[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Isabel Ruffell]

On Tue, May 06, 2025 at 07:09:46AM +0200, Mario Lang wrote:
> "Jason J.G. White" <jason at jasonjgw.net> writes:
> 
> > On 1/4/25 05:46, Aura Kelloniemi wrote:
> >> 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?
> > The GNOME Foundation obtained grant funding to work on a new
> > accessibility architecture, which was developed as a prototype. If
> > funding sources could be found, continuing that work would probably
> > lead to valuable, long-term improvements.
> 
> Oh no, not again.  That would be the third time GNOME starts over.
> Given what I saw while watching the D-Bus AT-SPI rewrite, followed
> by the early GNOME3 fallout, I have to admit I am
> not confident that GNOME actually can provide long-term stable
> accessibility support.  Sure, with proper funding, everything
> can be done.  However, as GNOME3 showed, shiny-new-stuff can easily
> kill existing Accessibility support just because.
> We'd need to obtain a substantially huge piece of funding
> to "motivate" developers to keep existing Accessibility features alive.
> 
>

good politic 
Is it worth reaching out to the EU?

I'm coming into this conversation late, and my experience is mainly orca on X, and braille is at the moment auxiliary or with a specific use case (bizarrely, classical Greek). But in terms of console vs GUI, most people are going to have to grapple with office software, and so it is not an either/or situation. I can totally see the attraction of staying in text-mode, and I spend most of my time running things from terminals in Fluxbox rather than grappling with GNOME or KDE these days.

The problem is political, of course: the adoption of Wayland, as far as I can see, was without much or any regard for accessibility, and last time I looked, moves to develop an orca replacement for Wayland were very nascent. It means Linux is not going to work in an environment which retains shreds of equalities legislation (e.g. the EU again) unless that is flagged *much* more strongly by distros. At the moment, you can switch to X, but a) I understand the intention is to phase it out, b) provision of tech support by employers is pretty intolerant of variety ...

Ripping up one inadequately-supported scheme for another yet-to-be-built scheme is a problem. I am not sure that retreating to a niche, but more easily stripped-down and tweaked, platform (as I have done personally) is really a good default option; but is there any way of getting GNOME and KDE to implement an accessibility mode which makes it easier to get at what we need, but exists within the same eco-system? I say this as someone whose laptop has just died for the umpteenth time as I have not yet got around to implementing a script to monitor the battery in fluxbox! But if GNOME/KDE are going to be unhelpful, then  perhaps we are going to have to roll our own flavour of *something*, with curated packages on a default install. I am sure we all have our personal version of such a thing.


Isabel


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Isabel A. Ruffell
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