Has anyone gotten i3 accessible yet? or is there a better option besides ratpoison, which is great, btw

Linux for blind general discussion blinux-list at redhat.com
Wed Feb 9 16:04:19 UTC 2022


I think the point of wanting an accessible ratpoison, i3, etc. setup
is that Gnome and Mate are both fairly hefty environments in terms of
resource usage, and Orca, if you'll pardon the pun, is a whale of a
resource user itself while these alternative window managers are
designed to be as lightweight as their creators could manage.

One of Linux's appeals is breathing new life into old hardware, and
there are many machines that would choke on modern Windows and could
handle either Gnome/Mate or Orca, but can't handle both Gnome/Mate and
Orca and still have enough resources left over for running apps with
acceptable performance. And since the only real alternative to Orca is
ditch the GUI and do everything in the console, the focus for putting
an accessible desktop on old machines tends to be onstripping out
unused parts of the desktop environment and switching the vital
components to lighter weight alternatives.

Also, as its name suggests, ratpoison is built from the ground up with
a keyboard-only, no mouse setup in mind, and blind users tend to fall
into the category of users who don't like using a mouse.

Anyways, I myself am using the fast, light window manager(flwm)... but
I can't really speak to its accessibility since my setup doesn't
include anything remotely resembling a full desktop. Firefox is the
only graphical application I use and I launch it via a script I did
not write and understand next to nothing of how it works that
basically gives me Firefox+orca running as a kiosk on top of
flwm(though, while a true kiosk would prevent closing Firefox, on my
setup, closing firefox ends the xsession and drops back to the
console. The script uses compiz as its default Window manager, but
changing which window manager it uses is the one thing I've figured
out, and flwm was just the smallest window manager I tried that worked
as a drop in replacement... and even then, Firefox+Orca are such a
Behemoth and Leviathan combo that some websites(or having many tabs
open) slow my 4GB Ram, i7 20-something-hundred machine to a crawl(My
system drive being platter based probably doesn't help matters
either).




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