[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Jason J.G. White]

Perhaps the new accessibility architecture prototyped under funding from 
the GNOME Foundation would be better able to attract a grant, as it is 
intended to be innovative rather than similar to what has been done 
before. Any work on the developer side to make it easier to ensure 
applications are accessible would also be valuable.

My experience is that quality control is the largest problem in software 
accessibility at the moment, and it's the same difficulty irrespective 
of operating system.

I also think BRLTTY is one of the best maintained projects in 
accessibility, and that it doesn't receive the recognition which it merits.

Different users obviously have different needs. In my case, I've long 
since switched away from the Linux console and now use desktop 
environments exclusively (unless I need to recover or install a system 
from the console). I simply couldn't meet my needs with console-based 
tools. I use the command line a lot, of course, for efficiency and 
control. I don't think GUI developers under Linux are trying to supplant 
the command line, but rather to provide a graphical interface for simple 
tasks, leaving complex tasks to the terminal.

On 6/5/25 06:44, kperry at blinksoft.com wrote:
> 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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