Maybe they don't know but some of us love them and have keyboards which have an em-dash/en-dash key or use an OS where they are easy to type.
In Vim, the digraph is ^K-M.
Never change a running system.
The fact that only Gnome kind-off supports basic accessibility on wayland already shows what a giant failure wayland is.
E.g. you now use the wayland calls instead of x11 calls
They did that via an out-of-band D-Bus protocol, rather than going full Wayland. I'm all for keeping D-Bus around for backwards-compatibility (lots of things use AT-SPI2, and I certainly don't want a repeat of the CORBA -> D-Bus migration), but Wayland's AT support should be first-class, not relegated to proprietary GNOME extensions.
Per Matt Campbell's article https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the..., this decision has something to with security:
> Assistive technologies or other accessibility clients currently connect to the compositor through a D-Bus protocol, defined in the Mutter repository linked above. By exposing this interface via D-Bus rather than Wayland, we make it easy to withhold this communication channel from sandboxed applications, which shouldn’t have this level of access.
- Adding hotkeys
- Replacing all my utilities that involve screenshot + OCR
- Making sure Orca works to some extent (low expectations here, but I need some of it to work)
- Reversing the gamma ramp
- Screen magnification
I have mapped out some approaches to most of these, but I full anticipate one or more to be show-stoppers or items I have to attempt to implement from scratch. I'm looking at 100 hours of work, minimum, to make this switch, and am basically just left out in the cold to figure all these workflows out under more hostile circumstances. It's also a chicken and egg, since I need to bootstrap into the new environment without any of my old tools working.
It's great that GNOME is taking some of this seriously, but they're forcing a very difficult transition, and it's frustrating that they think accessibility is in a usable state, or that we're low prioritiy enough to not matter. I'vbe heard the word "edge case" used a lot, it really stinks to be in a category where your entire computer use and professional career are considered an edge case.
It sounds like this actually is supposed to work? At least on GNOME?
mkesper•2h ago
holowoodman•1h ago
Wayland is a dead horse. Made edible by sufficient fermentation and mobile towards the finish line by declaring the rot spreading over the line to be a victory. That Gnome just now gains parts of the functionality it had in X11, years later, while still being actually behind X11, while being an incompatible mess that leaves behind all other desktop environments to the detriment of the Linux ecosystem as a whole isn't actually a victory. Its the victory of the slightly-less-ruined after a devastating war.
ChocolateGod•1h ago
You can't fix a protocol that simply isn't designed for how modern graphics hardware works. Both macOS and Windows have upgraded their display stacks over the decades, but it was seamless because unlike Linux, nearly all applications dynamically link the system library which they can upgrade. Linux is late to the party here because everyone wants to make their own toolkit.
X was designed for multiple remote terminals receiving drawing commands over a network, not locally hardware accelerated graphical interfaces and functions that rely on close coordination between the hardware and display server (e.g. hardware planes, vrr, hdr).
Fixing X would require a new protocol to the point that it isn't X anymore, aka Wayland. There are arguments that not having a reference display server has led to problems though.
Spivak•1h ago
The advantage is that anything can use the desktop stuff (cli tools) just by talking to dbus instead of having to be a wayland client despite having no windows.
vidarh•1h ago
I bet you could benefit from quite a bit of the Wayland compositor work on modernising the lower levels, and end up with something much simpler than current Xorg without ditching much compatibility.
elsjaako•30m ago
Or am I misunderstanding what you want to do?
vidarh•26m ago
EDIT: To clarify, the reason I mentioned Wayland compositors is that it'd be an opportunity to pick a low-level rendering backend that has been written from scratch without the baggage of Xorg.
The "good parts" of X that modern apps actually use are comparatively simple compared to the low level bits - the protocol is trivial-ish, and you can get 90% there by implementing a small-ish subset of the protocol.
Joker_vD•1h ago
This applies perfectly well as a criticism of X11, you know.
mkesper•1h ago