[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

Tue Apr 1 10:03:50 UTC 2025

I disagree with what is written below.

BTW, I'm a ham operator too since more than 52 years.

First off all, we as blind people can't see pictures, that is the biggest
problem. I can't think of anything solving that problem. WIth brltty we
are perfectly capable of running a linux system. I have done that
professionally for 40 years and still do that for myself and as a
volonteer for the animal ambulaaance.
I dont need a window manager, what I need is a better browser than lynx.
Something that works like lynx, with all the up/down stuff direct on the
appropriate keys and the enter-key when you want to click on something.
It look like "browsh" iis a candidate for that but I have not managed
thiis product.
It is afrontend to headless firefox, so you have everything firefox has.
Still you can't see pictures but you have to come to grips with that when
you are blind anyway. I'm not interested what sighted people think of our
text-based user interface, that's there problem, I'm perfectly happy with
it and I can do more things with the computer thean a lot of sighted
people can.

On Tue, Apr 01, 2025 at 12:46:25PM +0300, Aura Kelloniemi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As some of you know, the accessibility situation with Linux is, well, limited.
> Most sighted people nowadays use graphical desktops or simpler X window
> managers or Wayland compositors. When people use terminal emulators, they
> reach for graphical ones, some of which are based on the GNOME VTE terminal
> emulator library, some more interesting ones are not.
> 
> Most of us, I believe, are using the Linux console daily. It works quite
> nicely for most of us, I think. There are some issues though: most
> importantly, sighted people generally don't use Linux console nowadays.
> Linux's console infrastructure is pretty much deprecated and the code receives
> very little maintenance.
> 
> There are cricital bugs in the Linux console affecting us. One of them is that
> many Unicode double-width and zero-width characters are not recognized as such
> which leads to serious rendering issues with all applications when these
> characters (like emojis) are printed to the console.
> 
> The other problem important to many of us is that Linux console does not
> support extended keyboard input, like shifted cursor keys. This is very
> limiting especially in newer termianl applications. Using Org-mode for example
> without shifted/CTRLed/METAed cursor keys is unpleasant. As people who mostly
> do not use mouse, good keyboard input support is a top priority.
> 
> There are hacks which add extended keyboard support to Linux console in some
> degree. However, there are limitations which these hacks cannot overcome, such
> as the number of definable function keys and the fact that applications
> relying on terminfo or termcap do not recognize the added escape sequences. In
> addition these hacks have received little testing, do not work universally and
> are not part of any distribution.
> 
> Linux console experience for sighted users is even worse than for us. The
> Linux console font can have at most 512 different glyphs (which is not enough
> nowadays). Also the colour support is limited and buggy. Linux console does
> not support text attributes, such as underline, bold, standout, etc.
> 
> On the graphical desktop side our options are very limited. We can use
> terminal emulators which support AT-SPI2 (currently only VTE-based emulators),
> but these have even more issues than the Linux console: no terminal width
> detection, no proper input injection (resulting in paste and cursor routing
> being slow and hacky), no colour support for us, no support for using the
> menus and dialogs of the terminal emulator, issues with BrlAPI related to
> undetectable window/tab switching.
> 
> GUI terminal emulators would give us many benefits, if we could fix the
> issues:
> 
> 1) Some of them allow many customization possibilities, like scripting,
> configurable key bindings, configurable sound effects, etc.
> 
> 2) Support for modern bells and whistles, such as Unicode 16.0, bidirectional
> text, live terminal resizing, text attributes, bracketed paste, etc.
> 
> 3) Using the same tools with sighted people results in better support and
> better integration into the sighted people's community. (Also possibly better
> integration with the Orca community.)
> 
> 4) Better support for embedded devices. Linux smartphones are here (Librem 5,
> PinePhone, everything supported by PostmarketOS). Quite many of us already use
> Raspberry Pis. As Linux console is dying, these systems don't much care about
> it. On devices with small screens (and devices with no screen) Linux console
> can be very broken. Mobile devices use various different desktop environments
> mostly based on Wayland.
> 
> 5) Many features important to end-users are tied to graphical desktop sessions
> in Linux, even though this would not be necessary. For example upower,
> udisks2, some setups of PipeWire, etc. could work in Linux console, but do
> not, because nobody has been interested in supporting it.
> 
> I'd like to ask now, what do you people think? Do you agree with me that the
> above mentioned things are issues and that we would benefit from things
> getting fixed?
> 
> More important question of course is, is there something we can do about it.
> We would need to decide, whether we want to improve the Linux console side of
> things or should we invest resources in improving desktop accessibility.
> 
> I don't know the desktop accessibility infrastructure very well, neither do I
> know the people in there. But what I know is that there is lots of code and we
> might not have the resources to get big improvements rocking without help.
> Thus I started to think, would there be some organizations/companies which
> would be interested in sponsoring such development.
> 
> Does somebody know, if the funding options have been thoroughly evaluated and
> how easy/difficult it would be to get even one developer a long-term payment
> for working with accessibility?
> 
> My personal opinion is that we should not use our resources to improve the
> Linux kernel's console driver. It is inevitably going to die, very slowly
> probably, because it is needed in emergency situations, but still it is dying.
> I would go for investing to desktop accessibility, but it is a lot of work.
> 
> Thanks for reading and thanks for comments!
> 
> -- 
> Aura
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	Adri P. van Bloois

	It's never too late for early music!!!