Using and accessing MATE/Welcome

Welcome

Introduction

Welcome in the Using and Accessing MATE tutorial. This document is designed to provide low-vision persons with understanding the graphical environment concept under MATE and how it works. This book has the benefits of training where you have theorical information and practises. You can select easily topics, listen or read the explanations at your own convinience, and review them if needed.

This lesson, divided by six modules, deals with the following topics:

• Basic MATE concepts
• Writer, word processing
• FIle manager
• Get help using MATE
• System configuration
• Introduction to the Internet

Each module is divided by lessons. The last lesson of each module is a five-questions/answers game, about the addressed topics in the module.

FOr this book, we assume you have a computer where MATE is installed, with Compiz as window manager. The closest configuration for such prerequisities is brought by the Debian with a low-vision profile.

Some lessons include screenshots, for sighetd and low-vision persons, in order to see the screens we talk about.

You can get such screenshots in braille, in a paper document ordered by picture numbers.

As the explanations of this book are designed to low-vision and blind persons, all the lessons describe the menu and keyboard commands. The appendix is a quick reference about the keyboard shortcuts.

This tutorial is designed to be used with assistive technologies, e.g. a screen reader or a magnifier utility. That is why this is different from other tutorials as there is not mandatory and inaccessible picture, not movie.

Another appendix contains an additional help about the list of the commands provided by the Orca screen reader related to what is shown in this book. When an Orca command is usable during a topic, a footnote will refer to it.

Welcome in this tutorial for using and accessing MATE.

What are the writing conventions in this manual?

Any manual has some writing conventions to stay relevant and make the reading easier. Here:

1. All the step-to-step processes and practises are in numbered list.
2. Some keys are referred to by abreviations: ctrl for control, alt for the alternative key (or Meta); tab for the tabulation key.
3. All the commands and cimbinations are written in lowercase and the keys are separated with a dash if pressed at the same time, e.g. ctrl-alt-down arrow. This means that you need to press alt, ctrl, and the down key, then release everything.