[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Aura Kelloniemi]

Hi,

On 2025-05-06 at 07:09 +0200, Mario Lang <mlang at blind.guru> 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.

And if developers need ongoing motivation it will become quite expensive.

Do you see any hope in resolving the accessibility issues? My experience is
that quite many developers are willing to take accessibility into account as
long as it is reasonably simply (or somebody sends them a patch) and it does
not affect the applications resource usage. Thus I believe that if the right
APIs were available at the right level, getting developers to support
accessibility would not be that big deal (at least when it comes to
applications, libraries and toolkits might be a different thing).

Or do you think that Linux end-user software is always changing so rapidly
that always if something is accessible, it is already on brink of deprecation?

Personally I don't want to be tied to any particular desktop environment, and
I believe that applies to most of us here. I don't care about GUIs either (per
se), but I don't want to write a separate program (that works in console) to
solve problems that already have solutions, because it is a lot of work. I am
also very bored with things that are broken in console.

-- 
Aura