Far as I'm aware it has been reported, at least going by the blinux mailing list.

So...I'm piecing together an install in qemu. It's working fine, I got mate firing up by startx because I am not wanting to fuck around with lightdm config and fixing that when it keels over. Now I'm trying to remember where I shove all the env variables for stuff like Pidgin or Chromium and so on. I went from a minimal install, to throwing Mate on, and Orca, speech-dispatcher, then pulse audio then diving into Mate and adding stuff from there.

End result. It works, it works fairly well. Now I just need to toss my usual set of stuff on there and hope I don't die in an avalanche of updates. And FWIW this was with the archinstall, which worked flawlessly for making a basic minimal install once I added in espeakup and alsa-utils and enabled the right things as well.

EDIT: Okay to clear things up

1. Fedora's the broken .iso not Arch

That Arch falling over was down to me typoing stuff in config files and somehow breaking things in style and not catching it. Once I figured out what broke it was an easy fix

Blinux list = the Red Hat Linux for Blind mailing list. I just call it the blinux list since it's listed as that in my folders since it's easier to remember

Never got that option since I did a minimal install through it. It didn't ever give me that choice so I installed it once it'd finihsed and I crooted in to set things up before a reboot. I'm on the latest iso as well. The only time I've been asked if I want pipewireis when I was doing a test Gnome install however. This is a lot easier than I remember now there's archinstall to help out, and it puts a minimal system together nicely.

So basically, I booted the is, picked to do speech, went through the archinstall and when it said if I wanted extra packages I added alsa-utils and espeakup at that point, those installed ine and I've gone from there building my qemu system bit by bit. Would I shove it on bare metal? Not sure yet, but archinstall didn't throw any major flags with installing the basic cli only system.

After that I did this while chrooted as root:

pacman -S xorg xorg-init mate mate-extra ttf-font speech-dispatcher orca nano&&systemctl enable espeakup.service #twice

Then it's a matter of just setting up startx to fire off the desktop and setting up the atk stuff.

Copy the default xinitrc to your home directory and nix all the TWm/clock/etc stuff and put exec mate-session there

Save it and either startx or startx mate-session gets me into a nice, working Mate desktop without breaking majorly. After that it's the usual tick the assistive tech box and set the ACCESSIBILITY_ENABLED=1 in your .bashrc

I'm still running into, on a new Arch install, the issue of Orca acting up and needing to hit Orca+f2 when you quit a Chromium based ap. i'm on Orca 41 from the official repo.

So. I installed yay, yet it doesn't seem to target AUR packages specifically. I'm assuming I did something wrong? I just cloned the link from AUR, made it and installed it fine...yet it doesn't pick up on stuff I know is in the AUR. like...pipe-viewer or Skype or Spotify for example

Ah that did the trick, yeah...slowly getting my litany of used stuf up and going. Admittedly now trying to work out why mate-session keels over every once in a while is bugging me. I need to do mate-session before I startx else it hangs. Probably just derped and broke a conffig somewhere though
EDIT: Yep, Brisk menu was the culprit...which is a shame since I like that on Solus and Ubuntu Mate when it works right. I'm still unsure why why Orca 41 hangs when exiting a Chromium based app however. But he speed. The speeeeed, and packages.

And no updates immediately. Hey I'm kind of liking this. So aside from bsd-games. Any other decent games I can grab then? I remember the ones from Genux but not sure they'd work in a vanilla Arch install however?

That sounds fun. I will have to mess around with Arch again at some point.

what is wayland ?

So what does pipewire/wirepumber ofer over Pulse? And hm. I'm doing this from a CLI minimal install...trying mpv, it still says audio pulse 44100 hz

@37-38, Pipewire is the modern replacement for pulse. Read the arch wiki page on it for more info. The packages you need to install, roughly, are: pipewire wireplumber pipewire-pulse pipewire-jack

Okay there's something seriouslt strange going on when I'm virtualizing Arch in Qemu with pipewire. There's a litany of posts on the Orca list about Orca not working well with Pipewire though but I'm running into one where it flat out refuses to work when virtualized? It's either deomonic whispering, or, Pulseaudio for my sound choices

So, It seems like I didn't have alsa-plugins installed, installed that also, but, no speech, espeakup seems to be working because when I press the numpad keys I do here the beeps that indicate that this is the last line or whatever, but no speech output, espeak-ng is installed, and also speech-dispatcher.

Running into the same problem as 43 described. and followed the steps that @GCW outline, doesn't seem to fix the problem.