> Accessibility is about making our software usable (and, ideally, pleasant to use) for as many people as we can.
Exactly. I don't have any disabilities to speak of (less-than-perfect eyesight, mild case of wrist pain), but I enjoy using many accessibility features, such as:
- Automatic dark/light mode; yes I do use a light theme in my editor during the day ;)
- High contrast (Gnome); I wish macOS could do something sane here
- Reduce motion & transparency (Mac, iPhone); I really wish CSS prefers-reduced-* was already widely deployed
- Grayscale color filter (mild setting; iPhone)
- Dim flashing lights (Mac)
- Shortcat.app (looking forward to Gtk apps on Mac supporting this)
- On-screen keyboard, for using a Real Computer from a couch. A basic wireless mouse beats every single clunky TvBox remote out there.
> I'm sure we can all appreciate not climbing 30 flights of stairs, even if it we are physically capable of it.
Totally. And people seem to forget that you can temporarily go from "no disabilities" to "have a disability" to "no disabilities" very quickly. Slip of a knife while cooking can take a hand out of commission for a few days. Stepping on your glasses can make you visually-impaired for a few days. Ear infection can seriously affect your hearing until it's healed.
And there's tech issues that can come up too! A couple of weeks ago I needed to get an embedded Linux device set up with SSH and could only find a spare mouse in the office, no random USB keyboards kicking around. Trying to use the Gnome on-screen keyboard was an exercise in frustration. Some symbols were missing that I needed to type into a shell, for example.
I am quite a Gnome critic for all the common reasons, but one thing I really appreciate is how structured and focused they can be about some efforts. They really approach normal user needs and work through the whole stack to satisfy them.
This level of organization is probably also what allowed them to get STF funding for this initiative - which makes me quite proud to be german for a moment.
I did my fair share of DE hopping in my younger days, but now when I use the Linux desktop in anger I've found myself returning to GNOME. It's the only desktop environment on Linux that actually feels like an opinionated, cohesive whole, in the same way that macOS used to be. It certainly has shortcomings and annoyances, but instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater I decided to meet it halfway, and found myself rewarded for my patience with being able to get work done.
Interestingly, I've also found that the further a distro diverges from upstream GNOME, the worse my experience ends up being. I was frankly shocked at how many paper cuts I ran into the last time I used the Ubuntu spin of GNOME, while Debian was better and Fedora gave me almost no trouble.
Something that's worth noting is that the funding for accessibility went away. Sun did a ton, but they're gone, and Red Hat has scaled back their desktop ambitions, as has Ubuntu.
Wonderful news. This is a big step to filling one the gaps in the various waylands that prevented them from being taken seriously (none of the waylands were really ADA compliant before since they lacked any screenreader possibilities). I hope every wayland compositor choses to implement these two protocols in mutually compatible ways.
As someone with progressive retinal tearing I'd been really worried the last 5 years or so with everything switching to one of the waylands and there being no accessibility. This is a relief. It'll probably get there before I go functionally blind.
Are you using a screen reader on Linux? I tried Orca a few years back (wanting to test websites for accessibility with it) but it seemed to crash often.
Definitely much better now, in a day-to-day usage I found a crash situation only once in this year.
Note: I am a visually impaired Linux user and developer, I actually did the work on the shortcuts capturing API.
Great to read - where are we up to with regards to the long laundry list that voice control software like Talon needs?
It's interesting - if you're going to allow third-party a11y software to control your PC, you need a 'make my wayland compositor do stuff' API.
However, Wayland's intention to explicitly avoid baking specific desktop concepts onto its core protocols make this somewhat of a conflicting design req.
> However, Wayland's intention to explicitly avoid baking specific desktop concepts onto its core protocols make this somewhat of a conflicting design req.
I would say it's slightly worse. Wayland's intention was to explicitly prevent the implementation of those features in the name of security. To implement a protocol with enough flexibility to allow voice control of the general interface would necessitate walking back limitations that were heavily evangelized.
On the other hand, I'm utterly impressed how much more stable Wayland through Gnome and Plasma are over the last year or so, to the point I've switched to it as a primary desktop. They've also been adding protocols like xdg_toplevel_tag_v1 that were seemingly taboo until recently. I'm optimistic about this current batch of programmers. I think they'll manage to sort out accessibility pretty soon.
This is awesome! I'm really excited about this since this is the underpinning of Zed. I figured out quickly when replicating ChatGPTs macOS apps "work with" feature that Zed had zero accessibility tree.
Great news, just in time Global Accessibility Awareness Day tomorrow (May 15th)
Edit: I'm totally wrong about Zed using GTK. They built their own: https://www.gpui.rs/ Still a win for all GTK apps!
Coincidentally, there was an eye-opening thread on nearly this exact topic on /r/linux a few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1kkuafo/wayland_an_a...
Definitely worth reading to understand what users are going through and where open source desktops are falling short.
I love this bit from TFA:
> Is this system usable for me ?
> Accessibility is about making our software usable (and, ideally, pleasant to use) for as many people as we can.
