Last year, I moved all of my personal stuff to a mini PC, which has been working really well for the most part. It has no monitor. On the few occasions I've needed sighted help, I just connected via VNC from a laptop with a screen. But I needed to change a BIOS setting, so VNC wasn't an option and I didn't want to cart it somewhere else to connect it to a TV or whatever.
It turns out that contrary to my expectations, USB HDMI video capture devices are quite cheap these days (AUD$30ish). So I bought one and connected it to a laptop. The video capture device shows up like a camera.
Once I was streaming the video from that, I was able to use Be My Eyes desktop to repeatedly take screenshots. OCR worked too, but it doesn't provide sufficient info to tell which option is selected. Direct streaming meant I didn't have to worry about positioning a camera, etc. With some prompting, Be My Eyes was able to give me enough information to tell me which option I had selected, what it was set to, how to get to the option I needed with the arrow keys, etc.
Doing it this way was definitely kinda tedious, but it's nevertheless pretty awesome that I could do this without sighted help and without having to faf about with a camera.
@jcsteh Thanks! Main question is what your setup looks like on the software and hardware side. Did you need to do anything fancy to keep apps available to the screwn reader without a display connected? Like a dummy display of some sort? I'm going to be using wayland on linux and so far it looks like dummy displays will be a major pain to set up.
@mauve I'm using Windows with NVDA. I did have to install a dummy display driver. You can also get cheap dummy HDMI dongles which are simpler in that you just plug them in. I have one, but I was using it for something else at the time and the display driver worked well enough for me.
@jcsteh I wasn't aware HDMI dongles were a thing, thank you!
@mauve Sure! I'm just about to go to bed, but I'm happy to answer tomorrow.