accessiblity

I'm looking into this distro for a friend who is a Windows user and who is visually impaired.

Does zorin come with Orca installed by default? Has anyone tested / verified the screen magnifier functionality in the "Core" (non-premium) version? I'm concerned because zorin is an Ubuntu based distro, and I've seen a number of complains on the Ubuntu forums about how poor or non-existent support has been in recent releases for users with disabilities.

Any advice? Success stories? Known issues?

Hi pcalnon, and welcome to Zorin! Yes all flavours of Zorin come with accessibility as far as I know. Orca is the 'de facto' screenreader in GNU/Linux - now for the sad part and this is not the fault of Zorin, Ubuntu or any other distro based on Gnome 3 - the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of the Gnome Project who in their 'infinite wisdom' decided to 'integrate' Orca into Gnome instead of a separate app to reduce instances of instability - the downside to this is you cannot edit the backend, i.e., you cannot specify verbosity (character, word, character and word - no exception editor (e.g., Siobhan to be read as Shivorn). The last decent distro that was Orca friendly was Pear OS:

https://vimeo.com/95682732

Compiz does not have any screenreader in it but good for magnification:

https://vimeo.com/57264420

Hope this helps! And hope the Gnome Project pull their finger out - Gnome has always been superior to KDE for accessibility software e.g., KMouth etc.

Orca was written by a visual impaired member of Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) - Goodness knows what the state of Orca is as an independent accessibility software package - I will have to see if I can install it on one of my KDE installs (Netrunner 14) and see if I can access the back end there.

Take care!