"I assume you too have no usable sight so when your Debian 7.x net installation starts up meaning you heard a beep sound you can press your down arrow 6 time for 32-bit or 7 times for 64-bit installation with speech. See if this works for you. I assume you don't have any Braille display to connect to this machine don't you?" Yes, quite blind and no Braille display. I'll try arrowing down 7 times, as this is 64-bit, but I thought hitting the lowercase s would get me to the right point. I'll also try to find out anything using Greg's info. Does the live DVD also have Speakup? My impression from the installation guide is that it does, but, as noted before, I could get neither Speakup nor Orca talking. Al