Andrew Leland#Linux #a11y question with a long self-indulgent preamble: I have been using #emacspeak in the #terminal on #MacOS as my “daily driver” for all writing/notetaking/ #orgmode scheduling/todo organizing for about a month now. I am super in love with it, transformational for this low-vision writer/teacher/editor/producer. (1/8)
Before that I was jamming with a #plaintext workflow using markdown, coteditor + terminal.app (zsh) + #pandoc after getting red-pilled by @patric. (2/8)
Becoming increasingly convinced that #emacs is the way forward for me; I have zero coding background but love the feeling of control/flexibility, especially since with my current level of vision having speech plus the ability to make text huge on a black background is lovely, and I find hackery tools like Emacs and Terminal to be way more visually accessible and (with some 40-pt asterisks) way better for speech output too. (3/8)
There's still part of me that misses the ultrasmoothness of Word on Windows with NVDA (web browsing felt more stable there too) but compared to my notepad++ life back then I am very happy indeed. (4/8)
So: all this CLI-happy FOSS-y jamming, plus the recent swell of smart people talking on here about the good and bad of Linux for a screen-reader user, has me very interested in Linux. I bought a wee Beelink mini pc, put Debian Trixie on it and got emacspeak running, but that was only because everybody left me alone on father's day, it was my version of going into the garage to build my canoe or whatever, and haven't had time to use it beyond that. (5/8)
I still haven't asked you my question. (6/8)
My question is just... any advice for a friendly non-technical low-vision new linux guy? or, kind of embarrassing to admit but I'm also hungry for encouragement: is this worth the effort? any cheerleaders care to cheer me on? so far, the emacs journey has felt like it's absolutely rewarded the hours of wilderness-wandering... is it safe to assume that the same dynamic with Linux will reward those timesunk dividends? Is Emacspeak more stable over there? (7/8)
Tim ChaseWhile I'm a vi/vim/ed guy rather than an Emacs guy, I'll gladly cheer you on in your #plaintext & #CLI adventures.
For my personal finances, I use `ledger` (https://ledger-cli.org/) for #plaintextaccounting and I know it has some Emacs scripts available to make it easier.
For calendaring, I'm a big advocate for using `remind` (https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/). It's incredibly powerful, and as a CLI tool, pipes well to other utilities.
I don't know if you have a preferred mail program—whether that's Gmail in a web-browser or Thunderbird for a rich-client, or a command-line mail program like mutt/neomutt or even classic `mail` (or its souped up cousin `s-nail`).
There's a "blinux" (blind Linux users) mailing list if that's your jam. I think it's at http://leb.net/blinux/blinux-list.html I'm not blind/VI myself, but I lurk on the list and try to answer the occasional question as I have opportunity, and have an appreciation of keeping CLI tools accessible.
Anyways, here's cheering you on.