FYI: PinePhone community edition for Manjaro

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Hi!
What is the model of the phone you bought?
Thanks in advance.
/A

> 2 sep. 2020 kl. 03:46 skrev Linux for blind general discussion <blinux-list at redhat.com>:
> 
>> Somebody wrote:
>> 
>> Would be good to know when you get the device.
> 
> My phone is in transit (somewhere between Los Angeles and San Bruno, California) as I
> write this.  In theory, I should receive it some time on Thursday.
> 
>> I was wanting to get one myself, but wasn't sure of the options for accessibility.
> 
> I don't expect the device to have any particular options for accessibility.  I can try
> to evaluate and report on the physical hardware (e.g., how hard it would be for blind
> users to replace the microSD card), but this is only a small part of the story.
> 
> As I detailed in my (rather long winded) note the other day, most of the accessibility
> options for a mobile phone depend on the installed software: operating system, window
> manager, applications, etc.  So, I'd expect the default behavior under postmarketOS to
> differ quite a bit from that of Manjaro or any of the dozen or so other Linux variants
> that claim to support this device.
> 
> In any case, none of these variants seems to have blind accessibility on their radar.
> The closest I've found so far is Mobian, which (as a Debian derivative) may benefit
> from the efforts of the Debian accessibility community.
> 
> <whine>
> The Linux community is famously Balkanized, with hundreds of distributions.  The blind-
> friendly subset is much smaller, but still has several current variants (along with
> several more that are "pining for the fjords").  These variants are distinguished by
> their base distributions (e.g., Arch, Slackware), hardware platforms (e.g., ARM, Intel),
> package complements (e.g., Fenrir, Orca, Speakup), etc.  
> 
> Please understand that I'm not dissing these variants, let alone their developers.  It
> just makes me sad that none of them seems to have acquired any substantial user base.
> Given the relatively small percentage of blind folks in the general population and the
> even smaller percentage of Linux users, this seems all too predictable.  But still, the
> result is that there isn't a large enough community of users to support the kind of
> development and support that I'd like.  More to the point, I worry that my pipe dreams
> of "cell phone Linux for the blind" could easily go in the same direction.
> 
> My _hope_ is that I can find a solid Linux variant for mobile phones, based on a popular
> flavor of Linux.  Then, I can try to fold in a working set of accessibility packages,
> based on the existing work of assorted current and historic distributions.  If this can
> run on a large number of repurposed Android phones, it might provide a good start on a
> system that blind users around the world can afford.  But, it's all SciFi at this point.
> </whine>
> 
> - Rich Morin, rdm at cfcl.com
> 
> 
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