shouldn’t have anything to do with the boot process at all! I also made sure to leave enough space available so as retaining settings and a limited amount of files was supported.

So, to install, I needed to get sighted assistance. Fortunately for me, that’s no major problem.

After installation, the first thing I did was install ESpeak. That’s more prefered for me compared to the default of festival. This was incredibly simple. simply type the following command:

yum install espeak gnome-speech-espeak

TTSynth at a later stage so when I do, I’ll write instructions for that here.

I’ve some very interesting things to report in Linux in relation to a comparason with the off screen model used by Windows based screen readers, but again, I’ll leave that until I’ve had more time for testing.