This is a brief account of my experience with Ubuntu-Mate 15.04 Beta 2.
If I were unfamiliar with Mate, and its accessibility quirks, I'd have
had a lot of trouble; things are not really intuitive. Review below...
HTH,
Dave
When the live system booted, I got the sound of bongos. At this point, I
used 'ctrl+s' to toggle speech on. The introductory dialogue, with
"install Ubuntu" and "Try Ubuntu" options is fully accessible; I tabbed
to "try", and hit the space key. My system went into a desktop; I only
knew it was ready by the long absence of drive activity; an introductory
sound would be helpful, here. When I figured that enough time had
passed, I used 'alt+super+s' keys to toggle the speech on; this is a
nice feature, and familiar to those using GNOME 3. Orca came on, as
expected, but nothing was focused. I just happened to try 'ctrl+alt+d'
and found that the desktop gets focus. From here, I could set my screen
reader preferences in the expected way. Once I had Orca set up, I
started exploring the menu system, by entering with 'alt+f1' keys. I
found the expected three-column menu set on the top panel. I exited the
menus and tried getting to the top panel, with 'alt+ctrl+tab' and
'alt+ctrl+esc' keys, but could only get to the bottom panel. Even with
focus on the bottom, I found no way to reach the top, where my wifi
options are likely shown. I went back into the menus, and found
Preferences. In the 'look and feel' section, I found a new item called
Mate Tweak, which I started, with hopes of messing with the interface.
I found panels options, including Ubuntu Mate, Ubuntu Mate with Mate
Menu, and an interesting one-- Redmond. Once I chose this option and
left the tweak tool, I found I had a single-panel layout, with a single
column of menus, similar to the layout you'd find on Trisquel 7. I had
to use 'ctrl+alt+escape' to get to the panels, though, even after
binding 'ctrl+alt+tab' for switching between desktop and panels.
Anyway, once I got to the new bottom panel, I could connect to my wifi
as expected. Having unlocked this monumental achievement, I launched a
web browser, just to check connectivity. Since all seemed well, I closed
the browser, and hit the 'install' button on the desktop.
The installer is a typical session of Ubiquity, about which many of us
have written before; it hasn't changed much, in terms of accessibility,
since 14.04; I will mention, however, I had to toggle Orca a few times,
when switching from one page to the next.
When I started my new system, I found that the login greeter did not
come up talking, as it would in Trisquel. The 'f4' keystroke got Orca
talking on the dialogue, but attempts to explore it caused the greeter
to crash, thereby preventing logins. I gave the 'reboot' command from
another console, and waited. This time, the greeter came up talking, and
I just entered my password. A talking Mate session, set up almost
according to a previously-made configuration, came up. In the new
session, "alt+ctrl+tab' does not work as it should, though it is shown
as bound in the Keyboard Shortcuts dialogue. I set the Redmond panel
layout, as mentioned above, and did a few post-install things. The
system is now running.
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