Vojtux：针对视力障碍用户改造 Linux
视障 Vojtux 可访问性
![](/data/attachment/album/202311/19/213037vnff11ziqxnjcsft.png)



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> Vojtux 是 Fedora 项目的一部分，它是一款专门为视力障碍者打造的非官方 Linux 发行版。
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我五岁时，父亲给我们带来了第一台电脑。那一刻，我就明确了自己的职业追求：计算机领域。从那时起，我就一直和电脑打交道。在高中阶段，我开始尝试黑客活动，以决定自己专注于何种领域，最终我选择了安全工程师作为我的职业。


如今，我已经在红帽的安全合规团队任职软件工程师两年多了，我在捷克进行远程工作。我已经使用 Linux 12 年了，主要是 Arch Linux 和 Fedora，然而我过去也管理过 Debian、Gentoo 和 Ubuntu。


![Vojtech 的图片](/data/attachment/album/202311/19/213327lx1qqqku7qdk3mmc.jpg)


*图片说明：这是一张黑白的笑脸 Vojtech 图片，图中有一个红色边框，背景是一架纸飞机。*


工作之余，我玩盲人足球，我还参与了许多项目，这些项目都是为了帮助视力障碍者和视力正常人群建立联系。包括我还在一个为视力障碍者举办活动的小型非政府组织（NGO）工作。我还在开发一个叫做 [Vojtux](https://github.com/vojtapolasek/Fegora) 的 Fedora 项目，这也是一个专门为视力障碍者打造的非官方 Linux 发行版。


### 辅助技术栈


我在使用智能设备时，需要依赖多种辅助技术，其中最主要的一款叫做屏幕阅读器。它是一款能将屏幕上的内容通过语音或盲文传达给视力障碍者的软件（简单来说，它就像我们的眼睛）。它能读并通知我当前正在关注的按钮或页面元素是什么，使得我能够与图形用户界面进行互动。


屏幕阅读器使用语音合成技术，将屏幕上的内容声音化。市面上有众多的语音合成器，有些听起来比别的更自然。我使用的是 Espeak，它听起来没有那么自然，但是它很轻便，运行也很快。此外，它几乎支持所有的语言，包括我正在使用的捷克语。


最后，我使用了一台能以盲文显示一行文字的盲文显示器，尤其在我写代码或者做代码审查的时候，我离不开它。通过触觉自由地从一个代码元素转移到另一个元素，使我能更轻松地把握代码的结构。我还可以使用它的按钮将光标移至我感兴趣的字符或屏幕区域，如果我想的话，我还能使用上面的盲文键盘输入。


### 我在日常生活中如何应用辅助技术


作为一个视障人士在使用电脑时，有许多事情其实可以借助上述技术轻松完成。以下是我日常经常做的一些事情：


* 我十分喜欢使用文本控制台。一般来说，只要是文字信息，盲人就可以借助屏幕阅读器进行阅读（虽然并非所有情况都适用，但在大多数情况下是可行的）。我通常用控制台进行系统管理、文本编辑以及查阅指导手册和文档。
* 我喜欢浏览网络并与网页进行互动。
* 我使用 VSCode 和 [Eclipse](https://opensource.com/article/20/12/eclipse) 进行代码编写以及代码审查工作。
* 我会发送电子邮件以及进行即时通讯。
* 我可以使用诸如谷歌文档（虽非开源，但在现代办公环境中广为使用）和 [LibreOffice](https://opensource.com/article/22/2/libreoffice-accessibility) 这样的文本处理软件。谷歌文档的开发团队加入了许多键盘快捷键，我可以利用它们在文档中浏览、跳转到标题或者注释里等等。
* 通常来说，我能够播放多媒体内容，但这也取决于应用程序的开发方式，有些媒体播放器在这方面做得更好。


