Braille
Starting from version 0.9.1-4, debian's qemu has support for virtual braille device. That means that you can very easily (i.e. without any hardware) test the debian installer support for braille device by just installing brltty and brltty-x11, running:
brltty -b xw -x no -A auth=none,host=127.0.0.1:1
BRLAPI_HOST=127.0.0.1:1 qemu -usbdevice braille -cdrom mini.iso
and checking that debinst properly remains in text mode and that the brltty window shows what happens in the dialogs.
To test the serial device support, replace
-usbdevice braille
with
-serial braille
and append
brltty=tt,ttyS0
to the kernel command line.
Speech
Speech support is not yet integrated, pending speakup upload which will provide speakup-source and speakup-udeb. Once it is in, you will be able to run
qemu -serial stdio -cdrom mini.iso
and append
speakup.synth=dummy
to the kernel command line. You will then get on stdio what would be spoken.