10 ms·

Unfortunately the accessibility software[1] I use will likely never support Wayland due to Wayland's design requiring accessibility to be reimplemented by every

by SCdF 3y ago

Unfortunately the accessibility software[1] I use will likely never support Wayland due to Wayland's design requiring accessibility to be reimplemented by every DE, which means for you are no longer say supporting Windows, Mac and Linux; but Windows, Mac, X11, Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cina... It's very weird to say, but I feel like I'll eventually be dropping Linux and moving to Windows, and it won't be for videogames. [1] https://talonvoice.com/ https://talonvoice.com/

smoldesu 3y ago
> which means for you are no longer say supporting Windows, Mac and Linux; but Windows, Mac, X11, Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cina... At a toolkit level, you don't really have to worry about that. When developing GTK or Qt apps, most of the DE integration and Wayland/x11-specific features are handled for you automatically. Basic trackpad gestures, copy/paste and windowing heuristics are handled by the toolkit, and so is accessibility software if your toolkit supports it. If an app doesn't work well on a desktop's Wayland implimentation, it is less often a Wayland problem and more a desktop/toolkit problem. We had the same issue with non-conformist x11 software, unfortunately.
- superkuh 3y ago
  >most of the DE integration and Wayland/x11-specific features are handled for you automatically... Just no ability to launch windows at absolute positions or do non-standard input stuff (like special mice, keyboards, or keyboard/mouse sharing) unless your particular wayland flavor has libei. And some waylands like sway are actively hostile to libei. Which is kind of microcosm of the waylands as whole.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    It's a microcosm of Linux. x11 had wildly non-conformant desktops since forever, having a larger spec doesn't inherently fix things or force desktops to abide by the rules. Projects like GNOME would have dropped AppIndicator and server-side decorations whether it was included in Wayland or not. Drilling-down on a minimal set of secure features was the only path forward if Wayland wanted developers to take the protocol seriously.
worksonmine 3y ago
You'd switch your entire OS before trying an alternative accessibility program or a DE that comes with one? What's the state of accessibility on Gnome for example that seems to come with batteries included? I'm not trying to be rude just genuinely curious, and I also don't use a DE, wayland or accessibility, so I have no horse in the game.
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago
  If he/she is used to the program and wants to use it... yea? Why not? I run the OS that runs the programs I want to use.
  - 627467 3y ago
    Not sure why you're being down voted: not everyone cares about all levels of the software stack. Most people can be perfectly functional as long as they see a "Google chrome" icon anywhere on the display and once in chrome they feel at home. There's an entire OS built around chrome. Why wouldn't someone ditch an OS for another to keep using the software they want?
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      > Not sure why you're being down voted Probably because it was a legitimate question out of curiosity with a couple sub-questions, and "why not" is a dismissal rather than an answer.
- SCdF 3y ago
  Talon is what I would describe as accessibility for programmers (my definition, not the developer's!). You effectively write software that replaces keyboard and mouse usage, generically, flexibly and programmatically. So when you write commands you bind them in different way: app specific[1], feature specific[2][3], OS-specific, hecking __programming language specific__[4] etc, and then talon mixes and matches all of that stuff together. So let's say I have VSCode focused on a javascript file . Talon knows this, and so I have "panel switch" which is a vscode specific command, and "op strict equal" to insert ` === `, but I also have generic text editing commands (because it's an editor), and multi cursor commands (because vscode has been tagged as multi cursor supporting), and tab commands (because vscode is a tab-based editor), and so on and so on. If I then switched to the browser I would keep the generic text editing commands, and the tab commands, as it supports both of those things, but I would no longer have multi cursor support (or JS commands), because my browser doesn't support that. This also means you can by and large use the same talon config (and so the same voice commands) on windows, mac and x11. So for me switching to windows is actually less of a pain because most of the ways I interact with my computer don't actually change, as talon abstracts that away quite a bit. [1] https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/apps/vscode/vscode.talon https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/apps/vscode/... / https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/apps/vscode/vscode.py https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/apps/vscode/... [2] https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/core/windows_and_tabs/tabs.talon https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/core/windows... [3] where vscode gets its features "bound" https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/apps/vscode/vscode.talon#L4-L8 https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/apps/vscode/... [4] https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/lang/javascript/javascript.talon https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/lang/javascr...
renox 3y ago
