Tips on Using Screen Readers and Braille Displays

Use a screen reader to provide text-to-speech output and to support braille displays.

The following are tips on using screen readers and braille displays:

Use a character mode based terminal such as Putty or Cygwin. Do not use an X Window System VNC.
For screen reader users, we recommend installing “screen” in order to get multiple session support. The Linux based screen program allows for multiple sessions in different windows. You can access each session with keyboard based commands, for example, Ctrl-a. Screen allows you to detach or re-attach to a given window session. Like VNC, if you get disconnected when running ORAchk or other program, you can re-attach to and resume that session.

The screen package is not installed by default. You must install it using yum.
In the settings of the terminal software, set the cursor type to “block” cursor, not blinking or flashing.
The output of the commands can generate a significant amount of information. This information can exceed the terminal window display area, and the virtual window, or braille display. For example, the following command can generate a long alert history output:
```
dcli -g cell_group -l root cellcli list alerthistory | more
```
To display the output one screen-full at a time, pipe the output through the more command, as in the following:
```
dcli -g cell_group -l root cellcli list alerthistory | more
```
You can then use the space bar key to page through the output.
When ORAchk is launched interactively, do not pipe its output to the more or page commands. As it runs, it displays informational messages on the terminal. The messages pause when ORAchk requires user input, then resume after input is received. Important messages, user input, errors, and check results are logged in various files. The results from ORAchk are written to an HTML report. All you need to do is to transfer the HTML report to a computer that runs your assistive technology and open the HTML report in a browser that you can access with your assistive technology.