Vinux is a remastered flavour of the Ubuntu distribution optimised for the needs of blind and visually impaired users.

Vinux is a remastered flavour of the Ubuntu distribution optimised for the needs of blind and visually impaired users.

It provides three screen readers, two full-screen magnifiers, global font-size and colour changing facilities, and out-of-the-box support for USB Braille displays.

The Vinux live CD boots into the Orca screen reader which makes it easy to navigate the graphical GNOME desktop using keybindings. For those who prefer to work in a simple text-based console there is the Speakup screen reader as well as YASR, a hybrid screen reader which can be run in either console mode or in a virtual terminal on the GNOME desktop.

Updates (via Distrowatch):

Tony Sales has announced the release of Vinux 3.2.1, an Ubuntu-based distribution for designed for visually impaired users: "Vinux 3.2.1 is now available for download. The main difference between this and the recently released Vinux 3.2 is that by default it boots with PulseAudio running in 'user' mode rather than 'system' mode. This prevents PulseAudio from crashing at boot on a small number of sound cards, but it means that Speakup is not available from the live CD or immediately after installation. However, there are now two simple commands for switching PulseAudio from user to system mode in conjunction with a reboot of the machine. This version also includes an accessible Zenity front-end for UNetbootin which allows users to install Vinux to a USB pen drive with persistent storage.

Visit the distribution's news page to read the full release announcement.

Download (MD5): Vinux-3.2.1-i386-DVD.iso (977MB), Vinux-3.2.1-amd64-DVD.iso (1,054MB).

Recent relases:

• 2011-07-08: Distribution Release: Vinux 3.2.1
• 2011-06-28: Distribution Release: Vinux 3.2
• 2011-03-10: Distribution Release: Vinux 3.0.1
• 2010-12-09: Distribution Release: Vinux 3.1
• 2010-06-01: Distribution Release: Vinux 3.0

Screenshots.