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Assistive Technology

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Assistive technology on Parrot Linux comes from its desktop environment. Current releases use KDE Plasma by default; MATE is used on older installations and on some spins and images. This page covers the on-screen keyboard, the screen reader and the magnifier on both.

KDE Plasma

  • Accessibility settings. Open System Settings > Accessibility for the visual bell, sticky and slow keys, keyboard-driven mouse movement and the screen reader switch.
  • Screen reader. Plasma uses Orca. Install it with sudo apt install orca if it is missing, then enable it in System Settings > Accessibility > Screen Reader.
  • Magnifier. The zoom effect is controlled with Meta++ and Meta+-. It can be configured under System Settings in the desktop effects.
  • On-screen keyboard. Install one with sudo apt install maliit-keyboard (Wayland sessions) or sudo apt install onboard (X11 sessions). In a Wayland session select it under System Settings > Keyboard > Virtual Keyboard.

MATE

  1. Open Control Center > Assistive Technologies and tick Enable assistive technologies.
  2. Click Preferred Applications, open the Accessibility tab, choose Onboard as the on-screen keyboard and tick the option to run it at start.
  3. In the Onboard preferences you can also show the keyboard when the screen is unlocked.

On-screen keyboard at the LightDM login screen

If your installation uses the LightDM GTK greeter, you can make Onboard available before login. Edit the greeter configuration:

sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf

and add this line to the [greeter] section:

keyboard=onboard

Reboot. At the login screen press F3 to show or hide the keyboard.

To change desktop, see desktop environments.