It's true, “we” don't care about accessibility on Linux

https://tesk.page/2025/06/18/its-true-we-dont-care-about-accessibility-on-linux/

by todsacerdoti • 1 year ago

105 63 1 year ago

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?

hdjrudni• 1 year ago

Or if you develop severe carpel tunnel syndrome, which is fairly likely. There's a woman on YouTube that talks about it. Really sucks suddenly not being able to use apps the way you used to. She relies heavily on 3rd party apps to fill in the gaps.

commandersaki• 1 year ago

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.

batch12• 1 year ago

I think you're partially right. The development of good accessibility features require what any other feature would require- time. Since there aren't enough skilled people willing to give their time to make a good dent in the issue, the only solution left is to pay people for their efforts, sadly.

esafak2• 1 year ago

What kind of people are needed, accessibility experts? I think such people are usually PMs or designers, not engineers.

mook• 1 year ago

I don't know if this applies here, but my previous experience with doing amateur open source stuff against a code base work corporate backing was that they'll out-code you if they don't care about it. As in be very slow at doing reviews (because they are busy doing features their manager wants them to do, but it's their area that's being changed so the review is still needed), and things can bitrot in that time because they're actively working on it. In one case the lead then said too bad the project is a meritocracy and people who do the work daily has the say.

markerz• 1 year ago

My experience internally at Apple is that accessibility was important, but it's also in the critical path for automated UI tests. So broken accessibility means broken tests. Good accessibility also means tests are easy to write. The company prioritizes accessibility, but engineers focus on tests.

ssivark• 1 year ago

This is interesting. For anyone intending to improve the accessibility situation of software, would there be value in "open sourcing" a suite of tests -- or at least a recipe for constructing them? (based on hard-earned experience writing accessible software)

Even tests are structured as feature checks (for QA by humans, or soon by AI agents) would be quite useful for devs writing software who have no direct experience with building for accessibility.

Do you think it might be possible to get Apple to open source anything like this? Maybe ex-Apple people who care deeply about these challenges?

Gigachad2• 1 year ago

Apple has tons of accessibility features that don't benefit automated testing at all. It's clearly been made a priority regardless of profitability.

pabs33• 1 year ago

Apple's accessibility on iPhones for (partially-)cognitively-impaired people is terrible. You either get a ridiculously unusable simple interface, or you get the inflexible non-customisable confusing normal interface.

tdeck4• 1 year ago

Do you have any good examples of design for cognitively impaired people?

tdeck4• 1 year ago

I sometimes worry that this focus on accessibility testing and the industry around it makes folks think this is some monumental undertaking that they can't hope to approach themselves. But a lot of these issues are glaringly obvious (e.g. "this UI element has no label so I can't identify it"). The visual equivalent would be shipping your app with transparent text labels or a 2 pixel font height.

Any developer can test their software with a screen reader for free. If it's not usable with a screen reader, it won't be usable to screen reader users. The problem is that almost nobody who isn't Blind will do this, or even consider doing it. They'll effectively build an entire UI flow without running through it even once. If you're lucky, they'll work at a company that has some policies and checklists for accessibility and they'll follow that. If you're really lucky, they'll pay to have someone else do accessibility QA. But even just testing it yourself the way it's going to be used would be a huge step up.

ykonstant• 1 year ago

Absolutely, FOSS cannot compete with Apple in the same way I, an amateur with a flimsy seesaw, cannot compete with a professional lumberjack with a chainsaw. But I am still miles ahead from a person grabbing my seesaw and sawing their foot off with it. Clumsy and inefficient as I am, I can still get some work done and walk back home to carry the logs.

MBCook4• 1 year ago

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.

mjevans• 1 year ago

This is a terrible era for it, but IMO Wayland is a portion of the software stack that at least _in part_ really needs funding provided by educational grants. Fund professors and such to maintain it, with some students (probably earning bounties for maintaining / delivering).

The incentive structure should be work-shopped _a lot more_. However it's going to have to be contributions to the commons. There's not a big commercial project to really fund it as an ADA requirement.

eviks3• 1 year ago

Why would you want to fund people who are not capable in this area??

yjftsjthsd-h• 1 year ago

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.

I fully appreciate that asking people to switch DEs is a lot, but I'm still gonna nitpick: X still works. I think you can even get GNOME + X11 + a fully updated distro working if you're willing to force the matter (based on https://www.neowin.net/news/fedora-43-gnome-desktop-to-remov... , not even Fedora has actually fully dropped it yet). And of course if you can switch to another DE it becomes quite easy. If you're willing to switch off Linux completely, isn't it worth trying ex. XFCE first?

- sent from my laptop running Xorg

lmm2• 1 year ago

If you're willing to switch off Linux completely, isn't it worth trying ex. XFCE first?

