Install Arch Linux with accessibility options

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

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.

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.

To change the espeak-ng language/voice used by espeakup.service, edit the unit's following directive:

Environment="default_voice=language_code"

You can also change the espeak-ng voice variant by appending +variant to language_code. See espeakup(8) and espeak-ng(1) for more information.

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 /mnt base linux linux-firmware espeakup alsa-utils

If #Multiple sound cards were detected you need to copy the /etc/asound.conf file, which has been generated in the installation medium.

# cp /etc/asound.conf /mnt/etc/

To have speech support after booting into the installed system you need to enable espeakup.service. See also #Change speech language.

After booting into the newly installed system it should start speaking automatically.