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Help > 42. Orca Screen Reader
42. Orca Screen Reader

Orca icon. The Orca screen reader is a free, open source, flexible, and extensible screen reader that provides you with access to the graphical desktop via user-customizable combinations of speech and/or braille. It is pre-installed in MATE for blind and low vision users. At the login screen, and after MATE starts, you toggle the screen reader off and on by pressing Alt + Super + S.

With some other Linux distributions, getting Orca to work can be tricky. With MATE all the setup is done for you. It also works nicely with pretty much all of the pre-installed software, including the LibreOffice office suite and the Firefox browser.

For complete information about using and configuring the Orca screen reader, refer to the website https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/.

The Orca documentation on the website occasionally refers to the "Orca Modifier" key. The key that Orca uses by default as the "Orca Modifier" depends on whether you are using Orca 's "Laptop" keyboard layout or its "Desktop" keyboard layout.

Tip

If you are using Orca 's "Laptop" layout, the default Orca Modifier will be CapsLock.

If you are using Orca 's "Desktop" layout, for the Orca Modifier you can use either the normal Insert key or the KeyPad+ Insert. On US keyboards, KeyPad+ Insert is the same key as the 0 (zero) on the numeric keypad.

You can use the "Orca Modifier" key to get to Orca 's help. Press Orca Modifier + H to enter "learn mode".

Tip

To view Orca 's documentation, press F1.

To hear a list of Orca 's shortcuts, press F2.

To hear a list of Orca 's shortcuts for the current application, press F3.

To learn more about how to use Orca to read documents and websites, see the web page: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/#reading.

You may find that the screen reader speaks too slowly or too quickly for you. You can adjust the rate at which Orca speaks, and make other adjustments as well, in Orca Preferences. To get to the Orca Preferences screens, press Orca Modifier + Spacebar. If you find yourself needing to adjust the speed frequently, you might want to bind (map) the "increase the rate" and "decrease the rate" commands to specific keys. That way you can more easily make these adjustments. To review (and setup) the keyboard shortcuts and commands that Orca uses, you will want to refer to the documentation on key bindings on this web page: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/howto_key_bindings.html.en.

This is just a small sampling of the documentation that is available to you on the Orca site. Browse around. Discover what this powerful tool can do!