Announcing Vojtux: a Fedora-based accessible Linux distribution

[Posted December 15, 2025 by jzb]

Vojtěch Polášek has announced an unofficial effort to create a Fedora-based distribution designed for visually impaired users:

My ultimate vision for this project is "NO VOJTUX NEEDED!" because I believe Fedora should eventually be fully accessible out of the box. We aren't there yet, which is where Vojtux comes in to fill the gap. [...]

Key Features:
-Speaks out of the box: When the live desktop is ready, Orca starts automatically. After installation, it is configured so that it starts on the login screen and also after logging in.
-Batteries included: Comes with LIOS , Ocrdesktop, Tesseract, Audacity, and command-line tools like Git and Curl. There are also many preconfigured keyboard shortcuts.

See the repository for instructions on getting the image.

Better accessibility is always an excellent thing

Posted Dec 15, 2025 16:47 UTC (Mon) by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962) [Link] (2 responses)

Developing and configuring all the necessary tools to have a fully accessible desktop for vision-impaired or completely blind users is computing for humans. Doing that as a derivative distribution allows fast delivery of results and helps evaluate each change before it is integrated in the upstream distribution.

Other distributions did/do cater to vision-impaired users as well:
- SUSE Linux (since 7.0) had blinux and supported screen readers even during installation.
- ADRIANE Knoppix (special boot option for the default release of Knoppix)

Better accessibility is always an excellent thing

Posted Dec 16, 2025 7:56 UTC (Tue) by humenda (subscriber, #154922) [Link] (1 responses)

Debian has a11y since many years. I recall using an accessible install the first
time in 2008. If a braille display is used, the switch to an accessible install
even happens automatically. See

https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Debian_installer_ac...

I personally prefer fixing this in the distributions themselves. This is the
harder approach, but works for Debian. It allows to get the full support from
the "upstream" distribution.

Better accessibility is always an excellent thing

Posted Dec 16, 2025 15:20 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

It can be difficult for a person with particular accessibility needs to work with an upstream distribution that doesn't meet their needs already. It's easier to make a fork, make the changes you need to the install image, and then contact them from the machine you were able to install your derivative on and use successfully.

The only person who can test and evaluate work towards the accessibility goal is the person with the particular needs, and having them able to work effectively as soon as possible is the primary factor in the efficiency of the process. Once they're able to work effectively, it makes most sense to incorporate their solutions into the upstream distribution.

A big part of accessibility, and making accessibility meaningful for the intended users, is not doing things with the harder approach, because the approach that's just harder for some people is practically impossible for most of the target audience.

How does the installation process work?

Posted Dec 15, 2025 22:51 UTC (Mon) by Vorpal (guest, #136011) [Link] (7 responses)

A tricky question to me about the UX would be how to handle the initial install in a general purpose distro in the future (i.e. one not specifically targeting people with vision impairment).

Should the installer start speaking immediately and sighted users opt out? Perhaps a short timeout on the first screen, so if a sighted user hasn't clicked next within, say, 10 seconds it enters accessibility mode (which you can opt out of if you don't need it and you were just slow to act)?

There should probably also be a "next with accessibility" option as well for those who are partially sighted or have other accessibility needs than screen readers.

I assume that this is a solved issue, that there are some guidelines about this, and some way that it is handled on smartphones on first setup for example. But as someone who don't need assisitive technology I'm quite ignorant of this, but curious if anyone reading this has some insight on the topic.

On PCs an additional issue is the UEFI, and grub menu. Neither of which traditionally speaks. Not sure how that is handled?

How does the installation process work?

Posted Dec 15, 2025 23:12 UTC (Mon) by Gaelan (guest, #145108) [Link]

> Should the installer start speaking immediately and sighted users opt out? Perhaps a short timeout on the first screen, so if a sighted user hasn't clicked next within, say, 10 seconds it enters accessibility mode (which you can opt out of if you don't need it and you were just slow to act)?

