Even completely headless, command line #linux doesn't prioritize #accessibility in any way. Today I had to reinstall an entire #debian system from scratch because a drive listed in my /etc/fstab died. That makes #systemd boot into emergency mode, where you get no SSH, no network, no sound, and no screen reader. There is no quick way to force it to try and boot even though drive 7 of 11 has died, and it could absolutely bring up SSH and the network to let me fix it if it wanted to, just like sysvinit used to do. You can't even force systemd to add SSH and the network to emergency mode because of circular dependencies. nofail will only continue the boot if the drive doesn't exist, but if the filesystem has issues...emergency mode for you. In short: if your drive dies on Linux, fuck you. Be able to see, or reinstall your entire system, because nobody in Linuxland gives a shit about #a11y or your needs.
@fastfinge You've got a few options here. 1. Serial console on the motherboard, needs support from your motherboard and a cable. You also need to take your computer apart to install it. That's probably your best option. I don't know if Linux can use a USB to serial adapter that early in the boot process. There's netconsole, but I don't think it supports input. This would give you bootloader and console, no BIOS though. 2. Buy a real server board. They usually have some kind of remote management in them. They're expensive and there are very few options, but you should get an accessible BIOS out of it. 3. Write your own thing and hook it into the initrd. If I was going to do this, I would try to have it bring up the network and start some kind of shell. Getting everything I would need for sound would be too complicated. It might also interfere with things later in the boot process. 4. Capture card, hook it up to AI, or OCR.
@tspivey What I did was use a preseed to just reinstall. All the data wasn't on the root partition, so all I lost were some random config files like upsmon.conf that I forgot all about.
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