It's true, “we” don't care about accessibility on Linux | Hacker News Reader

It's true, “we” don't care about accessibility on Linux

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105 pointstodsacerdoti64 comments

OK. There are a handful of people working on accessibility in some projects.

But, in absolute terms, for what I have seen described Wayland is behind X11 for visually impaired users today. And it doesn’t sound like it’s a little bit.

It’s good some people are working hard on it. But as X11 support keeps getting dropped if Wayland isn’t there or close then it’s just pushing those users out.

I get the need for Wayland. I get where X11 is. But I have seen multiple people saying they’re about to switch off Linux to something else because the lack of accessibility in Wayland (again, relative to X11) since they don’t really have a choice without giving up on software updates.

And from seeing the people who are effected talk about this, they sure don’t seem to have the feeling that everything is fine and enough people are working on it.

This is a terrible era for it, but IMO Wayland is a portion of the software stack that at least _in part_ really needs funding provided by educational grants. Fund professors and such to maintain it, with some students (probably earning bounties for maintaining / delivering).

The incentive structure should be work-shopped _a lot more_. However it's going to have to be contributions to the commons. There's not a big commercial project to really fund it as an ADA requirement.

Why would you want to fund people who are not capable in this area??

> I get the need for Wayland. I get where X11 is. But I have seen multiple people saying they’re about to switch off Linux to something else because the lack of accessibility in Wayland (again, relative to X11) since they don’t really have a choice without giving up on software updates.

I fully appreciate that asking people to switch DEs is a lot, but I'm still gonna nitpick: X still works. I think you can even get GNOME + X11 + a fully updated distro working if you're willing to force the matter (based on https://www.neowin.net/news/fedora-43-gnome-desktop-to-remov... , not even Fedora has actually fully dropped it yet). And of course if you can switch to another DE it becomes quite easy. If you're willing to switch off Linux completely, isn't it worth trying ex. XFCE first?

- sent from my laptop running Xorg

> If you're willing to switch off Linux completely, isn't it worth trying ex. XFCE first?

Presumably they want or need something officially supported on the scale of Fedora, in which case not really. Like sure, you can use it that way for now, but what are you going to do when it breaks? Even if you're willing to go it alone and put your own system together, surely it's easier to switch to FreeBSD at that point.

XFCE is still in Fedora and AFAIK not dropping X11 anytime soon if ever.

As opposed to GNOME (removing support upstream) and KDE Plasma (Fedora disabling/removing X11 parts from their packages).

If you're on Fedora and want X11 KDE without fiddling, openSUSE Tumbleweed could be worth checking out.

If Fedora is removing X11 parts of KDE Plasma, presumably the only reason they're not also removing them from XFCE is that they offer a lower level of support for XFCE in the first place.

That’s what I assume the issue is, and why I said “up to date”. I think you’re dead on.

Yeah it may still be usable today.

Will it be with the hardware in your next laptop? Will your preferred DE or WM or distro keep support? What about the apps you depend on?

You’re going to want/need an update and the whole house of cards may come down because there is no choice anymore.

If these users thought “just keep using X11” was viable I don’t think they’d be looking to switch OSes over this. We haven’t trust they know their situation and options.

I was wondering about something like FreeBSD. I have no idea what they’re doing with X11/Wayland and wondered what their accessibility situation was. I don’t think I’ve seen them mentioned in the conversations about this from visually impaired users, but I don’t know why.

My understanding is that mainstream distros can no longer be installed by blind users because the screen readers don't work right (if at all) under wayland.

My opinion is good accessibility requires a good chunk of money, especially for surveys and testing. Something that Apple, in my opinion, does exceptionally well (big user of their accessibility features since 2002). FOSS just can't compete here sorry to say.

My experience internally at Apple is that accessibility was important, but it's also in the critical path for automated UI tests. So broken accessibility means broken tests. Good accessibility also means tests are easy to write. The company prioritizes accessibility, but engineers focus on tests.

