Update: More up to date snapshot than chromium-snapshot-bin 80 is now available. Make sure you are running the latest snapshot for testing and reporting bugs.

Accessibility support with Chromium on linux is a thing that developers are working very hard on this year and it turns out it’s getting better and better all the time. I’d say now it’s very usable already. Joan Marie has written a wiki article explaining its current state. I’ve expressed that it looks to be awesome, feels snappy.

Now I’ll add a few simple steps explaining how to install the latest chromium snapshot and enable its built-in accessibility support on Arch linux and other linux distros based off of it.

• All the commands you are executing should be executed as a normal user i.e. not root. Those that require super user privileges are starting with sudo.

• Download and install chromium-snapshot-bin package from the AUR

  wget https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/chromium-snapshot-bin.tar.gz
  tar xvzf chromium-snapshot-bin.tar.gz
  cd chromium-snapshot-bin
  makepkg -s

• Now pay attention what package version this will end up building for example as of today it’s chromium-snapshot-bin-80.0.3970.0.r716024-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz.

• Install the package like this

  sudo pacman -U chromium-snapshot-bin-80.0.3970.0.r716024-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz 

• Now set a required variable named ACCESSIBILITY_ENABLED to 1 and write it to your desktop session profile

  sudo bash -c 'echo "export ACCESSIBILITY_ENABLED=1" > /etc/profile.d/chromium-accessibility.sh'

• Now Write suggested chromium command line flags to the config file wrapper script responsible for launching chromium is looking for

  echo "--force-renderer-accessibility --enable-caret-browsing " > ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf

• Now relogin to your desktop session, launch chromium whatewer way you prefer and you should enjoy its accessibility support with orca.