### 可行，但困扰重重


随着技术的进步，一些任务尽管是可行的，但完成起来却相当困难，我称这类任务为“可行，但困扰重重”。


处理 PDF 文件非常艰难。有时，我不得不采用光学字符识别（OCR）软件将图像转换为文本。例如，我最近需要阅读一份餐厅菜单，他们在他们的网站上提供 PDF 菜单，但它已经被压平，丧失了文字层。在我这里，这显示为一片空白屏幕。我只能通过在智能手机上使用 OCR 应用程序来帮我提取文本。这不仅需要额外的步骤，而且提取的文本翻译并不总是完全准确。


查看和创建演示文稿也可能困难重重。为了解决这个问题，我采用像 [Pandoc](https://opensource.com/article/18/9/intro-pandoc) 这样的软件用 HTML 创建幻灯片，它可以处理 [Markdown](https://opensource.com/article/19/9/introduction-markdown) 并将其转换成幻灯片。我已经使用这种方法好几年了，效果很好。它允许我完全掌控生成的幻灯片，因为 Markdown 就是简单的文本。


通过将其基于声音或文字，可以使视频游戏更易于接入。然而，在 Linux 上玩游戏可以是一大挑战，不仅需要找到能够进行无障碍访问的游戏，而且由于大多数 PC 游戏原生支持 Windows，因此还需要处理一些兼容性问题。


有些网站和界面比其他的难以导航。往往只需要通过正确设置一些属性，这些问题就可以很容易地得到解决。一般来说，大量的网页内容都以图像的形式存在。提高网页内容可访问性的一个快速有效的方法就是确保图像都添加了替代文本，使得屏幕阅读器可以读出来，让无法辨识图像的人们也能了解图像内容。还有另一种经常遇到的情况是遇到没有标签的控件：你知道那里有一个按钮或复选框，但你无法确定它具体的功能。


### Vojtux 项目：为了更好的 Linux 可访问性


开发者并不是特意设计出无障碍访问困难的应用程序，问题在于他们通常不清楚如何测试可访问性。由于视障 Linux 用户数量有限，可访问性的测试和反馈往往不足。因此，开发者往往不能生产易于访问的应用，用户也相应较少。这样形成了一个恶性循环。


Vojtux 项目就是希望能处理这个问题。我们希望能建立一个对视障用户更友好的 Fedora 改造版本。我们的目标是吸引更多用户，并鼓励他们发现并报告问题，以便开源社区的开发者可以解决这些问题。


你可能会问为什么要做这个项目？我们需要明确的是，Fedora 在设计上并非就没有可访问性，实际上，它有许多作为包的形式存在的辅助工具。但这些工具不是从一开始就存在，且需要许多细小的配置才能顺利使用，这可能会让初次使用 Fedora 的用户感到困惑。


我们期望 Vojtux 对视障用户而言尽可能友好和可预知。当用户启动立付镜像时，只需出现图形用户界面，屏幕阅读就会立即开始。所有必要的可访问性 [环境变量](https://opensource.com/article/19/8/what-are-environment-variables) 将会被正确地加载和配置。


Vojtux 还实现了以下功能，例如：


* 配置开机就能使用的辅助性环境变量。
* 图形界面一加载，Orca 屏幕阅读器就会启动。
* 添加了自定义库，该库包含额外的语音合成和打包软件。
* 添加了许多替代键盘快捷键。
* 还有一个特别的脚本可以控制显示器的开关。很多用户根本不需要显示器，关闭它则是一种极好的节能方式！


### 想要帮忙？这就需要你了


首先，如果你希望为 Vojtux 做贡献（或只是帮助传播），可以在我们的 [项目库](https://github.com/vojtapolasek/Fegora) 查找更多信息。


此外，在团队中与视障人士协作时，可能需要考虑应用哪些无障碍技术。例如，因为我们都是通过声音获取信息，所以我们很难同时进行听说和阅读，除非有人非常熟练于使用盲文显示器。


最后，要记住，无论是演示幻灯片、网站还是 PDF，盲人和视障用户都与你使用相同的最终产品。当你开发产品或创作内容时，你的选择对我们能否有效地进行互动和访问有着巨大的影响。知道我们在这里，我们热爱使用计算机和科技，并且我们经常愿意帮助你进行测试。