Apple has tons of accessibility features that don't benefit automated testing at all. It's clearly been made a priority regardless of profitability.

Just curious: Are you speaking as an insider or just guessing about the test coverage?

Just looking through the settings they have stuff which would have no obvious automation angle. The reduce transparency option for example, the noise recognition feature to alert you of fire alarms, pairing with hearing aides, etc. Tim Cook said himself in an interview that they provide accessibility features regardless of ROI.

That's not the initial point. The point is that UI tests are so much easier and less brittle if they're going to be using the accessibility tree, rather than relying on a few selectors.

click("Enable Frobzinator") is infinitely more maintainable than click(button().index(7)), and if you eventually remove the accessibility description, your test fails, letting you immediately know what's wrong, and whether it's the test no longer up to date, or if you broke something.

This is interesting. For anyone intending to improve the accessibility situation of software, would there be value in "open sourcing" a suite of tests -- or at least a recipe for constructing them? (based on hard-earned experience writing accessible software)

Even tests are structured as feature checks (for QA by humans, or soon by AI agents) would be quite useful for devs writing software who have no direct experience with building for accessibility.

Do you think it might be possible to get Apple to open source anything like this? Maybe ex-Apple people who care deeply about these challenges?

I think you're partially right. The development of good accessibility features require what any other feature would require- time. Since there aren't enough skilled people willing to give their time to make a good dent in the issue, the only solution left is to pay people for their efforts, sadly.

What kind of people are needed, accessibility experts? I think such people are usually PMs or designers, not engineers.

Accessibility experts typically end up creating a bunch of requirements that need engineering man-hours to fulfil. That tends to be boring dev work that most people don't want to do for free. It's hard enough to find people to work on the shiny, fun stuff in open-source.

Sounds like a task for an LLM.

LLMs are terrible at accessibility since it requires a lot of implicit context. I'm currently implenemting accessibility for a web app. LLMs (sonnet 3-4, gemini 2.5) make a huge mess and they need a lot of supervision and planning

Sounds like a good task for LLM to fuck up the codebase to a point it's unmaintainable.

You don't need to be an expert to verify basic checklists. Adding accessibility labels to your buttons, making keyboard navigation work are supposed to be part of your work as an "engineer". Can you imagine building a bridge and saying "yeah no I haven't checked the sidewalks are safe that's an accessibility feature" ?

A basic understanding of accessibility principles is a requirement if you intend to call yourself an engineer (and work on UI facing elements, of course.)

I don't know if this applies here, but my previous experience with doing amateur open source stuff against a code base work corporate backing was that they'll out-code you if they don't care about it. As in be very slow at doing reviews (because they are busy doing features their manager wants them to do, but it's their area that's being changed so the review is still needed), and things can bitrot in that time because they're actively working on it. In one case the lead then said too bad the project is a meritocracy and people who do the work daily has the say.

I sometimes worry that this focus on accessibility testing and the industry around it makes folks think this is some monumental undertaking that they can't hope to approach themselves. But a lot of these issues are glaringly obvious (e.g. "this UI element has no label so I can't identify it"). The visual equivalent would be shipping your app with transparent text labels or a 2 pixel font height.

Any developer can test their software with a screen reader for free. If it's not usable with a screen reader, it won't be usable to screen reader users. The problem is that almost nobody who isn't Blind will do this, or even consider doing it. They'll effectively build an entire UI flow without running through it even once. If you're lucky, they'll work at a company that has some policies and checklists for accessibility and they'll follow that. If you're really lucky, they'll pay to have someone else do accessibility QA. But even just testing it yourself the way it's going to be used would be a huge step up.

Absolutely, FOSS cannot compete with Apple in the same way I, an amateur with a flimsy seesaw, cannot compete with a professional lumberjack with a chainsaw. But I am still miles ahead from a person grabbing my seesaw and sawing their foot off with it. Clumsy and inefficient as I am, I can still get some work done and walk back home to carry the logs.

