Hi all. I just tried installing Fedora Mate into a virtual machine, using VmWare for accessibility reasons. I am blind, so use the Orca screen reader. During installation, Orca works fine, although I had to turn up the sound volume using AlsaMixer in mate-terminal.

After installation, though, I must, again, turn up the volume through alsamixer, then start Orca. But, moving to the desktop, opening the applications menu and using arrow keys to move around, and pressing Alt + F2 and running terminal, Orca does not speak anything. After restarting a second time, Orca did turn on, but still didn’t read the log in screen. I just pressed Return, since I chose not to set a password for this test account on a test virtual machine. Still, Orca did not read the desktop after I logged in.

So, is there a step I’m missing? Or is Fedora Mate simply not designed to be accessible? As Mate is the desktop environment many blind people enjoy using, both because of the linear menus and light resources, I think some dedication should be set to making this spin of Fedora, one of the most up-to-date variants of Linux that is user friendly, accessible.

Thanks for any help with this.