Discussion on "Hacking in the Dark: Making Kali Linux, Orca, and VMware Accessible"

Last tidbit: The pipewire audio modifications have been needed for over a year... this is unfortunately one of the things I keep seeing in stacks like this, things don't move super quick. But I ran into this stutter last week and pretty much landed on your exact workaround, after which I posted an issue on the PipeWire gitLab. It looks like they are aware this is a problem and a fix has been merged, it just hasn't been released yet. Given Kali is a rolling release I hope this will no longer be needed by v2025.1, but then, relying on these fixes happening quickly is inconsistent, so here's hoping. Excellent write-up in any case!

Another quick optimization: If you do require to get into SSH in practically any VM that has it enabled, you don't necessarily need to identify the IP from the windows side first. VMware Workstation has a "connect to ssh" option in the Machine menu that does this for you automatically, and doing this for the first time will prompt for username and port.

I'm glad I no longer appear to be the only one looking into this. My journey with Kali Accessibility goes back to 2022 and I might be able to offer a few additions:

You can dodge around the NVDA OCR for setup requirement by downloading the installer ISO rather than the prebuilt virtual machine, setting it as a new VM's cd drive, booting into the system, and pressing down arrow several times followed by enter after you hear the PC beep sound. This should, if all goes well, kick off the speech-assisted install. I last tried this on 2024.2 rolling release and it worked, so unless they majorly screwed things up since that time, this might be easier for some.

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Hacking in the Dark: Making Kali Linux, Orca, and VMware Accessible

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