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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 iss

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)
- danShumway 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!). Accessibility work itself ironically suffers from an accessibility problem. I brought up i3wm above, the issue for that is pretty illuminating: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3393 https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3393 It's not that the devs are saying "this doesn't matter", the devs behind one of the most popular tiling window managers in the X11 ecosystem are saying, "this does matter, but we don't know how to fix it. We don't know what changes we'd need to make to be accessible." It's a tragedy because I honestly believe that if accessibility communities were more heavily baked into testing and development in Linux and if this wasn't treated like two separate worlds, it would be better for everyone -- fixing accessibility concerns very often improves interfaces across the board and makes them more powerful. Of course, it shouldn't be the primary motivation, but it's worth mentioning that every single screenreader is a potential adblocker, every alternative control scheme is a way to automate and script software, every comprehensive text-based description of an interface is a way to pipe that interface into a terminal and build tools on top of it. There's a huge amount of potential, but how do you bridge that gap? I don't really know, I tried looking into Orca to see what would need to happen here and bounced off of it pretty hard, it's not a very approachable tech stack and there aren't tutorials or getting started guides. And on the other side of the issue I can preach about needing accessibility input during interface design, but I'm not in a position to give specific advice because I don't use screenreaders or alternate control schemes and I don't know what the biggest problems are. The people who need to be involved in that process can't get involved because there's a tech barrier in place even for technically inclined people, and because the underlying software locks them out from the start. i3wm isn't ever going to get someone who's intimately familiar with Orca to jump into the conversation because the people who need to use Orca can't use i3wm. So that leaves the people who can address that tech barrier, but they don't know what to do or how to approach the problem because of the lack of involvement and because the communities are isolated from each other. So it's a chicken-and-egg problem and I don't know how to solve it.

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)

danShumway 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!). Accessibility work itself ironically suffers from an accessibility problem. I brought up i3wm above, the issue for that is pretty illuminating: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3393 https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3393 It's not that the devs are saying "this doesn't matter", the devs behind one of the most popular tiling window managers in the X11 ecosystem are saying, "this does matter, but we don't know how to fix it. We don't know what changes we'd need to make to be accessible." It's a tragedy because I honestly believe that if accessibility communities were more heavily baked into testing and development in Linux and if this wasn't treated like two separate worlds, it would be better for everyone -- fixing accessibility concerns very often improves interfaces across the board and makes them more powerful. Of course, it shouldn't be the primary motivation, but it's worth mentioning that every single screenreader is a potential adblocker, every alternative control scheme is a way to automate and script software, every comprehensive text-based description of an interface is a way to pipe that interface into a terminal and build tools on top of it. There's a huge amount of potential, but how do you bridge that gap? I don't really know, I tried looking into Orca to see what would need to happen here and bounced off of it pretty hard, it's not a very approachable tech stack and there aren't tutorials or getting started guides. And on the other side of the issue I can preach about needing accessibility input during interface design, but I'm not in a position to give specific advice because I don't use screenreaders or alternate control schemes and I don't know what the biggest problems are. The people who need to be involved in that process can't get involved because there's a tech barrier in place even for technically inclined people, and because the underlying software locks them out from the start. i3wm isn't ever going to get someone who's intimately familiar with Orca to jump into the conversation because the people who need to use Orca can't use i3wm. So that leaves the people who can address that tech barrier, but they don't know what to do or how to approach the problem because of the lack of involvement and because the communities are isolated from each other. So it's a chicken-and-egg problem and I don't know how to solve it.