> Wayland's design requiring accessibility to be reimplemented by every DE I'm not a big Wayland fan (quite the opposite truly), but I don't know if this is true: if there's an accessibility protocol made for Wayland you could (in theory) have one accessibility SW accessing many Wayland DE. So this isn't a Wayland design issue, but it is an implementation issue: given that many DE have reimplemented the Wayland server, there will be less shared code than with X and more bugs to take into account. Of course given the age of Wayland and that this is still an issue really show the problems with Wayland..
- hedora 3y ago
  From what I can tell, Wayland makes things much less customizable and much more brittle than X11 (since Gnome, KDE, etc have their own monolithic compositors, and implementing a compositor is much more complicated than implementing a window manager). Since accessibility implies customization (for different people's issues), I think that means the Wayland ecosystem will never support accessibility in practice. Take this redit post from someone with a bum shoulder, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17oo98g/wayland_simplicity_and_compositor_complexity_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17oo98g/wayland_simp... It's the second hit for "Wayland Accessiblity Protocol", so (I'm guessing) if there is such a protocol, it's extremely obscure and unsupported. The first hit links to these two pages, which are separate lists of wayland accessibility regressions for KDE and GTK: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/GTK-a11y-revamp/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/GTK-a11y-reva... Of course, even if they address all the things on both lists (which is at least twice as much work as doing it under X11 was) none of that will help the person with a bad shoulder, since they need to mix and match between multiple environments to use their machine.
  - addicted 3y ago
    > Wayland makes things much less customizable and much more brittle than X11 Another way to put it is Wayland with a few years of development by a few Linux players (others were building alternatives, while yet others were seeing which one would win out, and yet others were hoping to stay on X11 forever) under its belt, is almost as solid as X11 with many decades of development by all the Linux players. The idea that X11 was a completely working option which had every capability it does today within years of its inception is wrong. X11 has been built and expanded for decades and even today is incapable of doing many modern functions that its competitors can. Wayland, OTOH, has almost reached parity with X11 rapidly, does things that X11 is not even capable of, and has a roadmap to reach complete parity.
boudin 3y ago
I find this disappointing (the lack of accessibility tooling) as Wayland felt like a good opportunity to factor in accessibility from the get go. For what it's worth though, accessibility was mentioned as one of the improvement area for which Gnome got funding: https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-This-Week-Homed https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-This-Week-Homed Not sure what it will mean in practice, accessibility being a large topic.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  There are a lot of missed opportunities with Wayland. The sad thing to me is that Wayland is aiming at replacing X while at the same time proudly stating that they aren't going to support a fair bit of the functionality that X provides. That makes the whole effort an exercise in regression to me.
  - boudin 3y ago
    I do really like Wayland personally, for my usage it is now a really solid experience. No more weird graphical glitches and really smooth gaming experience. The side project pipewire is just amazing. I really hope that protocols for accessibility will get the attention it deserves though
llamaInSouth 3y ago
I just switched back to Windows after 20 years on Linux and I regret it... I'll be switching back ASAP... everything just works better by default on Linux for what I do (I don't game much but Steam is pretty nice on Linux anyways).
- ho_schi 3y ago
  You’re welcome. Everyone makes mistakes.
  - llamaInSouth 3y ago
    why do you say "you're welcome"?
- nwah1 3y ago
  The main problem is just their steady increase in cross-selling, nagware, advertising, and feature bloat. That is what makes me want to be rid of it. But Windows 11 really achieves greatness in a lot of ways, which offsets it.
ognarb 3y ago
This is wrong. Accessibility software uses the at-spi protocol and this work with kde, gnome and in both x11 and wayland. There are some minor issues with Wayland but most of it works. I don't know what talon is doing as it seems proprietary, but the issue might be there.
- SCdF 3y ago
  To be completely clear I am not a Linux programmer, and I don't have the bandwidth I think to become one, this is my secondhand understanding of the situation. Here is a bit of a discussion though on this topic: - a summary of the situation: https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blo... - talon-required features and their current compatibility: https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blob/main/talon-requirements.md https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blo...
  - Alupis 3y ago
    Keep in mind a lot of the belly aching you read is from people miffed their X11 application needs to be updated. Basically people complaining about needing to do work to modernize. All the things will eventually be just fine. X11 is a walking zombie.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      > people miffed their X11 application needs to be updated. Yes, users are very understandably miffed that things which were working are suddenly broken and somebody now has to fix it in order to return to the status quo. > things will eventually be just fine Wayland is 15 years old. At this rate it will be due for replacement before it's feature complete.
