Install Arch Linux with accessibility options
The official Arch Linux installation medium supports various Accessibility features:
- speech is provided by the espeakup package
- braille terminal support is handled by the brltty package
This document describes how to install Arch Linux using these features.
Pre-installation
Boot the live environment
When the installation medium starts booting, press Down followed by
Enter to boot with speech enabled.
USB braille displays should be detected automatically via udev.
Multiple sound cards
If your computer has several sound cards, you will hear the following message: Please select your sound card for speech output.
When you hear a beep on the output that you would like to use, press Enter to select the card.
Change speech language
To change the espeak-ng language/voice used by espeakup.service, edit the unit so that the language code is appended to default_voice= in the Environment= directive.
You can also change the espeak-ng voice variant by appending +variant to the language code. See espeakup(8) and espeak-ng(1) for more information.
Installation
Install essential packages
For speech support in the installed system, you need espeakup and alsa-utils. If you use a braille display, install the brltty package.
Append the required packages to the pacstrap(8) call when installing:
# pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware espeakup alsa-utils
Configure the system
Sound card
If #Multiple sound cards were detected, copy the /etc/asound.conf file, which has been generated in the installation medium:
# cp /etc/asound.conf /mnt/etc/
Enable the services
To have speech support after booting into the installed system you need to enable espeakup.service. See also #Change speech language.
Reboot
After booting into the newly installed system it should start speaking automatically.