Apple's accessibility on iPhones for (partially-)cognitively-impaired people is terrible. You either get a ridiculously unusable simple interface, or you get the inflexible non-customisable confusing normal interface.

Do you have any good examples of design for cognitively impaired people?

I don't, just speaking from experience helping one use an iPhone. Too many features can cause confusion, or accidental breakage with no way to revert. Not enough features is a problem too. Feature mechanisms can also cause emotion. So you need enough flexibility that you can customise the interface exactly to the person.

Some examples from iOS: The iPhone wallpaper change gesture is easy to trigger, losing that favorite photo, and needing assistance to go into the settings and fix it again. A big issue I saw was popup context menus can cause confusion when accidentally touching a message in the wrong way. Another was a regression in the latest iOS, in the messages app, when you write a long message, you can't scroll up to what you are replying to; previously you could minimise your draft at least and then scroll up. The photos app clip object feature with its silvery object outline caused delight, despite the feature itself not being used at all, just accidentally.

Having worked many years in non-profits, it's sadly an all too common issue. I have a number of explanations for why people are like this toward people who are already giving more in a month than the critic will give in a lifetime, ranging from a kind of need to belittle the giver's generosity - to quell the critic's own discomfort at the fact that they may not be as generous a person as they would like to think, through to many people taking generosity as a sign of weakness and exploitability - and thereby somebody who can be bullied to let off a bit of steam.

It's exhausting though. The giver ends up in this awful moral quandary where all they want to do is throw their hands up and say "eff-this and eff-all-of-you", but at the same time, this kind of person if the type who can't bring themselves to let the crappiness of others lead them to abandon vulnerable people in need. And so the spiral toward burnout spins down and down.

I've had similar experiences but I honestly think a lot of time it's just that people don't realize how much effort something is. Like organizing a 2 hour lecture meeting about something looks like the most basic and minimal event, but when you actually do it as a volunteer you realize how much work it is, and how that work often comes at a time when you're tired from your day job. Volunteering for and being responsible for things has repeatedly opened up my eyes to the amount of effort involved.

I get what is being put down, but, hypothetical of, what if I wake up blind? (wouldn't be the first time for me), I turn on my computer and I ain't got no idea of when plymouth is ready, I could wait for 15 minutes and then start typing, and then after that, when is the login screen ready? At this point I know I can press a hotkey to get some response but I don't know what it is, and then I get into my session, press the same hotkey I hope, can then enable the screen reader but is that a full comprehensive screen reader or sorta only for gnome reader? Do I need to install more things?

Or if you develop severe carpel tunnel syndrome, which is fairly likely. There's a woman on YouTube that talks about it. Really sucks suddenly not being able to use apps the way you used to. She relies heavily on 3rd party apps to fill in the gaps.

This was hard to read through because it felt like the author took a lot of the recent writings about the lack of accessibility in Linux (more accurately, Wayland) as a personal attack. It’s understandable given that they are actively working to improve accessibility, but the way the article was presented didn’t make me feel sympathetic. Instead, it made me more sympathetic to those who have written about these problems and doubly so for those who suffer from disabilities and are dealing with the push to Wayland.

Even before Wayland I get the sense that the screen reader desktop Linux experience was "this is just about usable if you're an expert". You just can't blame people for not wanting to put up with that, or giving up before they get far into it.

Yup, and now it’s regressing so totally understandable that for those who somehow made it work, this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Personally, when I developed RSI and other health issues (that made me seriously consider giving up programming or anything computer related as a career), I found that I didn’t want to put up with the state of a11y in Linux and switched to macOS. That was worlds better even though I missed a ton of features from Linux. After a lot of time and money, I’ve made my way back to being able to continue my career, and thankfully don’t need those tools anymore. I still give Linux a try for a few months every year to see if it’s time to switch back. For certain users, I can understand why Linux feels like it’s not there and even regressing.

