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?
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.
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.
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
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.
Yeah it may still be usable today.
Will it be with the hardware in your next laptop? Will your preferred DE or WM or distro keep support? What about the apps you depend on?
You’re going to want/need an update and the whole house of cards may come down because there is no choice anymore.
If these users thought “just keep using X11” was viable I don’t think they’d be looking to switch OSes over this. We haven’t trust they know their situation and options.
I was wondering about something like FreeBSD. I have no idea what they’re doing with X11/Wayland and wondered what their accessibility situation was. I don’t think I’ve seen them mentioned in the conversations about this from visually impaired users, but I don’t know why.
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.
Because he wasn't talking about any of those people.
These criticisms aren't coming from nowhere. There are legitimate shortcomings.
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.
why is a 12 year old's rant on the first page of HN lol
That name follows them with at least some chance of uniqueness throughout their career.
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
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."
its-summertime•3h ago
hdjrudni•1h ago