      - jorvi 3y ago
        > Yes, users are very understandably miffed that things which were working are suddenly broken and somebody now has to fix it in order to return to the status quo. You are misunderstanding. You can continue to keep using applications in X11-mode for as long as those applications maintain that code path. But many of the niceties Wayland provides, X11 won't get because it is virtually unmaintained. Or said another way, X11 is already broken and getting slightly more broken every day. And before you get angry at X11 going unmaintained, would you have expected Apple to support Carbon ad-infinitum? Look at the backwards-compatibility and new-framework-adoption-rate woes Windows has to deal with because Win32 exists and devs are lazy / expensive.
JohnFen 3y ago
If you're seriously considering dropping Linux, I suggest investigating the BSDs as an alternative rather than Windows. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- azinman2 3y ago
  The issue is Wayland accessibility vs X11. How is this any different on a BSD?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Most BSDs have not adopted Wayland and, at least for now, most have said they don't intend to adopt Wayland. I'm planning on moving all of my machines from Linux to BSD in part because of this, and in part because of SystemD.
    - johnny22 3y ago
      Where'd you get that idea. Wayland is part of the freebsd handbook. There's even a page on xenocera about how to use sway on openbsd and what issues are left to make it work fully. Wayland compositors will end up working fine on openbsd. That obviously doesn't cover all the bsds yet though, but it will get there.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        I guess my information is out of date. That's very disappointing news indeed.
- scythe 3y ago
  I've enjoyed BSDs, but I don't know how sustainable an approach this is. Unless the BSD maintainers are going to absorb and maintain the old X codebase (they have already refused to treat it as a system component, and it's reputedly hard to maintain), it seems like sooner or later they will have to switch to Wayland, unless something else comes along. And while BSD might be able to solve the fragmentation problem within themselves, they would probably diverge from GNOME and KDE by doing so, cf XKCD #927, and anyway they are generally loath to include or endorse graphical components in the base system. A first step might be to just have a list of all the functionality affected by fragmentation. So far, unfortunately, most such lists are accompanied by if not subsumed within angry rants.
danShumway 3y ago
TBF, I honestly think that X11 is also pretty bad about a lot of this stuff, but accessibility engines are able to hack around the problems. The underlying issue here is that in general, whether it's X11/Wayland/whatever, on Linux we don't treat accessibility issues like high priority items to fix and we don't treat accessibility interfaces as first-class citizens in the DE. To the extent that we allow programmable interfaces outside of the terminal, we put those interfaces on top of the graphics stack rather than underneath it and we treat them like alternative control schemes, not common interfaces that every input device should be hooking into and sharing regardless of whether they're for some "disabled" category or not. Disability is a spectrum, having separate categories for "normal" interfaces and accessible interfaces doesn't capture that. These problems are kind of universal, but X11 just happened to be so wildly insecure and had such bad encapsulation that devs could work around that problem. Which... better than nothing, I guess, but our primary way of mitigating accessibility problems shouldn't be to make our software worse. I'm still on X11; I haven't fully figured out tablet settings and I'm waiting for OpenTabletdriver to mature a bit more before taking a serious dive into Wayland. But does being on X11 mean that my desktop is accessible or that I can test software that I build with a common screenreader to make sure it works for disabled users? No, of course not, I use i3wm where as far as I can tell accessibility software like Orca can't hook into any of the programs that I run, even programs with explicit support for Orca. I don't think the problem here is the technology, the technology just reveals a deeper apathy that has always been present. It won't be fixed until we change our relationship with differently abled users and start working with accessibility communities on shared protocols/interfaces rather than treating those interfaces like afterthoughts. A lot of the "debates" about accessibility requirements like controlling window position, etc... stem from that issue and probably have solutions that would work for everyone if we prioritized finding them and approaching the problems from different angles.
- SCdF 3y ago
  This is very true, and unfortunately there are very few people working on linux accessibility (including not me! I am part of the problem!). TBC I don't have any educated opinions about Wayland (I don't know remotely enough to know if the decisions they made are good ones in the grander scheme of things), more that it's this looming existential sadness that I'll eventually have to give up on Linux. And this is probably some form of "losing", but honestly WSL gets me pretty close to where I want to be in the getting shit done department. Just not in the "not using Windows" department ;-) (MacOS is another fine option, but I literally bought a framework laptop a week ago, so that door is financially closed to me for a long while)
shrubble 3y ago
Would FreeBSD (doesn't have Wayland) be a possibility for you?
- SCdF 3y ago
  Talon doesn't support BSD (well, unless you count MacOS), so it's not an option no.

