Description of problem: The Orca screen reader is unable to read the installer which prevents blind users from installing the system. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Press super+alt+s to start the orca screen reader. 2. Launch the installer. 3. Try to press the tab or other keys, Orca is silent. I suspect the installer is running as a different user context and not exposing its contents to the accessibility bus via ATK. Actual results: Nothing is spoken. Expected results: Orca can read the items in the installer. Additional info: I marked this as a high priority because it prevents me and other users from being able to install the product.
I am sorry for the incorrect component at first. The dropdown for selecting a component in Bugzilla is actually inaccessible with a screen reader as well so I had to do a bit of mousing and guesswork with my screen reader.
I initially gave the wrong command to start the screen reader. Its actually super_alt+s not control+alt+s. I fixed that in the description. You can also press alt+f2 then type orca and press enter.
Thank you for the report, and sorry. This is a known thing, but not easy to fix. We are aware and multiple people looked into this, but never got anywhere. Here's why: On the Live CD, Anaconda GUI runs as root. That prevents Orca (running as user) from reading it (via ATK) under Wayland, which is the default these days. The most straightforward way to fix this is to run the GUI as normal user. Historically, Anaconda ran mostly as a monolith, so root was necessary. We have been for years working on a transition to a UI + services model. We've been calling this "modularization". This work is perhaps 70% done - most importantly, all RPM handling is still done the "old way", with work currently underway on this part. Maybe in F35 we'll be closer to that goal. A side effect will be that while the services will still have to run as root, the UI won't. So, once *all* of the actual installing work happens in the services, a non-root (G)UI is no longer impossible. Of course, making the GUI non-root might turn out to be another mountain to climb. I will leave this bug open, but there is no way this moves anytime soon, so I predict it will just rot and get auto-closed in a year. There might be some other way to get this working, but I don't remember any obvious clues. It's a shame :(
Thanks for your response. This lead me to another idea. The installer may still read in the Mate desktop due to it still being based on Xorg. Of the desktops other than Gnome, Mate is the only one that has very good accessibility. If Orca does read in the mate installer, would it be possible to list this issue under the common issues page for Fedora and suggest that Blind users use the Mate spin until things are fixed in Wayland? This wouldn't require any coding and could help people if it works by leading them in the right direction. If this seems all right with you, I could write up a short blerb with the information and any info that would help blind folks with the Mate spin.
I didn't exactly expect that, but looks like the desktop people sorted this out on their end! See bug 1821345. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1821345 ***