KNOPPIX 6.0 Released

[Dazed_75]

Neat setup to service a lot of visually impaired folks and making it the
default makes sense for that audience.  Looks like they have a lot of work
to do to maximize that benefit but they are well on the way.  I am not
qualified to test that thoroughly, but here are a few of the things I found
in playing with it.

   - The text to voice reader mostly only reads the line the cursor is on.
   Not a big deal except that in many places there is no way to place the
   cursor on some lines.
   - The help says to use the ESCape key to back out of things to the
   previous menu but some places it does not work and one has to use somethig
   else with no indication of what.  I suspect some of this is unavoidable but
   there needs to be some way to instruct the visually impaired that it is
   about to happen and what they need to do.  Even if this is a separate
   instructional audio or universal hotkeyed audio help.
   - In some places such as where you configure the voice reader, the voice
   reader does not distinguish whether the line it is speaking is a comment or
   real and effective config line.
   - under the graphic programs entry of the text menu, there is an item for
   "Firefox webbrowser with graphical screen reader".  Potentially a very
   useful item, it seems not to work.  It seems to enter a graphical black
   screen with a cursor but after a long time with nothing else happening and
   trying various means to get out of it, I finally used the power switch to
   get out of it.
   - There is only a 2 second delay before booting in the default manner (to
   the textual menu).  Even if there were a single line saying to type knoppix
   on the boot line to get the graphical desktop, that is not enough time to do
   so.  The impact is that people who did not read that on a web site never
   know they could.

Again, I think this is a wonderful thing that will just get better with
time.  But I must say that when I first downloaded and tried it, I wondered
in what way it was related at all to the great KNOPPIX releases of the
past.  First reaction was that it should not be KNOPPIX 6.0 but something
like KNOPPIX-A 0.9.  All because I did not notice the KNOPPIX cheat on the
page I downloaded from.
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