Prospects for an accessible and open version of Android?

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Part of me says you might be better off starting with a Raspberry Pi
if you want a more vanilla Linux/GNU experience on a pocket-sized
computer than what Android offers... unless there's some smartphones
out there that support replacing their stock Android with the ARM
version of more traditional distros.

The Raspberry Pi 3 makes a great command line-only with speech Linux
box, and there are reports of the 4GB ram version of the Pi 4 running
LXDE or Mate with Orca and still having resources to spare on
graphical applications.

Admittedly, I'm not aware of any good way of giving the Pi an internal
battery(I'm sure there's a hat for that, I just haven't found one),
and it might mean handling microSD cards more than one is comfortable
with(I wish the Raspberry Pi Foundation had stuck with full-sized SD
cards for their system drives or that there was a way to flash an SD
card while it's loaded in a Pi), but you also get 4 full-sized USB
ports for hooking up peripherals and the option ofconnecting to wired
networks via Ethernet.

If you do decide to go this route, I'd recommend

http://www.raspberryvi.org/stories/index.html

And the associated mailing list.

That said, the ability to tell Android's Java-based,
touchscreen-optimized GUI to take a hike and drop down to a Linux
console would be nice, almost as nice as full built-in physical
keyboards being a common option or having dual full-sized SD card
slots for expanded storage or devices being equipped with batteries
that actually have decent capacity and can be swapped out for a
charged spare when they do run low at an inconvenient time.