I am a totally blind screen reader user. While I can generally navigate the pseudo-graphical menus found in various parts of ASL and the operating system over SSH, some work better than others. It is very difficult, for example, to know which, if any desktop environment I am installing with a new Debian install. I have accidentally installed an unwanted desktop more than once because of this.
I have recently (re)discovered the following:
If you type
“sudo dpkg-reconfigure devconf”
and choose readline, in applications that support it, those menus are replaced by textual ones, where you type a number to access the option you want. This has made using sa818-menu much more efficient for me, just as an example.
Just putting this out here in case anyone needs it.
Sounds interesting, will give that a try. I’m not a fan of the old text menu system with the bright blue background and the Commodore 64 style ASCII graphics. Also there are about 10 different bugs with asl-menu, doesn’t write the node number to certain files, many options particularly in the radiotune menu don’t actually do anything, doesn’t properly show settings that have (or should have) been changed, etc. Once the next ASL release is out I will retest all that and open an issue report, and may then do a PR to fix the issues if no one else gets to it first. And I’ll see about adding an “accessible” option to asl-menu. The Debian installer is nicer, aesthetically at least, I use the Advanced…High Contrast Non-graphical install option. Hopefully it’s easy enough to provide the same sort of option for asl-menu.
Feel free to report issues you’re experiencing here - https://github.com/AllStarLink/ASL3/issues. There are no open issues for asl-menu so there is no immediate updates coming to that tool. Even better, please provide fixes for the items you mentioned. We are in severe need of more development and documentation help to keep the project moving forward.