Blind vs. mainstream distros

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Tony,
TalkingArch won't die. It used to have a single developer before those 
of us who maintain it now took over. The transition ran quite smoothly, 
and it didn't die. Since we now have two people instead of one, it has 
even less of a chance of dying in the future. So TalkingArch is slightly 
specialized, but it's a specialized image, not a specialized distro. 
That's the difference. Gentoo is the same if it has a specialized iso 
image. It's a specialized image that allows installation of the pure 
distro from a talking environment. That said, Gentoo can probably be 
installed from Debian, just like Arch can be installed from Fedora. Yes, 
Fedora in fact does have everything needed to bootstrap pure Arch, 
Debian and I believe Ubuntu as well from what I've seen. So although an 
iso image does make life easier, it can be said that all you really need 
to install pure Arch is a Fedora Live Workstation iso and an open 
terminal. So even if TalkingArch were to die, it would not become 
impossible to install Arch Linux.

Regarding why the unmute and prerecorded message aren't in the official 
Arch iso, one could state as you have done that they simply don't care 
about accessibility. But this is far from true. The main problem is that 
they already have a brltty package, but the brltty-minimal package is 
needed in order to make it work without pulling in lots of unneeded 
dependencies. This will always need to be in a separate repository 
unfortunately. Perhaps Chris, who maintained the iso before Kelly and I 
started maintaining it, can better explain why the unmute and 
prerecorded message aren't in the official image, but I'm certain there 
is a technical reason why Arch hasn't yet adopted these things. Still, 
even if they did, it would save just a little time and effort, and to 
have Arch come up speaking and brailling upon starting the iso is 
definitely better left to the TalkingArch image itself than to force 
users to blindly run something to get it working, which is what would 
need to be done to get the official iso talking, or install something, 
which is what would be needed to get it brailling.
~Kyle