"It's the first distro we've seen in which the installation program talks to you."
Slackware was doing this 20+ years ago - Slackware 8.0 at minimum, back in 2001.
It was called Slackware Speak.
The latest release of Elementary OS, version 7.1, is out, based on Ubuntu 22.04.3. We took it for a quick spin. Elementary OS 7.1 shares the same name, "Horus", as 7.0, which we looked at in February, and it's not radically different from that release. Elementary OS 7.1 has a very clean, minimalist desktop, with a panel, dock …
[Author here]
> I was about to post this too. Several Distros have and have had speech synthesis in the installer.
Self-announcing by default?
I have installed a *lot* of Linux distros over the last 25+ years, and this is the first general-purpose distro that ever spoke to me unbidden.
Yes, if you know it's there you can invoke Orca on a few. And of course there are distros like ARIADNE (and the former Blinux) which are aimed at users with visual impairments; I've installed several, and I can just about drive Windows via a screen reader *alone* -- meaning with no monitor connected.
But this is *not* a special-purpose or adapted distro.
[Author here]
> Slackware 8.0 at minimum, back in 2001.
I installed, or rather TBPH _tried_ to install, Slackware 2. I installed Slackware 15 this year, both in VMs and on bare metal, both 32-bit and 64-bit variants.
It did not speak.
I am sure it would be possible to invoke a screen reader, but AIR the installer doesn't even support a mouse, let alone a sound card. Since it's text-only it might actually be quite well-suited to this, but it need some extra steps.