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Fedora has been shipping with a broken screen reader for nine years

66 points by ingve 2y ago

LeoPanthera 2y ago
I've vouched this, and am shocked that it was flagged. Since there are no comments, I don't know why it was flagged, but if you're trying to disagree that we live in an ableist culture, flagging this is only proof that you're wrong.
- amluto 2y ago
  The guidelines suggest that on-topic submissions include “anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity” — a discussion of why various things on Wayland interacted poorly with screen readers would be in this category. The guidelines suggest that “Most stories about politics” are off-topic. This submission spent a whole lot more time ranting about the ableist world and, for some reason, about the difference between “white” and “white-presenting” than discussing anything intellectually interesting about A11y. One might reasonably consider that rant to be “politics”.
- boomboomsubban 2y ago
  I think the years without a screen reader is proof of an ableist culture, but I think this article is more about some dumb mastadon spat than about ableism.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  The blogpost seems like some drama mashup to me. Linking Fedora to the Holocaust and a couple of paragraphs about the author's racial heritage etc. Like, it is an inciting post, in the wrong way.
  - richbell 2y ago
    > Linking Fedora to the Holocaust and a couple of paragraphs about the author's racial heritage etc. I figured this was hyperbole. What an exhausting blog post.
phoronixrly 2y ago
Aral still does not miss a chance to look like an a-hole I see. Guess there's no profit for him to fix the screen reader himself, so he's blaming the volunteers. I've already filtered him from mastodon, sad I can't do this here...
- lostmsu 2y ago
  I don't see anything wrong with this blog post. Can you elaborate?
  - klooney 2y ago
    It's not that he's wrong, it's that he's kind of a jerk.
    - lostmsu 2y ago
      I don't know either side, but between a non-profit who calls for a11y testing of their product and then replies "patches welcome" to a report of a critical bug, and a dude who's complaining about said bug I feel like the non-profit is being a jerk.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- eesmith 2y ago
  Then what of the others, like Kingett, who commented: "I think we are all well aware of the issues caused by big tech but I never seen such irony as The open source community. Well, if your system isn’t working, you could use the system that you can’t use to contribute code on the system that you can’t use." What of the people who, because of Microsoft's increasingly user-hostile system, decide to check out some Linux-based OS only to find it doesn't have a screen reader, preventing them from that transition? (That's Prater's point.) Only a fraction of them will be skilled enough to fix the screen reader - assuming they are not blocked by the lack of a broken screen reader. Is this statement from 2006 still true?: "Red Hat retains legal liability for the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is not a separate legal entity or organization. The Fedora Project receives a tremendous amount of resources (people, money, infrastructure, etc.) from Red Hat." If you are paid to work on a project, you are not a volunteer. Guess there's no profit for IBM to fix things either? In any case, why should profit be the primary motive to support accessibility on a FOSS system?
amluto 2y ago
Fedora has been shipping with a system that does not have a unified concept of what’s on the screen for years. It’s called GNOME 3. Ever tried to interact with the modal thingy that asks for a WiFi password as though it were a dialog box? It doesn’t work well, because it’s a figment of gnome-shell’s imagination and not actually a dialog box. (Or at least this was the case the last time I tried to figure out what was going on, which was a while ago.) I know very little about how A11y is plumbed under the hood, but I’m not surprised that it struggles with gnome-shell. I suspect there’s a functioning middle ground between Windows XP-style or X11-style “everything is a window, even security sensitive overlays like the lock screen” and GNOME-style “everything is either a surface with no particular semantics or something produced directly by the shell”.
rurban 2y ago
The thing is that they still allowed X11, which has a working screen reader. Just they'll stop shipping X11 with F41, so this time it should really be a blocker. So Aral does have a point. now.
pharos92 2y ago
Aral really comes across as a class-a douche.

66 points by ingve 2y ago

I've vouched this, and am shocked that it was flagged. Since there are no comments, I don't know why it was flagged, but if you're trying to disagree that we live in an ableist culture, flagging this is only proof that you're wrong.

amluto 2y ago
The guidelines suggest that on-topic submissions include “anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity” — a discussion of why various things on Wayland interacted poorly with screen readers would be in this category. The guidelines suggest that “Most stories about politics” are off-topic. This submission spent a whole lot more time ranting about the ableist world and, for some reason, about the difference between “white” and “white-presenting” than discussing anything intellectually interesting about A11y. One might reasonably consider that rant to be “politics”.
boomboomsubban 2y ago
I think the years without a screen reader is proof of an ableist culture, but I think this article is more about some dumb mastadon spat than about ableism.
rightbyte 2y ago
The blogpost seems like some drama mashup to me. Linking Fedora to the Holocaust and a couple of paragraphs about the author's racial heritage etc. Like, it is an inciting post, in the wrong way.
- richbell 2y ago
  > Linking Fedora to the Holocaust and a couple of paragraphs about the author's racial heritage etc. I figured this was hyperbole. What an exhausting blog post.

phoronixrly 2y ago

Aral still does not miss a chance to look like an a-hole I see. Guess there's no profit for him to fix the screen reader himself, so he's blaming the volunteers. I've already filtered him from mastodon, sad I can't do this here...

lostmsu 2y ago
I don't see anything wrong with this blog post. Can you elaborate?
- klooney 2y ago
  It's not that he's wrong, it's that he's kind of a jerk.
  - lostmsu 2y ago
    I don't know either side, but between a non-profit who calls for a11y testing of their product and then replies "patches welcome" to a report of a critical bug, and a dude who's complaining about said bug I feel like the non-profit is being a jerk.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
eesmith 2y ago
Then what of the others, like Kingett, who commented: "I think we are all well aware of the issues caused by big tech but I never seen such irony as The open source community. Well, if your system isn’t working, you could use the system that you can’t use to contribute code on the system that you can’t use." What of the people who, because of Microsoft's increasingly user-hostile system, decide to check out some Linux-based OS only to find it doesn't have a screen reader, preventing them from that transition? (That's Prater's point.) Only a fraction of them will be skilled enough to fix the screen reader - assuming they are not blocked by the lack of a broken screen reader. Is this statement from 2006 still true?: "Red Hat retains legal liability for the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is not a separate legal entity or organization. The Fedora Project receives a tremendous amount of resources (people, money, infrastructure, etc.) from Red Hat." If you are paid to work on a project, you are not a volunteer. Guess there's no profit for IBM to fix things either? In any case, why should profit be the primary motive to support accessibility on a FOSS system?

amluto 2y ago

Fedora has been shipping with a system that does not have a unified concept of what’s on the screen for years. It’s called GNOME 3. Ever tried to interact with the modal thingy that asks for a WiFi password as though it were a dialog box? It doesn’t work well, because it’s a figment of gnome-shell’s imagination and not actually a dialog box. (Or at least this was the case the last time I tried to figure out what was going on, which was a while ago.) I know very little about how A11y is plumbed under the hood, but I’m not surprised that it struggles with gnome-shell. I suspect there’s a functioning middle ground between Windows XP-style or X11-style “everything is a window, even security sensitive overlays like the lock screen” and GNOME-style “everything is either a surface with no particular semantics or something produced directly by the shell”.

rurban 2y ago

The thing is that they still allowed X11, which has a working screen reader. Just they'll stop shipping X11 with F41, so this time it should really be a blocker. So Aral does have a point. now.

pharos92 2y ago

Aral really comes across as a class-a douche.