How to Enable Visual Alerts on Ubuntu Linux

Turn on or off visual alerts on Ubuntu Linux

Visual alerts replace system sounds with a flashing window or screen. The setting lives in the Settings app under Accessibility. The short version is: open the Activities overview, type Settings, open the app, go to Accessibility, and turn on visual alerts so the computer flashes instead of beeping. The sections below walk through each step.

Start by opening the Settings app from the Activities overview:

1. Click Activities in the top-left corner of the screen, or press the Super (Windows) key. The overview opens with a search box🔍 at the top.
2. Type Settings. The Settings⚙️ app, shown as a gear icon, appears in the results.
3. Click the icon, or press Enter, to open it.

You don’t need to type the full word. A few letters are usually enough for the Settings app to show up as the first result. Once it does, the Settings window opens on your desktop.

There is a second way in if you prefer the mouse and don’t want to search:

1. Click the System menu in the top-right corner of the desktop. This is the group of network, volume, and power icons. A panel drops down.
2. Click Settings in that panel. On most installs it is a gear icon at the bottom of the panel.

The Settings window opens, the same as with the search method.

Next, find the Accessibility category:

1. Look at the left-hand menu inside the Settings⚙️ window.
2. Scroll down if the list is long, and click Accessibility.

The right-hand pane now shows the accessibility options, grouped into sections such as Seeing and Hearing. If the window is narrow, the list may take the whole window, and you will need to click the Back arrow to return to it.

Visual alerts are in the Hearing section of the Accessibility menu. They deliver notifications through visual cues instead of sound.

1. In the Accessibility pane, find the Hearing section.
2. Click Visual Alerts.

Now turn the feature on and pick how it should look:

1. In the Visual Alerts window, move the switch to the On position. The switch changes colour and the options below it become active.
2. Choose one of the two appearance options:

• Flash the entire windowonly the window you are working in flashes. This is less distracting if you work in one app at a time.
• Flash the entire screenthe whole display flashes. This is easier to notice if you have several windows open or are looking away from the active one.

To undo the change, open the same window and move the switch back to the Off position. That disables the feature entirely, and sounds go back to normal. You can switch between window and screen flashing at any time. Changes apply right away.

How to test your settings

You can check that visual alerts work by triggering a system sound from the Terminal:

1. Open Terminal.
2. Paste the command canberra-gtk-play –id=bell. It asks the system to play the standard alert sound, which is the event that visual alerts respond to.
3. Press Enter.

canberra-gtk-play –id=bell (This command prompts your system to play a test sound.)

After you press Enter, the screen or active window should flash immediately if the feature works. If nothing flashes, go back to Settings › Accessibility › Hearing › Visual Alerts and confirm that the switch is on. Also make sure the system alert sound is not disabled in your sound settings.

Visual alerts are now set up and tested. The flash will appear whenever the system would normally play an alert sound, even with your speakers muted.

Reference:

https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/a11y-visualalert.html.en

Conclusion:

Silent workspaces or missing speakers make visual cues a practical alternative to sound. The Hearing section under Accessibility holds these controls, and you can flash either a single window or the entire screen. To turn the feature off, flip the same switch back. No restart is needed in either direction.