This document is the written version of a video tutorial on my Youtube channel and is intended to provide new users of all abilities with a general intro on using the Orca screen reader.
This document was created by Colton Loftus but is community driven; create an issue or PR on Github if you would like to make changes.
A cheatsheet of many keyboard commands for Orca can be found here
- A modern, widely used Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora is likely to be a good choice if you want a distribution for general use that is accessible.
- Ubuntu and Fedora are both good defaults, but can sometimes have outdated Orca versions in their repositories
- Using Debian backports, Arch Linux or NixOS can all work and get you newer packages, but may be more complicated to use
- Special custom Linux distros for specific accessibility needs can be useful but may not be as actively maintained or updated.
- The choice of your desktop environment will make a significant difference to overall system accessibility
- Many blind folks prefer using MATE; Gnome is also a good choice for overall accessibility
- espeak-ng
- Orca's default voice
- Click here to listen to a demo.
- espeak-ng supports many different languages, but is commonly criticized as being too robotic
- Voxin
- Paid, proprietary voices.
- Many voices in many languages, many of which sound very good
- MacOS uses many of these voices, such as Samantha (the default VoiceOver voice)
- Each voice averages $20 but it is probably worth it if you can afford it
- Click here to listen to multiple different voice demos
- rhvoice
- A free set of voices that is more natural than espeak
- Easy to install and works cross platform if desired
- piper
- A free set of voices that are quite realistic without needing to pay or have a GPU
- Generally too slow for screen reader use, but good for generating audiobooks or other audio content outside of screen reader use
- Must be installed with pied which is sporadically maintained or use Orca's experimental
spielintegration
- Browse Mode
- Navigate between semantic sections of the page using the keyboard
- Default way you navigate the desktop
- For example, pressing up in a text box could move you to the previous element
- Toggled with
Orca+ A - Essentially a form of structural navigation.
- Focus Mode
- Navigate inside of a focused element without moving outside of it
- Automatically enabled when moving focus into certain editable text boxes
- For example, pressing up in a text box could move the cursor to the previous line in the same text box
- Toggled with
Orca+ A
- Learn Mode
- Ignore all key presses and just echo out what they do
- Toggled with
Orca+ H
- Sleep Mode
- Don't speak when a particular application is focused
- Could be used to prevent duplicate speech when a self-speaking app is focused
- Toggle for a specific application with
Alt+ctrl+shift+ q
- Structural Navigation vs Flat Review
- Not a mode difference technically, but structural navigation keys can be toggled with
Orca + Z - Structural navigation commands move around by the semantic tags of the a11y tree.
- Flat review goes through each line one a time without a structured hierarchy
- Not a mode difference technically, but structural navigation keys can be toggled with
- Begin by learning navigation commands for your desktop environment
- Workflows using the browser or electron applications like VSCode or Slack tend to have the best success
- Orca mailing list tends to be the best place to ask questions
- Lack of accessibility support in many applications
- There is no one central place for Linux accessibility discussions
- May need to recompile to get latest Orca updates
- I have a written guide here, but dependencies may change over time
- There is no plugin system like in NVDA
- You can create scripts and bundle them inside Orca but this is less straightforward
- https://orca.gnome.org/
- https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/index.html.en
- https://emmabuntus.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Manual_Orca_20240711.pdf
- Orca as of version 49.0 can now be controlled with dbus bindings which are documented here
- You can use my golang bindings to control Orca from a higher level programming language
Unfortunately there are not many videos regarding Orca. However, these are some that are relvant to Linux accessibility in general:
- My own technical Linux a11y overview video
- Odilia Screen Reader overview (this is a new experimental Linux screen reader but it is useful for a general overview on how Linux screen readers are written)