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I have a blind friend, and he uses Linux (newbie). He wants to be able to mute the screen reader when it is yammering on too much. There use to be a short cut to mute it; for example, when I get a phone call or someone is talking to me.

Bottom line...everyone wants to kill the screen reader. I do not want that, because my friend is blind.

andrew.46
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user2630659
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2 Answers2

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There is keyboard shortcut in gnome that turns the screen reader on or off, and it is AltSupers. (Super is the windows key)

To see this and other accessibility shortcuts:

  1. Open the Settings app

    An image of the gnome settings application

  2. From the side bar, navigate to the "keyboard" section

    An image of the keyboard section of the settings application

  3. Scroll down to the Keyboard Shortcuts part, and click "View and Customize Shortcuts"

    An image of the shortcuts section of the gnome settings application

  4. Here, you can see and modify all the keyboard shortcuts. For the screen reader, click Accessibility:

    An image of the keyboard shortcuts menu

    Here is the screen reader shortcut:

    An image of the Accessibility menu of the shortcuts menu

You can also toggle the screen reader in gnome via the terminal, by running
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.applications screen-reader-enabled true to turn it on,
or
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.applications screen-reader-enabled false to turn it off.

The Orca documentation says that you can also start Orca with screen reader by running orca -e speech in your terminal or the Run dialog. Although, when using the terminal, I had to resort to Controlc and kill the process in order to stop it, and when started from the Run dialog, I had to go to the Accessibility section of the settings menu, and then toggle screen reader on and then off once to stop it.
If it is useful to you, you can bring up the Run dialog by pressing AltF2:

An image of the gnome Run dialog

You might also find some answers to How do I stop Orca Screen Reader?, mainly this and this one, helpful.

muru
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BotNet64
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0

To mute and unmute Orca, press Orca key and S together.

Notes:-

  1. The Orca key is:-
    1. Insert on desktop keyboard layout.
    2. Caps Lock on laptop keyboard layout.
  2. You can specify the keyboard layout from General tab of Screen Reader Preferences dialog, you can open it by pressing Orca key and Space together.
  3. You can get all Orca keyboard shortcuts by entering learn mode by pressing Orca key and H together, then press F2, and to exit learn mode, press Escape.
خالد محمود
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