Definitely worth reading to understand what users are going through and where open source desktops are falling short.
> Is this system usable for me ?
> Accessibility is about making our software usable (and, ideally, pleasant to use) for as many people as we can.
Exactly. I don't have any disabilities to speak of (less-than-perfect eyesight, mild case of wrist pain), but I enjoy using many accessibility features, such as:
- Automatic dark/light mode; yes I do use a light theme in my editor during the day ;)
- High contrast (Gnome); I wish macOS could do something sane here
- Reduce motion & transparency (Mac, iPhone); I really wish CSS prefers-reduced-* was already widely deployed
- Grayscale color filter (mild setting; iPhone)
- Dim flashing lights (Mac)
- Shortcat.app (looking forward to Gtk apps on Mac supporting this)
- On-screen keyboard, for using a Real Computer from a couch. A basic wireless mouse beats every single clunky TvBox remote out there.
- Games! Aim assist, highlight ally/enemy, reduce bobbing / motion, etc
Accessibility is for everyone.
Totally. And people seem to forget that you can temporarily go from "no disabilities" to "have a disability" to "no disabilities" very quickly. Slip of a knife while cooking can take a hand out of commission for a few days. Stepping on your glasses can make you visually-impaired for a few days. Ear infection can seriously affect your hearing until it's healed.
And there's tech issues that can come up too! A couple of weeks ago I needed to get an embedded Linux device set up with SSH and could only find a spare mouse in the office, no random USB keyboards kicking around. Trying to use the Gnome on-screen keyboard was an exercise in frustration. Some symbols were missing that I needed to type into a shell, for example.
Unfortunely too many forget about it.
Great news, just in time Global Accessibility Awareness Day tomorrow (May 15th)
Edit: I'm totally wrong about Zed using GTK. They built their own: https://www.gpui.rs/ Still a win for all GTK apps!
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...
It's interesting - if you're going to allow third-party a11y software to control your PC, you need a 'make my wayland compositor do stuff' API.
However, Wayland's intention to explicitly avoid baking specific desktop concepts onto its core protocols make this somewhat of a conflicting design req.
Ref: https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blo...
I would say it's slightly worse. Wayland's intention was to explicitly prevent the implementation of those features in the name of security. To implement a protocol with enough flexibility to allow voice control of the general interface would necessitate walking back limitations that were heavily evangelized.
On the other hand, I'm utterly impressed how much more stable Wayland through Gnome and Plasma are over the last year or so, to the point I've switched to it as a primary desktop. They've also been adding protocols like xdg_toplevel_tag_v1 that were seemingly taboo until recently. I'm optimistic about this current batch of programmers. I think they'll manage to sort out accessibility pretty soon.
This level of organization is probably also what allowed them to get STF funding for this initiative - which makes me quite proud to be german for a moment.
Interestingly, I've also found that the further a distro diverges from upstream GNOME, the worse my experience ends up being. I was frankly shocked at how many paper cuts I ran into the last time I used the Ubuntu spin of GNOME, while Debian was better and Fedora gave me almost no trouble.
At this point I don't know why they didn't make it an option or built in plugin.
superkuh•1mo ago
As someone with progressive retinal tearing I'd been really worried the last 5 years or so with everything switching to one of the waylands and there being no accessibility. This is a relief. It'll probably get there before I go functionally blind.
mhitza•1mo ago
lukastyrychtr•1mo ago