![Vojtech 手持足球的照片](/data/attachment/album/202311/19/213130h5kvqe55qzt8d5cb.jpg)


*图片说明：手持足球的 Vojtech，他身穿足球服，戴着防护眼镜。*


本文作者最初于 2022 年 9 月发布文章，并在后续将项目的官方名称更新为 Vojtux。


*（题图：MJ/06477e84-6119-45d0-8085-5936a607ee68）*




---


via: <https://opensource.com/article/22/9/linux-visually-impaired-users>


作者：[Vojtech Polasek](https://opensource.com/users/vpolasek) 选题：[lkxed](https://github.com/lkxed) 译者：[ChatGPT](https://linux.cn/lctt/ChatGPT) 校对：[wxy](https://github.com/wxy)


本文由 [LCTT](https://github.com/LCTT/TranslateProject) 原创编译，[Linux中国](https://linux.cn/) 荣誉推出


OK
When I was around 5 years old, my father brought home our first computer. From that moment on, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in computers. I haven't stopped hanging around them since. During high school, when considering which specific area I wanted to focus on, I started experimenting with hacking, and that was the moment I decided to pursue a career as a security engineer.

I'm now a software engineer on the security compliance team. I've been at Red Hat for over two years, and I work remotely in the Czech Republic. I've used Linux for about 12 years, mainly Arch Linux and Fedora, but I've also administered Debian, Gentoo, and Ubuntu in the past.

![Image of Vojtech](https://opensource.com/sites/default/files/2022-08/Vojtech.png)

(Vojtech Polasek, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Photo description: Black and white image of a smiling Vojtech, with a red frame around it and an illustrated paper airplane in the background.

Outside of my day job, I play blind football, and I'm involved in various projects connecting visually impaired and sighted people together, including working in a small NGO that runs activities for blind and visually impaired people. I'm also working on an accessible Fedora project called [Vojtux](https://github.com/vojtapolasek/Fegora), an unofficial Linux distribution aimed at visually impaired users.

## The assistive technology stack

When I use a smart device, I need several pieces of assistive technology. The first and most essential is called a *screen reader*. This is software that presents what's on the screen to blind or visually impaired people, either through speech or through braille (basically, it tries to serve as our eyes). It can read out notifications and tell me which button or page element I'm focusing on, allowing me to interact with graphical user interfaces.

Screen readers use speech synthesis to speak aloud what appears on the screen. There are a variety of speech synthesizers, and some voices are more "natural-sounding" than others. The one I use, Espeak, is not very natural-sounding, but it's lightweight and fast. It also supports almost all languages, including Czech (which I use).

Finally, I use a Braille display, a device that represents a line of text in Braille. I use this a lot, especially when I'm coding or doing code reviews. It's easier to grasp the structure of code when I can freely move from one code element to another by touch. I can also use its buttons to move the cursor to the character or area of the screen I'm interested in, and it has a Braille keyboard too if I want to use it.


## How I use assistive technology on a daily basis

When using a computer as a blind or visually impaired person, there are a couple of things that are relatively straightforward to do using the tech above. Personally, these are a few of the things I do every day:

- The text console is pretty much my favorite application. As a general rule, when something's in text, then blind people can read it with a screen reader (this doesn't hold true in all cases, but in most.) I mainly use the console for system management, text editing, and working with guidance and documentation.
- I browse the web and interact with websites.
- I code and do code reviews using VSCode and
[Eclipse](https://opensource.com/article/20/12/eclipse). - I send emails and instant messages.
- I can use word processing software, like Google Docs (which is not open source, but common in the modern office) and
[LibreOffice](https://opensource.com/article/22/2/libreoffice-accessibility). Google Docs developers have added a lot of keyboard shortcuts, which I can use to move around documents, jump to headings or into comments, and so on. - I can play multimedia, usually. It depends on how the application is written. Some media players are more accessible than others.

