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.