Accessibility question: setting up Ubuntu without sight

[Grant Hardy]

Hi all,

I've downloaded the latest stable release of Ubuntu (13.04) and
created a bootable USB drive for installation. I then booted from the
USB drive, waited until I heard the chime, and pressed CTRL+S to start
Orca, the built-in screen reader that lets someone who is blind or
visually impaired setup and use Ubuntu without sight.

According to the documentation, this should have opened the main
window for Orca from which I could access the preferences dialog, but
in fact this did not happen. Orca started reading the screen, but no
Orca window appeared. Further research reveals that this is the
expected behavior for Ubuntu 13.04 and that in order to access the
Orca main window I have to press INSERT+SPACE.

The trouble is, I'm using a netbook which does not have an insert key.
One can change Orca's keyboard layout so that it uses CAPSLOCK as a
modifier key rather than INSERT, but to do this you have to be able to
get into the preferences dialog.

This actually is a rather serious deal. It means Orca is stuck in the
wrong keyboard layout, yet there's no way to go into preferences and
change it because to do so I have to press a key which I don't have.
;) That means a lot of Orca's critical functionality is inaccessible.

I mean, I could probably pick up a cheap USB keyboard and use that,
but is there In fact a proper solution to this or is this a bug?

I managed to select the option to try Ubuntu, got into the terminal and typed:
$killall orca
$orca --text-setup

This brought me into a setup window where I should be able to select
the proper keyboard layout, but when I enter all my settings and press
ENTER to confirm them, Orca restarts but the settings are not applied.

I've tried the following to force Orca's main window to show:
$killall orca
$orca --enable main-window

However this has no effect. Orca starts but the main window is still hidden.

What am I missing here?

Thanks,

Grant