How do government software systems break—and how can we fix them?
Mikey Dickerson (healthcare.gov rescue, USDS) talks with @patio11 about procurement, crisis engineering, and why modernization plans often make things worse before they get better.
A great listen for anyone in civic tech or public service.
Tomorrow we have huge negative prices on the European electricity spot market. This is in reality a huge indication that too much renewable energy isn't actually a good thing. It's only May, this will be an interesting summer.
I find myself increasingly asking what value do I get out of existing commercial accessibility testing tools? What do they catch? What do they not catch? I ask because I want to improve on the results, and I also want to know what exactly I need to m…
No, I'm not gonna make it a full blown task list app 😜 but it happens quite often, that my wife sends me a list of groceries when I'm walking to the supermarket. This way I'm now able to check, what I have already in my cart so I don't forget anything.
It works by sending special reactions under the hood. So anyone with reaction sending permissions in a room can check any box from any sender.
Well thanks.. but I'm in matrix and open-source exactly for the interoperability. What's the motivation behind breaking it? I'd expect that from Microsoft or Apple...
@chebra luckily Matrix provides the concept of extensible events, letting you provide flexible fallback representations for features which all clients don’t implement yet. For this, you’d probably snapshot the todo list for each update in the custom reaction.
Guys, I'm talking about real use-case - imagine a group of 70 people where everyone has different client app and on a different homeserver. Suddenly one guy posts a new cool checklist.. what will happen? You really haven't considered this scenario?
WhatsApp and other closed source apps have a full dictatorship over the whole protocol and all clients. They can experiment with new features on all users at once, and they can turn them off if they don't meet the expectations for all at once.
How exactly do you want to do this in open world? Some clients will inevitably lag behind, some clients will not implement all features. Even if you didn't allow other clients to experiment with API proposals, they would lag behind the upstream.
The only thing you can do is to give developers tools to create reasonable fallback.
@shine It's not that hard. You just have to open your mind. Instead of invisible reactions this could be sending normal text messages `*Adam checked [x] option one` and supporting clients would render it as a checked checkbox, but unsupporting clients would at least have a meaningful fallback. The problem here is that Krille totally forgot to think about the unsupporting clients. And that's how we lose people.
@chebra @shine krille appears to be thinking about fallback representation, and the protocol supports it. the MSC wouldn’t pass FCP Merge without fallback support anyhow.
I don't think it's in a released version yet. Maybe it would be better to suggest a better fallback as a constructive criticism instead of hostility from start.
I was really disappointed when I got to know that the FreeBSD based TrueNAS CORE storage appliance – owned and developed by iXsystems – will be moved into the ‘maintenance’ …
FWIW, that use of non-ASCII letters to make text appear bold doesn't work at all with screen readers in most cases. To be clear, I'm not referring to the use of non-ASCII characters for actual non-Latin writing, but the abuse of non-ASCII characters to make text in the Latin script appear differently.
@cantstopthesignal Depends on the combination of screen reader and text-to-speech engine. Some do skip over the text. NVDA with eSpeak NG reads the hex code for each of those letters. Fortunately, NVDA does have a "Unicode normalization" setting to work around this practice.
It doesn't even work with the Mastodon WWW user interface, ironically.
The glyphs aren't in the Roboto WWW font requested by #Mastodon so WWW browsers fall back to whatever font is set locally.
Not only does that in itself make posts look like bad movie ransom notes, but it gets worse: because some fonts intentionally try to make the mathematical symbols distinct from truly boldfaced/italic Latin-1 alphabetic characters.
Hey all I'm leading a session GAAD at AccessU. The session is free and open to the public and streamed on YouTube. I'm looking for questions about the shifting landscape of digital access and accessibility. This wide open and can be interpreted in many ways, but the hope is to get some questions that cover multiple perspectives.
