I use Linux via SSH on servers. My biggest problem these days is with how fragile systemd/debian has made the boot process. One random drive fails that nothing on startup depends on? Emergency mode for you! One random process times out on startup for some reason? Emergency mode! No, of course you're not allowed to run SSH in emergency mode. No, of course you don't get sound in emergency mode, so even if you install a sound card in a server, you get no screen reader today. Your options are to have a sighted person help you recover whatever went wrong, assuming you have someone technical enough to read out command line stuff to you, or reinstall the entire system. This has a huge impact on my productivity. There is probably some way to solve this problem, but unlike a sane init system, I find systemd complicated and inexplicable, and I don't dare touch it.

There used to be accessible distros, Sonar, Vinux, then there is one called Accessible Coconut. All of these but the last one have I think beeen discontinued. Still, we can work with this. I use Arch on one of my machines. I have a console screen reader caleld Fenrir, but there is another one which is older called Speakup. This one is a kernel module or can be built into the kernel, both options are availble. It is from back in the days when you'd use hardware synthesizers. It has been made with a soft synth module though, and can work with several software voices. In the desktop space, we have Orca.

TALK
TO
ME!

I'm probably the most enthusiastic blind linux user you'll find and I have loads of stuff to share that will help you, too much to fit into a single post. I run a $1 whos main purpose, among other things, is to talk about linux accessibility. I'll post replies to this post going over everything I know when I can, but feel free to get in contact with me in any way you can, (mikeybuchan@hotmail.co.uk).

I've used Fedora Arch, Ubuntu, and Debian. Console is okay, besides RTV being very "chatty" with their ascii graphics, because of course text apps still have to be visual for the visually unimpaired. That's really how Linux fails, because no sighted developer would intensionally make a package accessible, unless its a pure command line app, but people would rather use text interfaces, and all of those besides Emacs, and only that because of Emacspeak, are hard to deal with. Graphical interfaces don't help much, either, because apps have to be written in GTK and have buttons labeled with text. Just see the Gnome Control Center for a great look at how epically accessibility fails on the "free" computing environment. So for us, Linux isn't freeing at all, it puts us at the mercy of developers who, a lot of them, won't do any more than is necessary, and nothing that they don't want to do. If you want it, you build it, and that mantra has spilled into the blind Linux users as well, so of course the few sighted developers at linux-a11y.org must do most of the work for us. Yes, there are about 2 or 3 blind developers but they're working on arguably small things, rather than strengthening the accessibility backbone of Linux, the packages that show TUI apps, and the Accessibility Toolkit interface to GTK and QT.

Really, its much easier for me to have a Mac, where I have Bash, Emacs, Youtube-DL, Fanficfare, Pandoc, and other nice CLI apps, with the absolute convenience of an actually accessible, easy-to-use system, where productivity won't be hindered by an inaccessible settings manager, (Gnome), or reliance on just Firefox as a browser, and ChromeVox, (unsupported), on Chrome. All other apps on Linux I can find great analogs on the Mac, and if not, I have a Windows laptop too.

So, for me, Linux just isn't worth it for people with disabilities, especially total blindness, which is probably the hardest to program for, and get developers onboard. ! ,

There is one accessible Lenix distro name vinux
That’s the only thing I know about a Accessible version of Linux, since I’m a Mac iOS and iPhone user