Lately I have been doing a lot of website development work in ubuntu, so I tried out orca, the screen reader for Linux. This article is based on my notes that I wrote learning to use orca, hope it may help you as well!
Orca works well, but a little different than NVDA, with which I have a little more experience in. To be honest, the voice sounds a little less natural, but after a bit of getting used to, it is fine. All in all, it feels like a very feature complete screenreader to me, very workable (which is not always the case for Linux equivalents, so props to prioritize where it matters!).
Installation and set up
Orca comes pre installed by default in recent ubuntu releases, as it should! I tried it for the most recent LTS release at time of writing, 20.04 Focal Fossa. The OS settings screen (called settings) only has a start/stop switch for the screenreader, which is also in the OS accessibility settings in the top right for easy access.
The settings for orca itself are in their own UI application, accessible from the command line via orca -s. In here you find lots to configure, but the defaults are good to get you started. Typically voices are again per language, turn on the Dutch voice here for example.
Starting orca
Orca itself is easy to turn on, but as most Linux software are developed as individual projects and struggle a bit on integration with each other and the OS, I experienced a hiccup here. The problem was that orca was not dictating the page of my already running and active Firefox browser. I found a quick and easy fix luckily: after starting Orca, you need to (re)start your browser, such that Orca can 'find' it and read out loud what is on the page. So just restarting Firefox solved the problem for me, not too much hassle as it remembers active sessions and open tabs across the restart.
Shortcut keys
Like all screenreaders, Orca is mainly controlled via the keyboard as that works best for its intended audience. Also like most other screenreaders, Orca has an 'Orca modifier key', a key that is used in a lot of shortcuts to keep the screenreader shortcuts away from other hotkey combinations. This key is for 'desktop keyboards' the insert key of the numerical section of the keyboard, but you can change this, as for example laptops quite frequently do not have that section of the keyboard.
Please see the below table for some useful shortcut key combinations:
| What | Key combination |
|---|---|
| Orca Modifier | typically insert (in so-called desktop mode) |
| Toggle Orca on and off in GNOME | Super+Alt+S. |
| Enter Learn Mode | Orca Modifier+H |
| Exit Learn Mode | Esc |
| Display a list of headings | Alt+Shift+H |
| Display a list of links | Alt+Shift+K |
| Display a list of landmarks | Alt+Shift+M |
| KP | keypad (keyboardnumerical section, with num lock off!) |
| current location | KeyPad enter |
| page summary | KP enter (twice) |
Links/references:
- The help pages of orca are very extensive, you can find some useful shortcut keys here: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/commands_structural_navigation.html.en and here: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/commands_reading.html.en
- For more info in how to use a screen reader in general, you can read my previous blogpost on NVDA on that.
Also on twitter you can follow Florian Beijers, going by the handle @zersiax, by my understanding he is an expert orca user and allround very knowledgeable about web accessibility (which makes me weirdly proud as someone with the same uncommon name, haha)
I hope you found this article useful, and if you have some tips yourself , questions, or remarks, please leave them in the comments below!
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