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OK. There are a handful of people working on accessibility in some projects.

But, in absolute terms, for what I have seen described Wayland is behind X11 for visually impaired users today. And it doesn’t sound like it’s a little bit.

It’s good some people are working hard on it. But as X11 support keeps getting dropped if Wayland isn’t there or close then it’s just pushing those users out.

I get the need for Wayland. I get where X11 is. But I have seen multiple people saying they’re about to switch off Linux to something else because the lack of accessibility in Wayland (again, relative to X11) since they don’t really have a choice without giving up on software updates.

And from seeing the people who are effected talk about this, they sure don’t seem to have the feeling that everything is fine and enough people are working on it.

My opinion is good accessibility requires a good chunk of money, especially for surveys and testing. Something that Apple, in my opinion, does exceptionally well (big user of their accessibility features since 2002). FOSS just can't compete here sorry to say.

Having worked many years in non-profits, it's sadly an all too common issue. I have a number of explanations for why people are like this toward people who are already giving more in a month than the critic will give in a lifetime, ranging from a kind of need to belittle the giver's generosity - to quell the critic's own discomfort at the fact that they may not be as generous a person as they would like to think, through to many people taking generosity as a sign of weakness and exploitability - and thereby somebody who can be bullied to let off a bit of steam.

It's exhausting though. The giver ends up in this awful moral quandary where all they want to do is throw their hands up and say "eff-this and eff-all-of-you", but at the same time, this kind of person if the type who can't bring themselves to let the crappiness of others lead them to abandon vulnerable people in need. And so the spiral toward burnout spins down and down.

Is it really worth worrying about traditional "accessibility" features for GUIs in the age of AIs? The future of interfaces looks like Siri and Alexa with the power of a good LLM behind them. Those interfaces can potentially communicate with anybody who can talk, type, or sign. Maybe that's where to put the effort.

Couldn't read past the first line. There are plenty of actually disabled and visually impaired people who have written about the shortcomings of accessibility tools on Linux.

I really liked this article because it gave me my first real look into A11y GNOME/OS-level development from a developers perspective. And it really hit me. I have done a ton of accessibility development and testing in the past. Mostly for websites and mobile apps. For that, I had to set up Windows virtual machines to use screen readers like JAWS or NVDA (on Debian/Gnome). Also I remember, I want to try Orca when I got in touch with a11y development, but I failed to get it to work. And since Orca just is not widely used and does not represent the market well. I had an argument to not dig deeper.

On desktops, NVDA and JAWS are the big players, both Windows-only, with NVDA being open-source under GPL2 and JAWS being proprietary. On mobile, it is all about Apples VoiceOver and Androids TalkBack.

From my experience, the projects that really nail accessibility on mobile and the web start thinking about it even before they write a single line of code or do any UI design. That is probably because accessibility is so tied up with UI/UX design and user flow. Because of all those non-functional requirements that make it tricky, it requires a cross-functional-team effort including: designers, developers, content creators and product managers.

Trying to improve accessibility after the software is already designed and built is tough. Sometimes you have to completely redo the UI and UX. When I think about doing that at the OS level or within GNOME itself, it feels overwhelming, like trying to make an impact drop by drop on a stone. But before you drop anything, you have to talk with 10 different people and teams.

Who the hell is making hundreds of millions of dollars off GNOME? Even indirectly?

> To summarize the table: those three merge requests that I worked on for free were worth 9,393.60$ CAD (6,921.36$ USD) in total at a minimum.

To reference a linked post, how much is this calculator effort worth to a user who can't even login because accessibility is broken?

How bad is the Gnome Bad chorus? I got burned too many times getting outside Ubuntu comfort zone like Kubuntu 15.04, Spiral (Sid with btrfs snapshots by default) but Gnome became peak DE for me a few years back.

This was hard to read through because it felt like the author took a lot of the recent writings about the lack of accessibility in Linux (more accurately, Wayland) as a personal attack. It’s understandable given that they are actively working to improve accessibility, but the way the article was presented didn’t make me feel sympathetic. Instead, it made me more sympathetic to those who have written about these problems and doubly so for those who suffer from disabilities and are dealing with the push to Wayland.

I've ranted about accessability on projects I've been on. The new excuse from TPTB is "just let the AI read the screen. We don't need to do anything else"

Blind people are missing Emacspeak under Emacs which is superior to anything else. Ebooks, webs, mail, podcasts, org-mode, calculator, programming, IRC, im+IRC (bitlbee)...

I get what is being put down, but, hypothetical of, what if I wake up blind? (wouldn't be the first time for me), I turn on my computer and I ain't got no idea of when plymouth is ready, I could wait for 15 minutes and then start typing, and then after that, when is the login screen ready? At this point I know I can press a hotkey to get some response but I don't know what it is, and then I get into my session, press the same hotkey I hope, can then enable the screen reader but is that a full comprehensive screen reader or sorta only for gnome reader? Do I need to install more things?

The Gnome project wastes so many resources rewriting the toolkit every 5 years, it is no wonder that zero progress has been made over the past 25 years.