Previous keyboard shortcut to switch off Orca after system startup (Super + Alt + SS) no longer works
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Before a recent package update a couple of weeks ago, this default install of Trisquel (still on Nabia) would always autostart Orca, the pre-installed text-to-speech accessibility tool. To switch off Orca, I had to hold down the Super and Alt keys and twice tap the S key. (Then, to toggle it on/off, the same but using a single S tap. Possibly with some unexpected behaviour when I log out and in without restarting the machine, but that's not the issue here.)
The post-update behaviour is that Orca still autostarts, but the old keyboard shortcut no longer does anything. Instead, in order to switch off Orca, I now use the System Manager to "end" Orca's process which is a bit tedious.
Is there either a new shortcut to toggle Orca, or a way to make Orca not autostart in the first place?
I can see and don't need Orca. Right now I've got neither speakers nor earphones, so I couldn't use Orca even if I wanted to. If I remember correctly, Orca being pre-installed and autostarting was very helpful when I was trying to navigate my way through Trisquel's installer while experiencing display problems. But now I never need Orca, at least not until I do another install or major upgrade, and running Orca seems to increase the load on my system or even to slow everything down.
Thanks in advance!
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>text-to-speech accessibility tool
In the accessibility menu, it's called "screen reader with speech".
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I have half solved the problem.
man orca led me to orca -s which brings up a GUI for setting preferences for Orca, which has an option to deactivate speech, and that works across sessions. (I was at first not able to directly edit Orca's config file because there was no config file before my usage of the GUI caused one to be created.)
So, the progress is that I no longer need to stop Orca from speaking when I start a session, and Orca no longer weighs down on the system.
But Orca still needlessly autostarts at the beginning of every session (but stays silent).
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Update:
Turns out there is a reason for me to not have Orca running at all, rather than just telling it not to speak:
As long as Orca is running, even while in no-speak-mode, Abrowser is in what feels very much like caret browsing mode, except that, unlike Abrowser's real caret browsing mode, the caret position is not visible. I guess this is a feature rather than a bug, and something I did caused this behaviour.
It took me a while to figure out Orca was involved and using the system monitor to manually forcibly end Orca returned Abrowser behaviour to normal, non-caret browsing, whereas pressing Abrowser's shortcut for caret browsing did NOT help; it only toggled between Orca caret browsing mode (without visible caret) and Abrowser's own built-in caret browsing mode (with visible caret).
As a side note, I had trouble navigating the current (as of 2024) Trisquel forum webpages in caret browsing mode:
In a thread of several posts, it seemed impossible to use caret browsing to go all the way down or all the way back up; as long as I only used the ↓ and ↑ keys, the caret always seemed to get stuck inside only one part of the page. Instead, I had to rely on other ways such as pressing the space bar to get down, or using either the mouse wheel or mouse-dragging the scrolling bar to get down or up. I hope the future Trisquel website will not let the caret get stuck anywhere.
So, how do I once and for all prevent Orca (and while I'm at it, Trisquel's bluetooth manager, as I don't even own any bluetooth devices) from autostarting each session?