by SCdF 3y ago

smoldesu 3y ago

> which means for you are no longer say supporting Windows, Mac and Linux; but Windows, Mac, X11, Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cina... At a toolkit level, you don't really have to worry about that. When developing GTK or Qt apps, most of the DE integration and Wayland/x11-specific features are handled for you automatically. Basic trackpad gestures, copy/paste and windowing heuristics are handled by the toolkit, and so is accessibility software if your toolkit supports it. If an app doesn't work well on a desktop's Wayland implimentation, it is less often a Wayland problem and more a desktop/toolkit problem. We had the same issue with non-conformist x11 software, unfortunately.

superkuh 3y ago
>most of the DE integration and Wayland/x11-specific features are handled for you automatically... Just no ability to launch windows at absolute positions or do non-standard input stuff (like special mice, keyboards, or keyboard/mouse sharing) unless your particular wayland flavor has libei. And some waylands like sway are actively hostile to libei. Which is kind of microcosm of the waylands as whole.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  It's a microcosm of Linux. x11 had wildly non-conformant desktops since forever, having a larger spec doesn't inherently fix things or force desktops to abide by the rules. Projects like GNOME would have dropped AppIndicator and server-side decorations whether it was included in Wayland or not. Drilling-down on a minimal set of secure features was the only path forward if Wayland wanted developers to take the protocol seriously.

worksonmine 3y ago

You'd switch your entire OS before trying an alternative accessibility program or a DE that comes with one? What's the state of accessibility on Gnome for example that seems to come with batteries included? I'm not trying to be rude just genuinely curious, and I also don't use a DE, wayland or accessibility, so I have no horse in the game.

Unfrozen0688 3y ago
If he/she is used to the program and wants to use it... yea? Why not? I run the OS that runs the programs I want to use.
- 627467 3y ago
  Not sure why you're being down voted: not everyone cares about all levels of the software stack. Most people can be perfectly functional as long as they see a "Google chrome" icon anywhere on the display and once in chrome they feel at home. There's an entire OS built around chrome. Why wouldn't someone ditch an OS for another to keep using the software they want?
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    > Not sure why you're being down voted Probably because it was a legitimate question out of curiosity with a couple sub-questions, and "why not" is a dismissal rather than an answer.
SCdF 3y ago
Talon is what I would describe as accessibility for programmers (my definition, not the developer's!). You effectively write software that replaces keyboard and mouse usage, generically, flexibly and programmatically. So when you write commands you bind them in different way: app specific[1], feature specific[2][3], OS-specific, hecking __programming language specific__[4] etc, and then talon mixes and matches all of that stuff together. So let's say I have VSCode focused on a javascript file . Talon knows this, and so I have "panel switch" which is a vscode specific command, and "op strict equal" to insert ` === `, but I also have generic text editing commands (because it's an editor), and multi cursor commands (because vscode has been tagged as multi cursor supporting), and tab commands (because vscode is a tab-based editor), and so on and so on. If I then switched to the browser I would keep the generic text editing commands, and the tab commands, as it supports both of those things, but I would no longer have multi cursor support (or JS commands), because my browser doesn't support that. This also means you can by and large use the same talon config (and so the same voice commands) on windows, mac and x11. So for me switching to windows is actually less of a pain because most of the ways I interact with my computer don't actually change, as talon abstracts that away quite a bit. [1] https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/apps/vscode/vscode.talon https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/apps/vscode/... / https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/apps/vscode/vscode.py https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/apps/vscode/... [2] https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/core/windows_and_tabs/tabs.talon https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/core/windows... [3] where vscode gets its features "bound" https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/apps/vscode/vscode.talon#L4-L8 https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/apps/vscode/... [4] https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/lang/javascript/javascript.talon https://github.com/talonhub/community/blob/main/lang/javascr...

renox 3y ago

> Wayland's design requiring accessibility to be reimplemented by every DE I'm not a big Wayland fan (quite the opposite truly), but I don't know if this is true: if there's an accessibility protocol made for Wayland you could (in theory) have one accessibility SW accessing many Wayland DE. So this isn't a Wayland design issue, but it is an implementation issue: given that many DE have reimplemented the Wayland server, there will be less shared code than with X and more bugs to take into account. Of course given the age of Wayland and that this is still an issue really show the problems with Wayland..

