Install Arch Linux with accessibility options

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The official Arch Linux installation medium supports various Accessibility features:

This document describes how to install Arch Linux using these features.

Note: This page describes only steps which are different from the Installation guide.

Pre-installation

Boot the live environment

Note: The bootloaders on the installation medium have a timeout of 15 seconds before they start the default menu item.

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.

Troubleshooting

See Accessibility#Troubleshooting.