Presumably they want or need something officially supported on the scale of Fedora, in which case not really. Like sure, you can use it that way for now, but what are you going to do when it breaks? Even if you're willing to go it alone and put your own system together, surely it's easier to switch to FreeBSD at that point.

ranger_danger• 1 year ago

My understanding is that mainstream distros can no longer be installed by blind users because the screen readers don't work right (if at all) under wayland.

SuperNinKenDo• 1 year ago

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.

tdeck4• 1 year ago

I've had similar experiences but I honestly think a lot of time it's just that people don't realize how much effort something is. Like organizing a 2 hour lecture meeting about something looks like the most basic and minimal event, but when you actually do it as a volunteer you realize how much work it is, and how that work often comes at a time when you're tired from your day job. Volunteering for and being responsible for things has repeatedly opened up my eyes to the amount of effort involved.

NewJazz3• 1 year ago

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.

lotharcable• 1 year ago

It is ok to be ignorant, but it is odd to take the time to actively point it out.

Because he wasn't talking about any of those people.

NewJazz3• 1 year ago

I don't think I'm being ignorant. If he wasn't talking about those folks, maybe he should have specified that rather than seemingly characterizing all criticism of GNOME accessibility as some sort of anti-GNOME conspiracy.

These criticisms aren't coming from nowhere. There are legitimate shortcomings.

MBCook4• 1 year ago

What do virtue-signalers and privileged people without disabilities sharing content about accessibility on Linux being trash have in common?

NewJazz is right. It is a straight up ad hominem attack.

I have never seen the phrase “virtue signal[er]” used in a non-pejorative way.

This post could have been written to explain people are working on it and trying hard and it’s really demoralizing and asking for more help.

It wasn’t.

thefz• 1 year ago

Personally can't take seriously anything written by someone with an anime avatar

Crestwave• 1 year ago

They specifically highlight and praise those posts in the closing paragraphs.

stonogo• 1 year ago

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

eddythompson80• 1 year ago

Yeah, I had the same reaction (billions even!)

FWIW, I can easily imagine how OP arrived at that number, but when it comes to "corporations" some people believe that applying any random fast and loose math. The type of math that says:

      - Redhat == RHEL (+CentOS/Fedora)
      - RHEL ships GNOME 
      - Redhat "made" 6 billion in revenue in 2024
      - Therefor: Redhat made millions (or billions) indirectly of GNOME

Trying to argue against that is difficult because who the hell knows. How much money does Calculator.app make Apple on MacOS? How much does mspaint make Microsoft?

Not many of RHEL customers are using RHEL for the desktop. I don't know the split, but RHEL is a very slow moving distro. It's Desktop experience is.. Extra Enterprise.

None the less, someone could make the argument that RedHat wouldn't be able to sell their servers to as many customers as they are if they didn't have the desktop offering. Plus Some RedHat customers are using Fedora or CentOS as desktop even if not directly paying for it, they want to know that it's from their OS vendor.

so using loose anti-corporate math, RedHat is making billions of GNOME and not contributing to it. Other examples of loose corporate math I read on reddit once "Apple is literally a 3 trillion dollar company. They can literally afford to hire a support person for every customer they have."

pabs33• 1 year ago

Later in the article they say that RedHat are contributing to accessibility though.

Animats• 1 year ago

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.

eviks3• 1 year ago

This is just wishful thinking, so until there is anything more plausible it's worth worrying about

socalgal2• 1 year ago

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"

hysan2• 1 year ago

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.

tdeck4• 1 year ago

Even before Wayland I get the sense that the screen reader desktop Linux experience was "this is just about usable if you're an expert". You just can't blame people for not wanting to put up with that, or giving up before they get far into it.

hysan2• 1 year ago

Yup, and now it’s regressing so totally understandable that for those who somehow made it work, this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Personally, when I developed RSI and other health issues (that made me seriously consider giving up programming or anything computer related as a career), I found that I didn’t want to put up with the state of a11y in Linux and switched to macOS. That was worlds better even though I missed a ton of features from Linux. After a lot of time and money, I’ve made my way back to being able to continue my career, and thankfully don’t need those tools anymore. I still give Linux a try for a few months every year to see if it’s time to switch back. For certain users, I can understand why Linux feels like it’s not there and even regressing.

anthk• 1 year ago

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)...

aitchnyu• 1 year ago

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.

baobun2• 1 year ago

A lot has happened in 10 years.

At least KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon (Gnome 3 fork), Mate (Gnome 2 fork) all worth testing in approximately that order. You may also be interested in Budgie, which is very Gnomey UX but I believe remaining X11 first. Official Ubuntu Budgie installer is a thing.

Note that installing different DEs side by side may or may not have session handlers or other helper services conflict or otherwise be annoying if you leave those behind so if you want to play it safe, test in a VM or live USB to play around with a few without side-effects before committing on actually installing a new DE.

eviks3• 1 year ago

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?

exiguus• 1 year ago

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.

bcrl• 1 year ago

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.

It's true, “we” don't care about accessibility on Linux

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