Exactly. I don't have any disabilities to speak of (less-than-perfect eyesight, mild case of wrist pain), but I enjoy using many accessibility features, such as:
- Automatic dark/light mode; yes I do use a light theme in my editor during the day ;)
- High contrast (Gnome); I wish macOS could do something sane here
- Reduce motion & transparency (Mac, iPhone); I really wish CSS prefers-reduced-* was already widely deployed
- Grayscale color filter (mild setting; iPhone)
- Dim flashing lights (Mac)
- Shortcat.app (looking forward to Gtk apps on Mac supporting this)
- On-screen keyboard, for using a Real Computer from a couch. A basic wireless mouse beats every single clunky TvBox remote out there.
- Games! Aim assist, highlight ally/enemy, reduce bobbing / motion, etc
Accessibility is for everyone.
I'm sure we can all appreciate not climbing 30 flights of stairs, even if it we are physically capable of it.
> I'm sure we can all appreciate not climbing 30 flights of stairs, even if it we are physically capable of it.
Totally. And people seem to forget that you can temporarily go from "no disabilities" to "have a disability" to "no disabilities" very quickly. Slip of a knife while cooking can take a hand out of commission for a few days. Stepping on your glasses can make you visually-impaired for a few days. Ear infection can seriously affect your hearing until it's healed.
And there's tech issues that can come up too! A couple of weeks ago I needed to get an embedded Linux device set up with SSH and could only find a spare mouse in the office, no random USB keyboards kicking around. Trying to use the Gnome on-screen keyboard was an exercise in frustration. Some symbols were missing that I needed to type into a shell, for example.
Scott Hanselman from Hanselminutes fame, has several remarks on his podcast that anyone can be disabled, even if temporary.
Unfortunely too many forget about it.
I am quite a Gnome critic for all the common reasons, but one thing I really appreciate is how structured and focused they can be about some efforts. They really approach normal user needs and work through the whole stack to satisfy them.
This level of organization is probably also what allowed them to get STF funding for this initiative - which makes me quite proud to be german for a moment.
I did my fair share of DE hopping in my younger days, but now when I use the Linux desktop in anger I've found myself returning to GNOME. It's the only desktop environment on Linux that actually feels like an opinionated, cohesive whole, in the same way that macOS used to be. It certainly has shortcomings and annoyances, but instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater I decided to meet it halfway, and found myself rewarded for my patience with being able to get work done.
Interestingly, I've also found that the further a distro diverges from upstream GNOME, the worse my experience ends up being. I was frankly shocked at how many paper cuts I ran into the last time I used the Ubuntu spin of GNOME, while Debian was better and Fedora gave me almost no trouble.
Same. I will say that for me, dash-to-dock or dash-to-panel is a must. I believe Ubuntu just built it in as default.
At this point I don't know why they didn't make it an option or built in plugin.
Someone's been writing a great series on accessibility for the blind in Linux
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...
Something that's worth noting is that the funding for accessibility went away. Sun did a ton, but they're gone, and Red Hat has scaled back their desktop ambitions, as has Ubuntu.
I hope this is the start of AccessKit getting more attention from GUI toolkits going forward.
Wonderful news. This is a big step to filling one the gaps in the various waylands that prevented them from being taken seriously (none of the waylands were really ADA compliant before since they lacked any screenreader possibilities). I hope every wayland compositor choses to implement these two protocols in mutually compatible ways.
As someone with progressive retinal tearing I'd been really worried the last 5 years or so with everything switching to one of the waylands and there being no accessibility. This is a relief. It'll probably get there before I go functionally blind.
Are you using a screen reader on Linux? I tried Orca a few years back (wanting to test websites for accessibility with it) but it seemed to crash often.
Definitely much better now, in a day-to-day usage I found a crash situation only once in this year. Note: I am a visually impaired Linux user and developer, I actually did the work on the shortcuts capturing API.
Great to read - where are we up to with regards to the long laundry list that voice control software like Talon needs?
It's interesting - if you're going to allow third-party a11y software to control your PC, you need a 'make my wayland compositor do stuff' API.
However, Wayland's intention to explicitly avoid baking specific desktop concepts onto its core protocols make this somewhat of a conflicting design req.
Ref: https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blo...
> However, Wayland's intention to explicitly avoid baking specific desktop concepts onto its core protocols make this somewhat of a conflicting design req.
I would say it's slightly worse. Wayland's intention was to explicitly prevent the implementation of those features in the name of security. To implement a protocol with enough flexibility to allow voice control of the general interface would necessitate walking back limitations that were heavily evangelized.
On the other hand, I'm utterly impressed how much more stable Wayland through Gnome and Plasma are over the last year or so, to the point I've switched to it as a primary desktop. They've also been adding protocols like xdg_toplevel_tag_v1 that were seemingly taboo until recently. I'm optimistic about this current batch of programmers. I think they'll manage to sort out accessibility pretty soon.
This is awesome! I'm really excited about this since this is the underpinning of Zed. I figured out quickly when replicating ChatGPTs macOS apps "work with" feature that Zed had zero accessibility tree.
Great news, just in time Global Accessibility Awareness Day tomorrow (May 15th)
Edit: I'm totally wrong about Zed using GTK. They built their own: https://www.gpui.rs/ Still a win for all GTK apps!