Submit your questions for the "From Today to Tomorrow: Navigating the Shifting Landscape of Digital Access" unpanel at Access U 2025! Inspired by improv, Ignite talks, and Access U’s unconference sessions, this interactive session will be driven by y…
Looking for something to do this weekend? Join the Month of #LibreOffice! Learn new things and expand your skillset – and get cool merch as a bonus: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl…
Want to learn new skills for a potential future career change, or expand your knowledge and have fun on the way? Then get involved in the Month of LibreOffice, May 2025! Over the next four weeks, hundreds of people around the world will collaborate t…
To be fair these are all *nix commands and also work in OSX. That said, many of them don’t work as well (find is a great example). I still love Linux most, but if you need that stuff and have to convince corporate of an OS choice, Mac might do it for you.
From border crossings to data breaches, there are more reasons than ever to protect your smartphone. Here's a practical guide to securing your device and your digital life.
Heard of polymorphic browser extensions yet? You will. These savage imposters threaten the very future of credential management. Here's what you need to know - and do.
I have ported X11 to Redox OS in order to start working on ports that have previously been too difficult. In the future, we will be rebuilding these with wayland. Here is TWM with gtk3-demo open on the left, the embedded GL example on the right, and xterm behind. This all runs inside orbital using a custom X server video driver.
A bit tangential, but if you or other Redox developers could develop a really reliable audio stack, then get Orca plus some kind of fallback text console screen reader working reliably, blind users who currently fight with desktop Linux might love your OS. See also this blog post from a long-time blind Linux user about the state of desktop Linux accessibility: fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-w… I'd be willing to help fund work on audio and/or accessibility on Redox.
@matt Regarding audio on Redox the biggest issue is at the driver level - there is a lot of quirky hardware that is not yet dealt with. The next level above the driver is called audiod and it allows all programs to mix audio regardless of what user they are running as. The path used is global and world writable - /scheme/audio
please, instead of reading the blog post by someone getting "scared" by "rust's dependencies" after running some line count tool, read this more informative article instead
Hot Take: reusing software is good actually. I doubt this flurry of dependencies will change unless people actually want software to have less features. Most of these dependencies are there for a reason.
This has saved me a bunch of times, so might be useful to other people. When I change firewall rules on a remote machine, I always run the following command:
# service pf restart && sleep 30 && service pf stop<br>
And then I hit control-C after a few seconds. If my ssh session is still working, this cancels the service pf stop command. If I've managed to break my ssh connection with the rule change, the firewall is disabled after 30 seconds and I can revert the changes and reenable it.
Monopoly wasn't invented by the Parker Brothers, nor the man they gave it credit for. In 1904, Monopoly was originally called The Landlord's Game, and was invented by a radical woman. Elizabeth Magie's original game had not one, but two sets of rules to choose from. One was called "Prosperity", where every player won money anytime another gained a property. And the game was won by everyone playing only when the person with the least doubled their resources. A game of collaboration and social good. The second set of rules was called "Monopoly", where players succeeded by taking properties and rent from those with less luck rolling the dice. The winner was the person who used their power to eliminate everyone else. Magie's mission was to teach us how different we feel when playing Prosperity vs Monopoly, hoping that it would one day change national policies. When the Parker Bros adopted the game, they erased the "Prosperity" rules and celebrated "Monopoly".
To all #OpenSource and #Linux warriors, to all saying "Ditch windows, install Linux", to everyone and every single person: please, spend several minutes and read this. I want you all to read this so you really understand the problem (if you want to understand, of course). And a huge, huge thanks to Aaron @fireborn for starting this post series. fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-w… #Accessibility
Не знал что в Ubuntu стало всё так плохо. Давно отказался от идеи использовать хоть какой Linux в качестве домашней системы из-за тех или иных заёбов, потому уже и не помню когда что последний раз ставил. Хоть есть вещи, за которые Винде хочется дать по жопе, или из-за того что там не работает например Airflow без WSL и прочих танцев, но это всё можно стерпеть и пережить.
В статье увидел знакомое слово PulseAudio. Помню это говнище, как ещё в 2010 году выпиливал его из системы, потому что ничего другого не оставалось. С ним у многих тогда проблемы были, судя по различным тогдашним форумам.
"Speak on Boot" : definitely a +1 on that, as even those of us with working eyeballs can appreciate another channel of communication when the graphics display system has fried. Exponentially bigger challenge for certain people when it's the graphics perception biologics that's borked.
honestly, trying to work with Linux ends up feeling like Death by a thousand cuts. I end up running into driver issues, configuration issues, unexplained slowdown with internet speed, update problems and game performance issues every time I use Linux on one of my devices. Individually, they're usually not a big deal, but altogether they stop me from using Linux as anything more than a curiosity, or a rare data recovery machine.
