The penetration testing distro can now be used by blind or visually impaired users

Apr 27, 2013 10:03 GMT  ·  By

Offensive Security, the developer behind the Backtrack and Kali Linux operating systems, has announced on April 26 that a new version of the the Kali Linux distribution for forensic and penetration testing tasks has been released.

Kali Linux 1.0.3 brings a feature that should have been implemented since the first release of the penetration testing distro, accessibility, especially for hearing/visual impaired and blind persons.

"A couple of weeks ago, we were approached (independently) by two blind security enthusiasts who both drew our attention to the fact that Kali Linux had no built-in accessibility features."

"This made Kali difficult, if not impossible, to both install and use from a blind or visually impaired user’s perspective." was stated in the official release announcement.

The Kali Linux developer worked together with the upstream GNOME developer in order to fix some bugs in the GDM (GNOME Display Manager) package, which prevented Offensive Security to build an accessible version of Kali Linux.

Therefore, a new “accessibility” boot option has been added in this release, which triggers the speech engine during the installation process of Kali Linux. To activate it, users should press “S” at boot time, and hit Enter.

“We are very proud to have sponsored this work, which has brought much-improved accessibility features to both Kali Linux and Debian and we sincerely hope to continue receiving feedback from the community so we can further improve Kali Linux."

"We have also taken this opportunity add a new “Live Desktop” installer and have released a new version of Kali Linux that has these accessibility features built-in.” said the Kali Linux developers at the end of the release announcement for Kali Linux 1.0.3.

Kali Linux is distributed as DVD ISO images featuring the GNOME desktop environment and supporting the x86, AMD64 and ARM architectures.

Download Kali Linux 1.0.3 right now from Softpedia.