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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

This is a huge blow to accessibility on linux since KDE is such a large marketshare. There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all). It's frankly shocking to me that they would go ahead with this. Even if one doesn't care about the lives of the disabled KDE is now ruled out of workplaces and institutions in the USA because of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The only wayland compositor that supports accessibility it's GNOME's mutter and that's with it's own newly rolled set of protocols that only GNOME's userspace applications support.

I'd love to be proven wrong about KDE's accessibility support. Hopefully they'll adopt GNOME's acccessibility extensions for wayland but that seems less likely than making their own that work with their compositor's design.

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> There is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland extensions (and none in core wayland at all

Can you clarify what you mean by this? In the process of KDE implementing Wayland support I also have seen several issues and blog posts dedicated to accessibility features. In fact, I am fairly sure I saw KDE explicitly funding accessibility development in relation Wayland a while ago.

I am using KDE with Wayland and just had a look in my settings and the Accessibility menu is there and the features in there also appear to be working. Including the screenreader which worked on all windows I had open at the time.

Which makes sense as none of that goes through the display server but rather a D-Bus protocol implemented by Qt and GTK as far as my understanding goes.

There is a bunch of stuff that came with X11 "for free" like access easier screen capture for magnifiers, input injection, etc but as far as my understanding goes KDE (just like GNOME) has been working on DE specific implementations of each.

I am not saying things are perfect right now as far as accessibility goes. I am not someone who depends on these features. I also know that things are in fact not perfect across the board and there is still work to be done. But the claim that there is no support for accessibility seems like a rather large hyperbole to me.

> here is no support for accessibility for the visually (or otherwise) disabled in KDE Plasma's wayland

I'm sure accessibility is far from perfect, but in this case, I doubt that's true. KDE has a blind developer working on accessibility: https://mastodon.social/@acidiclight

That is good to hear. But the third post down on acidiclight's mastodon page is a link to another user's blog post:

>As a KWin developer and KDE's accessibility engineer... >https://nocoffei.com/?p=451 >This is a problem. We need to solve it. Fast.

And this is a quote from the page intro,

> As the Linux Desktop transitions to a Wayland-only future, I will be locked out of my computer, as the accessibility software I rely on is left behind. The desktop environment I use, KDE Plasma, has announced that in early 2027, X11 support will be removed from the system. That means in about roughly 9 months, I will no longer be welcome on that desktop environment, being forced to cling to an older version or switch to a more niche environment that still supports it.

The problems described therein haven't been fixed. And mclassen's (of gtk) comments on the fedora bug tracker make it clear that even if KDE tries to implement GNOME's new AccessKit it still won't solve the problems. mclassen seems to think the people asking for things like getting and setting cursor position are just sealioning "accessibility maximalists". The core idea of his argument argument is valid, you can't get it working all at once and progress is incremental. But if that's true then don't remove X11 support that works while the waylands are still progressing towards working.

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