hedora 3y ago
From what I can tell, Wayland makes things much less customizable and much more brittle than X11 (since Gnome, KDE, etc have their own monolithic compositors, and implementing a compositor is much more complicated than implementing a window manager). Since accessibility implies customization (for different people's issues), I think that means the Wayland ecosystem will never support accessibility in practice. Take this redit post from someone with a bum shoulder, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17oo98g/wayland_simplicity_and_compositor_complexity_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17oo98g/wayland_simp... It's the second hit for "Wayland Accessiblity Protocol", so (I'm guessing) if there is such a protocol, it's extremely obscure and unsupported. The first hit links to these two pages, which are separate lists of wayland accessibility regressions for KDE and GTK: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/GTK-a11y-revamp/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/GTK-a11y-reva... Of course, even if they address all the things on both lists (which is at least twice as much work as doing it under X11 was) none of that will help the person with a bad shoulder, since they need to mix and match between multiple environments to use their machine.
- addicted 3y ago
  > Wayland makes things much less customizable and much more brittle than X11 Another way to put it is Wayland with a few years of development by a few Linux players (others were building alternatives, while yet others were seeing which one would win out, and yet others were hoping to stay on X11 forever) under its belt, is almost as solid as X11 with many decades of development by all the Linux players. The idea that X11 was a completely working option which had every capability it does today within years of its inception is wrong. X11 has been built and expanded for decades and even today is incapable of doing many modern functions that its competitors can. Wayland, OTOH, has almost reached parity with X11 rapidly, does things that X11 is not even capable of, and has a roadmap to reach complete parity.

boudin 3y ago

I find this disappointing (the lack of accessibility tooling) as Wayland felt like a good opportunity to factor in accessibility from the get go. For what it's worth though, accessibility was mentioned as one of the improvement area for which Gnome got funding: https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-This-Week-Homed https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-This-Week-Homed Not sure what it will mean in practice, accessibility being a large topic.

JohnFen 3y ago
There are a lot of missed opportunities with Wayland. The sad thing to me is that Wayland is aiming at replacing X while at the same time proudly stating that they aren't going to support a fair bit of the functionality that X provides. That makes the whole effort an exercise in regression to me.
- boudin 3y ago
  I do really like Wayland personally, for my usage it is now a really solid experience. No more weird graphical glitches and really smooth gaming experience. The side project pipewire is just amazing. I really hope that protocols for accessibility will get the attention it deserves though

llamaInSouth 3y ago

I just switched back to Windows after 20 years on Linux and I regret it... I'll be switching back ASAP... everything just works better by default on Linux for what I do (I don't game much but Steam is pretty nice on Linux anyways).

ho_schi 3y ago
You’re welcome. Everyone makes mistakes.
- llamaInSouth 3y ago
  why do you say "you're welcome"?
nwah1 3y ago
The main problem is just their steady increase in cross-selling, nagware, advertising, and feature bloat. That is what makes me want to be rid of it. But Windows 11 really achieves greatness in a lot of ways, which offsets it.

ognarb 3y ago

This is wrong. Accessibility software uses the at-spi protocol and this work with kde, gnome and in both x11 and wayland. There are some minor issues with Wayland but most of it works. I don't know what talon is doing as it seems proprietary, but the issue might be there.

SCdF 3y ago
To be completely clear I am not a Linux programmer, and I don't have the bandwidth I think to become one, this is my secondhand understanding of the situation. Here is a bit of a discussion though on this topic: - a summary of the situation: https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blo... - talon-required features and their current compatibility: https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blob/main/talon-requirements.md https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blo...
- Alupis 3y ago
  Keep in mind a lot of the belly aching you read is from people miffed their X11 application needs to be updated. Basically people complaining about needing to do work to modernize. All the things will eventually be just fine. X11 is a walking zombie.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > people miffed their X11 application needs to be updated. Yes, users are very understandably miffed that things which were working are suddenly broken and somebody now has to fix it in order to return to the status quo. > things will eventually be just fine Wayland is 15 years old. At this rate it will be due for replacement before it's feature complete.
    - jorvi 3y ago
      > Yes, users are very understandably miffed that things which were working are suddenly broken and somebody now has to fix it in order to return to the status quo. You are misunderstanding. You can continue to keep using applications in X11-mode for as long as those applications maintain that code path. But many of the niceties Wayland provides, X11 won't get because it is virtually unmaintained. Or said another way, X11 is already broken and getting slightly more broken every day. And before you get angry at X11 going unmaintained, would you have expected Apple to support Carbon ad-infinitum? Look at the backwards-compatibility and new-framework-adoption-rate woes Windows has to deal with because Win32 exists and devs are lazy / expensive.