This is exactly what Apple does, although I think the delay is a bit longer than that.

How does the installation process work?

Posted Dec 15, 2025 23:14 UTC (Mon) by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962) [Link]

I think on SUSE Linux, the installation process will beep once if you are at the stage where you need to enable speech support in the installer. This is/was in or shortly after the bootloader menu. I haven't checked recently, though.

How does the installation process work?

Posted Dec 16, 2025 8:29 UTC (Tue) by vpolasek (guest, #134336) [Link]

Hello,
In case we are talking about the installer launched from the live environment, then there is nothing much to solve (at least in case of Vojtux). The installer is a regular desktop application and in case the application it self is accessible, there is nothing extra needed.

Regarding the boot loader and UEFi... I think this will be long way with blury ending, because we are lacking support for many audio output devices etc.
But in general, I think what would help in all distros is that after the live desktop environment starts, there would be a mesage played like "Press this keyboard shortcut to enable screen reader".
This would allow blind users to detct that the environment is ready. And they can activate it.
People who do not need screen reader can just ignore it.

How does the installation process work?

Posted Dec 17, 2025 11:58 UTC (Wed) by sthibaul (✭ supporter ✭, #54477) [Link] (3 responses)

> Perhaps a short timeout on the first screen, so if a sighted user hasn't clicked next within, say, 10 seconds it enters accessibility mode

This is exactly what Debian has been doing since Debian 12.

> an additional issue is the UEFI, and grub menu. Neither of which traditionally speaks. Not sure how that is handled?

Making bios accessible would be a long uphill battle. I had discussed a bit with an intel person, he said some efi modules could be developed to access the boot stage, but the setup itself is probably a lost cause. For servers you can access through IPMI though.

As for grub, it does support beeping, so the user knows they are at the boot menu, and documentation can tell them what they can do there. Having support for sound cards and having a in-grub speech synthesis would technically be possible, but as always it's a matter of some people actually doing the work, and particularly in the complex context of grub, that's terribly few people who can and have the time to do it.

How does the installation process work?

Posted Dec 18, 2025 7:32 UTC (Thu) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (2 responses)

sthibaul is the expert as far as I'm concerned but has left out one particular problem. Voice synthesisers / voice models are mostly proprietary, large and difficult to work with. If your only means of useful output is via a voice model, it's often a nightmare with sound systems in Linux. Added to that the fact that many visually impaired folk want their favourite familiar, nice sounding voice that works in Windows / is bought from a small vendor - it's HARD.

The Debian standard installer will allow you to carry out a choice based install and step you through the entire process after a couple of beeps: if there's no keyboard input after the beeps, the voice output will start. Having
done this several times - it's clunky but mostly reliable. (This was also the reason for the Debian change in policy on non-free firmware - if you're visually impaired and need firmware preloaded for sound to start, you're at an impasse).

Anything that makes life easier for visually impaired users - screen magnification, font changes, Braille display support and good voice output - is absolutely needed. It's a shame that someone deeply involved has to fork a mainstream distro but not a surprise at this point.

How does the installation process work?

Posted Dec 18, 2025 9:14 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

Do you really need voice models inside the boot loader?

Wouldn't it be much easier to just create the sound files for the boot menu entries and maybe even snippets for the grub REPL commands and parameters up front during boot loader installation and play those?

I feel familiar and nice sounding voice is a secondary concern for something like a boot loader where you are usually only going to hear one or two lines before you move on to the actual OS as long as the voice used is clear and understandable enough.

How does the installation process work?

Posted Dec 18, 2025 12:15 UTC (Thu) by sthibaul (✭ supporter ✭, #54477) [Link]

> Wouldn't it be much easier to just create the sound files

Yes.

That's not the difficult part, audio drivers is.

> nice sounding voice is a secondary concern for something like a boot loader

Yes.

He was speaking more generally, not just boot loaders.