Welcome to Odilia!

Odilia is a new screen reader for the Linux desktop. It’s written in Rust, for maximum performance and stability.

On top of what screen reading features we already have on Linux, we intend to add roughly the following:

Addons

You’re no longer limited to built-in functionality! Install addons from third-party developers to extend Odilia with new commands and abilities. Or, if you’re a developer, write your own in one of several languages.

Object Navigation

Navigate applications as a tree of accessible objects, making it easy to interact with parts of the interface that are partly inaccessible, don’t play well with keyboard focus, or are hard to use. No mouse required!

OCR

Use optical character recognition to read text in images or inaccessible apps, and activate the buttons you need.

Touch Support

Use Odilia on your Linux smartphone, tablet, or touch-screen equipped laptop.

Customisable Input

Configure any keyboard shortcut, mouse button or touch gesture to activate any Odilia command, even those provided by addons! You can customise any default keybinding, either directly in the config file with a text editor, or in an intuative graphical application.

And hopefully much more!

Why the Name?

Odilia, also known as Odile of Alsace, is the patron saint of the blind, partially sighted, and good eye sight in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. We hope that we can, in a sense, return the lost sense of sight to blind Linux desktop users, and make using their computer easier and more fun!

Disclaimer: Within the Odilia development team, we have people with a very wide swatch of religious backgrounds: Catholic, Orthodox, Atheist, Muslim, etc. We aren’t endorsing any religion, living or dead. The name symbolizes, to us, the right ideals and goals. That’s all.

In its earliest stages of development, this project was called Yggdrasil, associating the mythical descriptions of the tree with how accessibility should unify the world. Though we changed it later because of community feedback, we want to emphasize that we have always been interested in names with strong symbolism behind them.

Under Active Development

This website as well as the software itself is in its early stages and under active development! We’re actively looking for contributors! Please feel free to open an issue in Github or create a pull-request for new features.