JohnFen 3y ago

If you're seriously considering dropping Linux, I suggest investigating the BSDs as an alternative rather than Windows. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

azinman2 3y ago
The issue is Wayland accessibility vs X11. How is this any different on a BSD?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Most BSDs have not adopted Wayland and, at least for now, most have said they don't intend to adopt Wayland. I'm planning on moving all of my machines from Linux to BSD in part because of this, and in part because of SystemD.
  - johnny22 3y ago
    Where'd you get that idea. Wayland is part of the freebsd handbook. There's even a page on xenocera about how to use sway on openbsd and what issues are left to make it work fully. Wayland compositors will end up working fine on openbsd. That obviously doesn't cover all the bsds yet though, but it will get there.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      I guess my information is out of date. That's very disappointing news indeed.
scythe 3y ago
I've enjoyed BSDs, but I don't know how sustainable an approach this is. Unless the BSD maintainers are going to absorb and maintain the old X codebase (they have already refused to treat it as a system component, and it's reputedly hard to maintain), it seems like sooner or later they will have to switch to Wayland, unless something else comes along. And while BSD might be able to solve the fragmentation problem within themselves, they would probably diverge from GNOME and KDE by doing so, cf XKCD #927, and anyway they are generally loath to include or endorse graphical components in the base system. A first step might be to just have a list of all the functionality affected by fragmentation. So far, unfortunately, most such lists are accompanied by if not subsumed within angry rants.

danShumway 3y ago

TBF, I honestly think that X11 is also pretty bad about a lot of this stuff, but accessibility engines are able to hack around the problems. The underlying issue here is that in general, whether it's X11/Wayland/whatever, on Linux we don't treat accessibility issues like high priority items to fix and we don't treat accessibility interfaces as first-class citizens in the DE. To the extent that we allow programmable interfaces outside of the terminal, we put those interfaces on top of the graphics stack rather than underneath it and we treat them like alternative control schemes, not common interfaces that every input device should be hooking into and sharing regardless of whether they're for some "disabled" category or not. Disability is a spectrum, having separate categories for "normal" interfaces and accessible interfaces doesn't capture that. These problems are kind of universal, but X11 just happened to be so wildly insecure and had such bad encapsulation that devs could work around that problem. Which... better than nothing, I guess, but our primary way of mitigating accessibility problems shouldn't be to make our software worse. I'm still on X11; I haven't fully figured out tablet settings and I'm waiting for OpenTabletdriver to mature a bit more before taking a serious dive into Wayland. But does being on X11 mean that my desktop is accessible or that I can test software that I build with a common screenreader to make sure it works for disabled users? No, of course not, I use i3wm where as far as I can tell accessibility software like Orca can't hook into any of the programs that I run, even programs with explicit support for Orca. I don't think the problem here is the technology, the technology just reveals a deeper apathy that has always been present. It won't be fixed until we change our relationship with differently abled users and start working with accessibility communities on shared protocols/interfaces rather than treating those interfaces like afterthoughts. A lot of the "debates" about accessibility requirements like controlling window position, etc... stem from that issue and probably have solutions that would work for everyone if we prioritized finding them and approaching the problems from different angles.

SCdF 3y ago
This is very true, and unfortunately there are very few people working on linux accessibility (including not me! I am part of the problem!). TBC I don't have any educated opinions about Wayland (I don't know remotely enough to know if the decisions they made are good ones in the grander scheme of things), more that it's this looming existential sadness that I'll eventually have to give up on Linux. And this is probably some form of "losing", but honestly WSL gets me pretty close to where I want to be in the getting shit done department. Just not in the "not using Windows" department ;-) (MacOS is another fine option, but I literally bought a framework laptop a week ago, so that door is financially closed to me for a long while)

shrubble 3y ago

Would FreeBSD (doesn't have Wayland) be a possibility for you?

SCdF 3y ago
Talon doesn't support BSD (well, unless you count MacOS), so it's not an option no.