GNOME Orca on Slackware 14.1

On Slackware 14.1 I wanted to get Orca up and running without a full GNOME install just like I had in the past with 13.37. With the GNOME Slackbuilds project no longer active I took a different route.

From Slackbuilds.org I installed the following packages because I am going to be using espeak as my speech synthesizer:

• portaudio
• espeak

I got everything else from the dropline GNOME project. I am only installing selected packages from their 3.10 packages just to get Orca running, but you could simply use their installer to install the full GNOME desktop for an overall better accessibility experience on the desktop.

Download and install/upgrade the following packages from their 3.10 site:

• at-spi2-atk-2.10.2-x86_64-1dl (use upgradepkg)
• at-spi2-core-2.10.2-x86_64-1dl (use upgradepkg)
• atk-2.10.0-x86_64-1dl (use upgradepkg)
• dotconf-1.3-x86_64-1dl
• glib2-2.38.2-x86_64-1dl (use upgradepkg)
• gobject-introspection-1.38.0-x86_64-1dl (use upgradepkg)
• orca-3.10.2-x86_64-1dl
• py3gobject-3.10.2-x86_64-1dl
• pyatspi-2.10.0-x86_64-1dl
• pygobject3-3.10.2-x86_64-1dl (use upgradepkg)
• python3-3.3.2-x86_64-1dl

There is one required package that I do not have in that list, speechd-0.8-x86_64-1dl.txz. It was built without espeak installed so it does not have espeak support. By default it has Festival support. If you use Festival, you should be fine with the downloaded package. Since I am using espeak, I needed to rebuild it.

How you rebuild speech-dispatcher is up to you. I was playing around with some alternate instructions I found before I just used the dropline packages. Since I still had Aiyumi's slackbuilds on my system I modified the speech-dispatcher slackbuild to install 0.8.1 and build it that way. Orca 3.10 requires speech-dispatcher 0.8 or greater which is why I had to change the version.

On a final note, Firefox on Slackware is built without accessibility support enabled. You either need to rebuild after modifying Patrick's slackbuild to enable it, or you just need to download it directly. I do the latter, but I us Ruario's latest-firefox script in order to repackage it as a Slackware package.