raspberry pi for screen reader users

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Which Raspberry Pi do you have? As far as I know, there are still 3 
versions being sold: The original Raspberry Pi model B, the Pi2 and the 
Pi3, all at the same price. Did you only purchase the computer,or did 
you get it in a kit with an SD card, a case and possibly a reader? The 
Pi3 is the only model with onboard wifi and bluetooth, but its wifi only 
supports the 2.4GHz band. That said, most routers support both 2.4GHz 
and 5.0GHz bands, so the onboard wifi should still work. If you did buy 
your Raspberry Pi in a kit, the OS on the MicroSD will depend on the kit 
you purchased. However, although I believe the kit I have initially had 
Ubuntu, I'm not sure what is on other MicroSD cards. It will be better 
to rewrite it with a different OS. Instructions are available for 
ArchLinuxARM on its website

https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/broadcom/raspberry-pi-2

which also works on the Raspberry Pi 3. The tarball download includes no 
screen reader, but you can install packages over ssh fairly easily. You 
will probably want the MATE desktop and the Orca screen reader. It runs 
a bit slowly on these machines, because they have fairly slow processors 
and less RAM than other similar machines, but if you get zramswap from 
the AUR, you can add a little swapspace in memory that will speed things 
up a little. If you don't want/like the Arch philosophy or the rolling 
release model, where there is no set timetable for complete OS releases, 
and each package gets upgraded when it is released, I believe there may 
be Ubuntu releases that include Orca as well, although I don't have a 
link at this time. In all cases, you will want to either use your wired 
speakers and mask pulseaudio to keep it disabled, or use your USB 
speakers, as Pulseaudio remains badly broken on the Raspberry Pi's own 
sound hardware.

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