[vox-outreach] New Sacramento Linux user

[Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik@uMAPSbuntu.com>]

Hi,

I'm the accessibility lead at Ubuntu. I'm contacting SacLUG with what 
may seem an odd request. We were recently contacted by a 72 year old 
computer enthusiast from Sacramento who has been trying for several 
years to migrate from Windows to Linux, trying various distros.

His case is made more complicated by the fact that he is nearly blind 
(5% vision in one eye, he says). On windows he relies on special 
text-to-speech and magnification software. Such tools are becoming 
available on Linux too, but they are not always trivial to set up. If 
you have no previous knowledge of Linux and poor vision, you can imagine 
that it gets complicated.

The good news it that he seems generally quite tech-savvy and is very 
determined. I spoke with him on the phone at some length yesterday. What 
he really needs IMO is to meet someone locally who can just show him 
some of the options available to him and help him install them.

I would recommend the Orca screen reader and the espeak voice engine, 
which are both developing nicely. Finally he should try the zoom 
function with inverse colours in Beryl, which would serve his 
magnification needs very well IMO, though it can be non-trivial to 
install and is still a bit buggy.

I would go see him myself if we were even on the same continent, but I'm 
in Oslo, Norway ATM :) He says he had trouble finding contact 
information on you website (I found it easily enough, but this 
illustrates the challenges he faces).

I've had some contact with people from LUGOD in connection with Software 
Freedom Day, so I know there are dedicated evangelists in the Sacramento 
area :)

Henrik

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