Thirdly is a good one

It can/is a battle at times. For the desktop, orca, for the shell, Fenrir or speakup (older). Distros like Ubuntu and Debian will have accessibility stuff in the live CD, and you would hit alt super S to start speech (super being the windows key, but don't ever call it that in front of linux peeps). You're gonna probably either be using Gnome or Mate as a desktop, do not even think about mainstream mint or centOS as they both I think use cinnamon. The creator of that desktop ripped all the universal access stuff out. Arch is a build your own system, so you can use fenrir if you don't want a desktop, and Orca if yo udo. You can't use them together but they can live on the same system, you just will have to not have Fenrir start automatically at boot. They use two different sound systems, Fenrir/speakup use ALSA, while orca uses Pulseaudio. ALSA and pulse cannot coexist. While a pulse server is active, ALSA cannot work or well, it can, but I've never managed it, other people have and I'd love to know how. I think what they do is find a way to either force speakup to use pulse, or somehow route all ALSA stuff to pulse. Fenrir has no pulseaudio driver but I think it does have JACk and OSS support if I'm not mistaken. You also get BRLTTY with Orca, so plug in any display and it detects it and you get braille support. Many many battles with accessibility in Linux. It's... really not worth it for day to day use IMO. I don't know how to get all the QT apps working, I've tried exporting environment variables and made sure I have qt-at-spi. There are blind linux users who swear by it, and they're more help than I could be. It is great though if you don't need a desktop and can just work from the command line, like if you need a server.

For me, as an opinionated blind techie that has tried Linux over and over and over again, its awful. Emacs with Emacspeak, is just about the most enjoyable experience you could get, if you can live inside Emacs' sometimes cramped space and awful email clients. Outside of that safe little space, its pretty bad. Orca's developer tries her best, but there's only so much one can do when 99% of Linux developers don't give one crap about accessibility.

ChromeVox on Chrome OS works with the Linux terminal. This surprised me because Linux runs in a container on Chrome OS so it is well isolated from the rest of Chrome OS.

Chromevox talks some sense when working with vi (pronounced vee by ChromeVox), mostly it is calling out numbers saying things like TILDE @k 8 to 15 . It doesn't pronounce ; but it does say (){} in C source code.

I don't have any Linux GUI apps installed on my Chromebook so I can't say if ChromeVox works with such apps.

I'm not a serious screen-reader user myself so please don't ask for an assessment of ChromeVox. From an outsiders point of view it does seem to do useful stuff.

I understand. Don't be too harsh on the devs, though. Human language and abbreviations are a complex thing, and if they followed your advice and just made VO speak every uppercase sequence by itself, all caps text would be a pain in the proverbial. I myself heavily rely on braille display so I'll admit I don't have your issues most of the time, but every hobby dev who worked with text processing from raw data (for example turning numbers into their word equivalents) sooner or later finds out it's easier to break than make all this properly.

And let's face it, VI as roman number is way more frequently used than VI for Vision Impaired. So is INST for institute rather than installer, something I stumbled upon using JAWS (yes, institute eclipse oxygen sounded funny).

That said, either use a braille display or VO's various ways of navigating by character, by word... if you want to be absolutely sure. These options exist for a reason.

Fair enough