Who the hell is making hundreds of millions of dollars off GNOME? Even indirectly?

Yeah, I had the same reaction (billions even!)

FWIW, I can easily imagine how OP arrived at that number, but when it comes to "corporations" some people believe that applying any random fast and loose math. The type of math that says:

      - Redhat == RHEL (+CentOS/Fedora)
      - RHEL ships GNOME 
      - Redhat "made" 6 billion in revenue in 2024
      - Therefor: Redhat made millions (or billions) indirectly of GNOME

Trying to argue against that is difficult because who the hell knows. How much money does Calculator.app make Apple on MacOS? How much does mspaint make Microsoft?

Not many of RHEL customers are using RHEL for the desktop. I don't know the split, but RHEL is a very slow moving distro. It's Desktop experience is.. Extra Enterprise.

None the less, someone could make the argument that RedHat wouldn't be able to sell their servers to as many customers as they are if they didn't have the desktop offering. Plus Some RedHat customers are using Fedora or CentOS as desktop even if not directly paying for it, they want to know that it's from their OS vendor.

so using loose anti-corporate math, RedHat is making billions of GNOME and not contributing to it. Other examples of loose corporate math I read on reddit once "Apple is literally a 3 trillion dollar company. They can literally afford to hire a support person for every customer they have."

Later in the article they say that RedHat are contributing to accessibility though.

How bad is the Gnome Bad chorus? I got burned too many times getting outside Ubuntu comfort zone like Kubuntu 15.04, Spiral (Sid with btrfs snapshots by default) but Gnome became peak DE for me a few years back.

A lot has happened in 10 years.

At least KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon (Gnome 3 fork), Mate (Gnome 2 fork) all worth testing in approximately that order. You may also be interested in Budgie, which is very Gnomey UX but I believe remaining X11 first. Official Ubuntu Budgie installer is a thing.

Note that installing different DEs side by side may or may not have session handlers or other helper services conflict or otherwise be annoying if you leave those behind so if you want to play it safe, test in a VM or live USB to play around with a few without side-effects before committing on actually installing a new DE.

Couldn't read past the first line. There are plenty of actually disabled and visually impaired people who have written about the shortcomings of accessibility tools on Linux.

They specifically highlight and praise those posts in the closing paragraphs.

It is ok to be ignorant, but it is odd to take the time to actively point it out.

Because he wasn't talking about any of those people.

> What do virtue-signalers and privileged people without disabilities sharing content about accessibility on Linux being trash have in common?

NewJazz is right. It is a straight up ad hominem attack.

I have never seen the phrase “virtue signal[er]” used in a non-pejorative way.

This post could have been written to explain people are working on it and trying hard and it’s really demoralizing and asking for more help.

It wasn’t.

It sounds to me like the OP is specifically calling out non-disabled people. Maybe I'm reading it wrong? But it seems more like they're concerned with people that like to complain rather than critique

They are, but it’s an odd critique.

If we ignore the tone, they’re basically suggesting that it’s unfair for people without impairments (A) to boost posts from the visually impaired (B) complaining about issues, because the As don’t face the issues.

Which would reduce the number and visibility posts dramatically. Effectively silencing the B users to a large degree.

But I don’t that’s truly intended. This piece seems pretty clearly born out of frustration and emotion.

No they're upset that some people just want to complain. They're okay with critiques (complaint != critique) but saying that only getting complaints is demoralizing and makes it hard for people who are actually trying to get shit done.

I don't know what's hard to understand about this. It's a pretty universal human experience. We've all had to listen to people just complain and experience how that makes us want to just say "fuck it" and stop doing the thing. That's it. Nothing more. Stop trying to twist this into things. You can read it as "shut up or pony up".

I don't think I'm being ignorant. If he wasn't talking about those folks, maybe he should have specified that rather than seemingly characterizing all criticism of GNOME accessibility as some sort of anti-GNOME conspiracy.

