It's been a while since I wrote in and said thanks, and I just wanted to report that I still appreciate the great work and things are (for the most part) working great.
I'm using gnome/gdm, orca, and emacspeak, with pipewire for audio, and things work well. This laptop has strange sound issues with boot, but for example if I suspend it, wait a while, and then unsuspend it's fine. I don't think that's an accessibility problem; other laptops have worked fine. I just haven't gotten around to enabling ssh and digging into it; I haven't reported a bug because I don't know what is going on well enough. Overall though, things just work and I can focus on writing code rather than on accessibility. I cannot stress how happy I am about that! I am curious what people use as a way to get to terminal applications in a GUI desktop. I'm using terminal mode inside emacspeak for that. It's the only thing I've found where I can do all the cut&paste things that I want. But it feels like there ought to be a better solution for using text apps inside a graphical environment. --Sam