On the other hand, if one of those Linux warriors wants to _help_ a blind person get up and running on Linux and work through the difficulties, that's great. I used to participate on the Emacspeak mailing list in 2001, and there was a guy there who was new to Linux and Emacspeak, but one or two people from his local Linux users' group had helped him as much as they knew how. He still needed help from us on the list, but the fact that the LUG helped him stuck with me.
@evilheart Exactly! I mean, it's a perfect OS for server environment, and lots of blind people use it as such (SSH is your best friend here). But for desktop daily use… not yet, as Aaron wisely said.
I've had this vision for a NixOS installer that is fully blind-accessible by default for years now. NixOS really is the best tool for the job when it comes to making sure that a pile of shell scripts actually become maintainable long-term. However, everything is on fire and the backlog of "fixing the basics" is already half a decade long :/
@are0h@h-i.social I spent a few years managing Linux servers, at a basic level, started my career as a Windows user/manager, and been a Mac user 15 years.
Re: my last boost of @fireborn's post on Linux accessibility (fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-w…), I propose that fixing audio on Linux would be a good place to start. "Linux audio doesn't work" is a meme even among sighted people. I know that reducing it down to that is perhaps unfair to all of the people who work on the audio stack, but there seems to be some truth to it. Any ideas on what can be done to finally make audio output as reliable as the graphics stack? I'll put money where my mouth is.
Modern distros that have switched to Pipewire are a lot more stable here. As far as I can tell, audio is a solved problem. The issue is that not everyone is up to speed: LTS distros, or just plain out of date distros, or distros that have no defaults and force the user to configure whatever they think is right (where the user cannot possibly understand the requirements of the stack above). Using "weird" environments (like Bedrock, or to a lesser extent NixOS) isn't helpful either
@AdrianVovk I entirely agree with you. Pipewire has made Linux audio reliable, and the preempt flags in the kernel have solved the low latency kernel issue for pro audio too.
TTYs are very weird environments that exist outside of any kind of session, at least until you log in. They might as well not exist as far as most services can tell. This is just a legacy of how they work
The good news is that this all will be fixed sooner rather than later, because the TTY is going away. Instead it'll be replaced with a graphical terminal, which should give you access to a screen reader
Can't say much about the other issues. I've never run into them
Some of your Pipewire issues might actually be Wireplumber issues. Pipewire is just dumb media routing. The smarts, like card and output selection, belong to Wireplumber. Are you using Wireplumber?
Are the bugs you've run into known issues, or have you filed bug reports? Realistically it's possible that you're triggering bugs that others haven't encountered and so they will never be fixed because nobody knows about them
Industry groups are not happy about the imminent demise of Energy Star The program has saved consumers billions of dollars since its inception. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
The state of Linux accessibility in 2025. This started out as a rant but became a series. Please feel free to leave feedback, comments, and subscribe via rss or email for more stuff as I release it. fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-w…
honestly? this just gives us more, like, of a push to actually get a few versions of Solaris and OpenIndianna and friends working in vm and ee if their accessibility is any better
I am a hobby systems programmer that wants to make accessibility better but I don't really know how to since nobody besides me and maybe a few others seem to actually want to make Linux better beyond their pristine abled usecase
This right here is exactly WHY people get so mad when #linux #accessibility comes up. This is why even when people receiving the torch who want to do better get unjustly yelled at. We're dealing with systemic neglect for quite literally decades, and pretty much a big fat f*ck you every single time some new thing happens in this space. Are Windows and Mac worth switching from? Absolutely. In a heartbeat. Is it worth switching to ... this? ... How masochistic are you feeling? Not just today, but for the rest of your digital life?