These criticisms aren't coming from nowhere. There are legitimate shortcomings.

FWIW I did read the rest of the blog post... I have a lot of empathy for open source developers but I can't help but feel like this post is coming on strong... There's a way to address perceived flame bait from publications like theregister while acknowledging real shortcomings.

  > If he wasn't talking about those folks, maybe he should have specified that rather than seemingly characterizing all criticism of GNOME accessibility as some sort of anti-GNOME conspiracy.

  | What do virtue-signalers and privileged people without disabilities sharing content about accessibility on Linux being trash have in common?

  | They don’t actually really care about the group they’re defending; they just exploit these victims’ unfortunate situation to either fuel hate against groups and projects actually trying to make the world a better place.

It reads to me like they're doing what you're asking. Their language separates "they" from "disabled people". Specifically with "the group they’re defending"

So let me get this right: It's okay for a blind person to write content about accessibility being trash, but it's not okay for a privileged person without disabilities to share that content.

I'm not sure how that's supposed to be a reasonable point of view. Keeping the problems nicely hidden from the larger community is not going to help anyone. Of course merely talking about a problem isn't going to solve it either, but it's more likely to lead to solutions in the long term.

I think that's a reasonable point of view to be interpreted if you read it reasonably

You've used reasonable twice, but haven't explained how it's reasonable.

You'll need to read it reasonably to get a reasonable response. But if there's a correct response with no room for disagreement then there's no conversation to be had. That's what I was saying: you read it unreasonably

Personally can't take seriously anything written by someone with an anime avatar

I really liked this article because it gave me my first real look into A11y GNOME/OS-level development from a developers perspective. And it really hit me. I have done a ton of accessibility development and testing in the past. Mostly for websites and mobile apps. For that, I had to set up Windows virtual machines to use screen readers like JAWS or NVDA (on Debian/Gnome). Also I remember, I want to try Orca when I got in touch with a11y development, but I failed to get it to work. And since Orca just is not widely used and does not represent the market well. I had an argument to not dig deeper.

On desktops, NVDA and JAWS are the big players, both Windows-only, with NVDA being open-source under GPL2 and JAWS being proprietary. On mobile, it is all about Apples VoiceOver and Androids TalkBack.

From my experience, the projects that really nail accessibility on mobile and the web start thinking about it even before they write a single line of code or do any UI design. That is probably because accessibility is so tied up with UI/UX design and user flow. Because of all those non-functional requirements that make it tricky, it requires a cross-functional-team effort including: designers, developers, content creators and product managers.

Trying to improve accessibility after the software is already designed and built is tough. Sometimes you have to completely redo the UI and UX. When I think about doing that at the OS level or within GNOME itself, it feels overwhelming, like trying to make an impact drop by drop on a stone. But before you drop anything, you have to talk with 10 different people and teams.

> To summarize the table: those three merge requests that I worked on for free were worth 9,393.60$ CAD (6,921.36$ USD) in total at a minimum.

To reference a linked post, how much is this calculator effort worth to a user who can't even login because accessibility is broken?

I've ranted about accessability on projects I've been on. The new excuse from TPTB is "just let the AI read the screen. We don't need to do anything else"

Blind people are missing Emacspeak under Emacs which is superior to anything else. Ebooks, webs, mail, podcasts, org-mode, calculator, programming, IRC, im+IRC (bitlbee)...

The Gnome project wastes so many resources rewriting the toolkit every 5 years, it is no wonder that zero progress has been made over the past 25 years.

Is it really worth worrying about traditional "accessibility" features for GUIs in the age of AIs? The future of interfaces looks like Siri and Alexa with the power of a good LLM behind them. Those interfaces can potentially communicate with anybody who can talk, type, or sign. Maybe that's where to put the effort.

This is just wishful thinking, so until there is anything more plausible it's worth worrying about

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