The Debian installer supports several front-ends for asking questions, with varying convenience for accessibility: notably, text uses plain text while newt uses text-based dialog boxes. The choice can be made at the boot prompt, see the documentation for DEBIAN_FRONTEND in Section 5.3.2, “Debian Installer Parameters”.

With the newt front-end (used mostly with braille), one mostly just selects answers with arrow keys and presses Enter to validate the choice. Pressing Tab or Shift - Tab allows to switch between dialog elements, and notably to access the Go Back button, which brings back again to previous questions. Some dialogs contain check boxes, which can be ticked on and off by pressing Space.

With the text front-end (used mostly with speech), one mostly selects answers either by typing their number followed by pressing Enter, or by selecting an answer with arrow keys, and pressing Enter to validate the choice. One can also not type anything and just press Enter to simply accept the default value. Typing < and pressing Enter brings back again to previous questions. When a selection of choices has to be made (e.g. during task selection), one can type ! to express an empty selection.

Some accessibility devices are actual boards that are plugged inside the machine and that read text directly from the video memory. To get them to work framebuffer support must be disabled by using the fb=false boot parameter. This will however reduce the number of available languages.

For users with low vision, the installer can use a high-contrast color theme that makes it more readable. To enable it, you can use the “Accessible high contrast” entry from the boot screen with the d shortcut, or append the theme=dark boot parameter.

For users with low vision, the graphical installer has a very basic zoom support: the Control++ and Control+- shortcuts increase and decrease the font size.

Expert, Rescue, and Automated installation choices are also available with accessibility support. To access them, one has to first enter the “Advanced options” submenu from the boot menu by typing a. When using a BIOS system (the boot menu will have beeped only once), this has to be followed by Enter ; for UEFI systems (the boot menu will have beeped twice) that must not be done. Then, to enable speech synthesis, s can optionally be pressed (followed again by Enter on BIOS systems but not on UEFI systems). From there, various shortcuts can be used: x for expert installation, r for rescue mode, or a for automated installation. Again these need to be followed by Enter when using a BIOS system.

The automated install choice allows to install Debian completely automatically by using preseeding, whose source can be entered after accessibility features get started. Preseeding itself is documented in Appendix B, Automating the installation using preseeding.

Documentation on accessibility of the installed system is available on the Debian Accessibility wiki page.