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Awesome! If they spend some of it on accessibility, the year of the Linux desktop may be near for blind people like me. Windows has gotten so bad that if you ha
by devinprater 3y ago
Awesome! If they spend some of it on accessibility, the year of the Linux desktop may be near for blind people like me. Windows has gotten so bad that if you have File Explorer open to the Home section, NVDA just says "pane" instead of reading out the home section. That's along with other papercuts and rough edges on the OS. But oh no, Windows 11 was made <s>from the ground up to be accessible!</s>. And I think we've already seen the Safari not responding thing for Macs.
Linux already has a good foundation. BRLTTY works with just about any Braille display, cups can print both text, and even images, to Braille printers, and Emacspeak has existed since the late 90's. Even on Windows, the best and most useful addons for a screen reader are on NVDA, the open source one. Imagine what we can do when we control the whole stack? A true audio desktop, with audible animations. No need to spend $1099 for the most high quality screen reader and OS. being able to put Linux on the [Optima laptop](https://www.orbitresearch.com/product/optima/ https://www.orbitresearch.com/product/optima/) upcoming laptop, and have everything open, from the metal to the GUI. Just a dream of mine, and I'm not a developer so can't do much to bring it to life, but it definitely would be nice, and the desktop environment is about the biggest thing that can be made better in order to fulfil this. I'm telling y'all, we're ready for something better than Windows and Mac. Note that I'm just one person, and don't speak for every blind person and definitely don't speak for every disabled person. There are blind people and especially partially sighted people that love Windows and Apple and Android.
- Le_Dook 3y agoThere was post made in recent weeks on the Gnome Accessibility blog about the work they'll doing over the next year. Sounds like it's being spearheaded by someone quite capable, with a strong vision: https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2023/10/27/a-new-accessibility-architecture-for-modern-free-desktops/ https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2023/10/27/a-new-accessibility-...
- devinprater 3y agoOh yes, I can't wait to see what comes of that.
- squigz 3y ago> I'm not a developer so can't do much to bring it to life Funding and advocacy is just as important as developer time :)
- devinprater 3y agoWell I mean, I think I donate like $20 a month to Gnome, ... or is that KDE... Both? I'll have to look. But anyway yeah that's about all I can do is donate and try to be there to help where I can. I can also do documentation and proofreading.