A basic understanding of accessibility principles is a requirement if you intend to call yourself an engineer (and work on UI facing elements, of course.)
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?
click("Enable Frobzinator") is infinitely more maintainable than click(button().index(7)), and if you eventually remove the accessibility description, your test fails, letting you immediately know what's wrong, and whether it's the test no longer up to date, or if you broke something.
Some examples from iOS: The iPhone wallpaper change gesture is easy to trigger, losing that favorite photo, and needing assistance to go into the settings and fix it again. A big issue I saw was popup context menus can cause confusion when accidentally touching a message in the wrong way. Another was a regression in the latest iOS, in the messages app, when you write a long message, you can't scroll up to what you are replying to; previously you could minimise your draft at least and then scroll up. The photos app clip object feature with its silvery object outline caused delight, despite the feature itself not being used at all, just accidentally.
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.
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.
As opposed to GNOME (removing support upstream) and KDE Plasma (Fedora disabling/removing X11 parts from their packages).
If you're on Fedora and want X11 KDE without fiddling, openSUSE Tumbleweed could be worth checking out.
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.
> 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.
| What do virtue-signalers and privileged people without disabilities sharing content about accessibility on Linux being trash have in common?
| They don’t actually really care about the group they’re defending; they just exploit these victims’ unfortunate situation to either fuel hate against groups and projects actually trying to make the world a better place.
I'm not sure how that's supposed to be a reasonable point of view. Keeping the problems nicely hidden from the larger community is not going to help anyone. Of course merely talking about a problem isn't going to solve it either, but it's more likely to lead to solutions in the long term.
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.
If we ignore the tone, they’re basically suggesting that it’s unfair for people without impairments (A) to boost posts from the visually impaired (B) complaining about issues, because the As don’t face the issues.
Which would reduce the number and visibility posts dramatically. Effectively silencing the B users to a large degree.
But I don’t that’s truly intended. This piece seems pretty clearly born out of frustration and emotion.
I don't know what's hard to understand about this. It's a pretty universal human experience. We've all had to listen to people just complain and experience how that makes us want to just say "fuck it" and stop doing the thing. That's it. Nothing more. Stop trying to twist this into things. You can read it as "shut up or pony up".
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."
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.
To reference a linked post, how much is this calculator effort worth to a user who can't even login because accessibility is broken?
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.
its-summertime•7mo ago
hdjrudni•7mo ago