## Possible but painful

This brings me to tasks that aren't so easy. I like to call these "possible but painful".

PDF files can be difficult. Sometimes I end up needing to use optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert images to text. For example, recently I needed to read a menu for a restaurant. They had the PDF of their menu on their website, but it had been flattened, and didn't have a text layer. For me, this shows up as a blank screen. I had to use an OCR application from my smartphone to extract the text for me. Not only is this an extra step, but the resulting "translation" of the text isn't always entirely accurate.

Viewing and creating a presentation can be problematic. To work around this, I create slides in HTML, using software such as [Pandoc](https://opensource.com/article/18/9/intro-pandoc), which can process [markdown](https://opensource.com/article/19/9/introduction-markdown) and convert it into slides. I've been using this for many years and it works well—it allows me total control of the resulting slides, because the markdown is just simple text.

Video games can be made more accessible by basing them on sound or text. However, playing games can be doubly challenging on Linux as not only would you need to find an accessible game, but most PC games are also native to Windows so you would be dealing with some compatibility issues as well.

Some websites and interfaces are more difficult to navigate than others. These issues are often quite easy to solve just by setting some attributes correctly. In general, lots of web content comes in the form of images, especially today. One of the easiest ways to make web content more accessible is to make sure that alternative text is added to images so that screen readers can read it out, and people who cannot distinguish the image have some idea what's there. Another thing I experience a lot is unlabeled controls: you know there's a button or a check box but you don't know what it does.

## The Vojtux project optimises Linux for accessibility

Developers don't intentionally set out to build applications that aren't accessible. The problem is that they usually don't know how to test them. There aren't many blind Linux users, so there aren't many people testing the accessibility of applications and providing feedback. Therefore, developers don't produce accessible applications, and they don't get many users. And so the cycle continues.

This is one thing we hope to tackle with the Vojtux project. We want to create a Fedora remix that's user-friendly for visually impaired and blind users. We hope it will attract more users, and that those users start discovering issues to report, which will hopefully be solved by other developers in the open source community.

So why are we doing this? Well, it's important to point out that Fedora is not an *inaccessible* distribution by design. It does have many accessibility tools available in the form of packages. But these aren't always present from the beginning, and there are a lot of small things which need to be configured before it can be proficiently used. This is something that can be discouraging to a beginner Fedora user.

We want Vojtux to be as friendly and predictable for a blind user as possible. When a user launches a live image, the screen immediately starts being read as soon as a graphical user interface appears. All [environment variables](https://opensource.com/article/19/8/what-are-environment-variables) needed for accessibility are loaded and configured correctly.

Vojtux brings the following changes, among others:

- Environment variables for accessibility are configured from the start.
- The Orca screen reader starts as soon as the graphical interface loads.
- A custom repo is added with extra voice synthesis and packaged software.
- Many alternative keyboard shortcuts have been added.
- There's a special script that can turn your monitor on and off. Many users do not need the monitor at all and having it off is a great power saver!

## So how can you help?

First, if you'd like to contribute to Vojtux (or just spread the word), you can find out more on [our repository](https://github.com/vojtapolasek/Fegora).

Additionally, when working on a team with someone who has a visual impairment, there might be some additional considerations depending on the accessibility tech being used. For example, it's not easy for us to listen to someone and read at the same time, because we are basically getting both things through audio, unless someone is very proficient with the Braille display.

Lastly, bear in mind that blind and visually impaired users consume the same end products as you do, whether that's presentation slides or websites or PDFs. When building products or creating content, your choices have a huge effect on accessibility and how easy it is for us to engage with the end result. Know that we are here, we love to use computers and technology, and we're often willing to help you test it, too.

![Image of Vojtech holding a football](https://opensource.com/sites/default/files/2022-08/Vojtech%20holding%20a%20football.jpg)

(Vojtech Polasek, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Image description: Vojtech holding a football. He is wearing a football uniform and protective goggles.

*This article originally published in September 2022 and has since been updated with the project's official name, Vojtux.*

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