John figured out that you can right-click on the button on the Bitnami page and download your preferred app installation package that way. I looked at the source code for the page and the reason the links for downloads present as buttons is because of this gem:

<a class="indirect_download_link " style="outline: none; display: none !important" role="button" data-target="#downloadFileModal-1013270" data-toggle="modal" href="/redirect/to/1013270/bitnami-wordpress-5.4.1-0-module-linux-x64-installer.run">Linux </     a>

</a>

Admittedly I didn’t think to try the right-click-on-the-button trick yesterday when I was fighting with it because I still haven’t managed to wrap my brain around the why of the stupid developer trick of changing the role of a perfectly-working anchor element via ARIA when if you really wanted the thing to be a button you could have made an actual button or even styled the thing to look like a button while still making sure it actually works.

But OK, on to the other bits.

Download the file, and then press enter on it once Xampp is running, and this is where things got weirder.

john got the fields filled in for the Bitnami script, (or at least he thought he did), and got the WordPress installation up and running, only to find that he couldn’t log in and couldn’t reset username and password because the email entry apparently didn’t take.

He fought with it for something like thirty minutes using various bits of Jaws magic, and then finally decided to wait to get the assistance of a sighted person to figure out where things went sideways.

I’ve decided to skip the whole thing and just do a manual install, which I will get to tomorrow. I’m not interested with putting more time into a script for a quicker install than an actual manual install would take.

If John can figure out what the problem is then we’ll write the whole thing up and publish it as a tutorial for those who use screen readers and don’t want to do manual WordPress installs. I’m of the opinion that this is merely putting off the inevitable because when it comes to installing various javascript tools for development or PHP or whatever the command line will become unavoidable, but we’ll offer the option.