[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[kperry at blinksoft.com]

Someone might want to write an NFS grant.  I am a reviewer and panelist now
for several of the grants and many of the things that get anywhere from
300,000 to 2 million is much less impactful than what could happen if a
well-defined proposal could do to Linux with a few coders.  The problem is
there would need to be a defined goal.  I work at APH as a Senior Software
Engineer and talking to young and old students and Brialle learners it seems
no one has a one size fits all written up plan or even thought up plan.
Even on this list people have all kinds of ideas.   We would need to drag
them into a single goal document and then after that it would be time to
think about money or even open-source work.

-----Original Message-----
From: BRLTTY <brltty-bounces at brltty.app> On Behalf Of Aura Kelloniemi
Sent: Tuesday, May 6, 2025 4:42 AM
To: brltty at brltty.app
Subject: Re: [BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

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
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