I’m sorry this dude has to go through this shit. If I could, I would help, but there just isn’t any time. I’m fighting NixOS and just getting things to work for me. There isn’t even time to get it working for non-technical folk, let alone disabled folk.
My blame goes to the gate keepers who want to keep linux an elitist space. The people that want things to be hard so that they can feel superior and laugh at others who can’t do what they do. The people that unironically say RTFM.
Linux could be such a great distro for normal users but the very first step of installing it is already a hurdle for many people. And yet many linux users recommend dumb shit like Arch to beginners or tell them to buy (and support) non-Linux hardware vendors instead of funnelling money into the linux ecosystem.
If the majority of Linux users who could actually invested monetarily into opensource and the linux ecosystem, and the Linux Foundation invested more than 2% of it 200 million annually into the kernel and advocacy, maybe things would look different. But it seems like we’re a long way from the linux community actually being welcoming and self-funding. We’ll have to wait for corporate sponsors like Valve to actually make the OS popular and worthy of interest to app developers and accessibility advocates before the community realises that being popular does come with more benefits than negatives.
I don’t think I ever saw a Linux user that doesn’t want it to have widespread adoption
You’ve never met an eternal September Linux user?
I regularly encounter such people online and offline, as well as people who abhor GUIs or making Linux easier to use.
Great read, thanks for sharing. Fingers crossed that Nix gets there for you.
Is accessibility designed by someone that doesn’t require that accessibility any good? I think that hesitance keeps some maintaners from fixing some of the longer standing issues.
I do think there should be a unique distro attuned to users requiring speaker or braille output. It can be a bit lacking on local security but it should be the software for a computer that you can listen to and can listen to you.
I’m not blind but MATE has been my goto DE. I want a modern yet no-frills desktop.
A separate but equal OS is tricky because it will be perpetually teetering on the edge of collapse because of lack of support. These features need to be baked into the major distros (or done in a way that they can be quickly and effectively layered on top). That way your accessibility maintainer doesn’t have to be an entire OS maintainer.
@Rentlar@lemmy.ca
There is e.g. the ADRIANE KNOPPIX version especially designed for blind people.
Is accessibility designed by someone that doesn’t require that accessibility any good?
It can be if it’s tested with users. There are guidelines/principles (just like with sighted users), but what makes a good (robust) experience is subjective and requires testing.
I’d say that it’s on developers to try. It will take some learning, but that’s just part of developing the capacity
Running ALSA as root had one huge benefit
Huh? ALSA is not a sound server. You don’t run it.
With PipeWire or PulseAudio, audio is bound to a user session.
PipeWire has a system-wide mode of operation. It wasn’t well-tested when I last asked about it, but it might be worth a try.
GTK3 broke accessibility for years.
GTK4 released with no accessibility support at all.This whole article is focused on GNOME and other GTK-based desktops. The only mention KDE Plasma at all is to say that a certain GNOME fork (MATE) isn’t like it. This seems like a rather large oversight given that Qt, upon which Plasma is built, has accessibility features built in.
So, nearly every criticism here is not about Linux after all, but about a specific family of desktops. I hope they eventually notice that others exist, try them, and discover something that works better for them. (And it would be nice if they were to post a more comprehensive follow-up article, or rephrase this one so that it doesn’t mislead people into thinking it represents the Linux desktop ecosystem as a whole.)
I encourage you to try all of the OS out there, blindfolded, and report back on which were easiest to set up without looking. That would be very helpful content.
>try all the OS out there
>person you’re responding to is suggesting they try the other one of the two top DEs for Linux desktop before leading with “Linux Is Already Broken Before You Even Start”
This is a ridiculous strawman. I empathize with them and want to see accessibility improve (it’s something I do in the project I work on even though you wouldn’t conventionally expect that blind people can use it). If you’re going to talk in such broad terms about the Linux desktop, not just your specific distro/DE, the onus is on you to at minimum try GNOME and KDE. Instead they chose GNOME and MATE, the latter of which is barely maintained and has effectively zero relevance outside of users who abandoned GNOME ages ago during GTK3 or people whose hardware makes the Atari 2600 look like a supercomputer (it looks like the former here). It’s not 2017 anymore; Ubuntu with GNOME isn’t some near-universal Linux desktop experience. I’m not telling them “nooooo just try my specific config for NixOS bro I promise Linux isn’t that bad”.
This isn’t even to say that KDE will be better; I don’t know, which is why I wish they covered it. If KDE is also bad, then this is a stronger argument that Linux desktop contributors need more awareness of and focus on accessibility. If it’s just mediocre, KDE devs can see it and learn how to improve. If it’s good, then GNOME and MATE devs have a lesson in how they can improve.
I don’t expect anyone to exhaust every DE on every distro, but when the userbase is so firmly concentrated around GNOME and KDE, I expect you to at minimum include KDE (let alone if you include MATE). You don’t have to, but I’m free to criticize your essay if you have such a massive hole in it. If you don’t want to try KDE, literally just find+replace “Linux” to “GNOME/MATE” and solve the problem that way.