I've just started going down this rabbit hole and this struck a chord for me. It's hard to appreciate that betrayal when I don't rely on it day-to-day. Thanks for sharing your perspective
The truly sad thing is you could write this kind of post about every single operating system that we use, even ones that we say works very well actually, like Windows. I've tought several people how to use computers over the years, and inevitably something will come up where they'll ask me but why? And I have no good answer. It's gotten to the point where I don't even actively notice some of the workarounds I do anymore because they're just so natural to me now. I often say if operating systems were as broken for sighted folk as they are for us, everybody would be outraged. It would never, ever, ever fly. Windows has sharp edges. Mac has a lot of sharp edges. iOS has sharp edges. Android has them. ChromeOS seems forgotten and is just one giant edge. And every single one of them has different failure modes. Different things that don't work how they're supposed to. Why do you never linger on this particular section of the UI? Oh it's because if I remain here for too long, things will slowly fall apart and crash. Better tab on quickly! Why do you always very quickly switch out of your terminal? Oh because I know if I execute this particular command, there will be a *lot* of text output, and I know it will take my screen reader down. Are just normal things sometimes. I love computers because they let us take part in life in ways we never could before. But at the same time I hate computers because every day is a reminder of how much we don’t actually truly matter. Everyone's running ahead and we're expending everything we have just to not lose them completely.
@talon And, at the risk of piling onto the gripefest, all of this just makes me feel guilty for not doing more to fix things. But I know I can't and shouldn't be responsible for fixing it all.
@matt You're doing enough. You're doing more than a lot of people. I could learn how to help fix things myself and I feel guilty for not doing it, but I also have to understand that I simply do not enjoy this kind of work. I *can* do the work I do enjoy so I do that instead. So don't worry. I appreciate all you're doing and when I complain about things like this it is never meant personally in any way. No one person can fix this by themselves. I don't imagine a lot of Linux GUI work isn't done for some kind of compensation. You did contracted accessibility work. So why don't we have more of that? It clearly helps.
@talon @matt Thanks for sharing - such a shame we have reached this state of affairs!
I wonder whether there are potential parallels with things like LineageOS and postmarketOS - focus initially on devices like ThinkPads that are known to work well with Linux. Volunteers could sign up to run through an accessibility checklist after (say) booting a live image from a USB drive and document on a wiki. But as you say... assembling that image is not going to be trivial
@talon You're right of course, but the question is the *amount* of such unbearable things. It's like with countries, I love this phrase: choose a country whose drawbacks you can bear. It's the same with operating systems: for me Windows just works, Mac or Linux don't. I know that there are a lot of "works, but…" in there, but yeah, I can set up a Windows PC in a couple hours max and just work, i.e., do my daily stuff. With Mac or Linux — nope, sorry.
Different things work for different people, but yes, everything has its ups and downs, some have more ups, some more downs, and work arounds are a part of life so much, that we just do them on autopilot. Things are supposed to work, but when they don't work, because companies don't want to put the effort, or people don't want to put the effort towards inclusion, then we have no choice. But nothing is perfect, neither are we, so there'll always be things we can't fully answer, or stuff we can and cannot use. And it's not about something being better or worse than something else. It's all down to trial and error, and eventually using everything if we can't choose, or because one thing has something and the others don't. Absolutely thing refers to any OS, that way there's no stating better or worse in this reply.
@talon at least ChromeOS won't be around much longer, even Google has realized it's not worth saving and is working on replacing it with Android for desktop.
@talon This is absolutely right. I have debian running on my alienware for having fun with local ai generation, but I just end up sshing into it from windows because if orca breaks I have no speech on tty's and I better hope orca pops back up if I restart it from mate.
@pitermach I'll even tell those YouTube influencers about this article and even those people who say... Fuck Apple, Google and Microsoft, fuck proprietary software, long live Open-source and Linux! pseudo-patriotic anthem. Heck if I were in person with them I'll symply say read this article first!
CC @dingodoppelt you may find this interesting. You've often touted the joys of daily-driving Linux, but I've never been able to articulate properly why it might be hard from an accessibility standpoint.
@FreakyFwoof You very much have a point there. Though it is not "Linux" ignoring accessibility, it is the desktop environments and software. And the good news is: Progress is being made towards an accessibility-first distro: social.tchncs.de/@Linux@linuxr…
so far it has been an amazing read! I had no idea about all the accessibility tools.
I am working on a Linux distro (slowly) and would love to at least try to make an effort to solve at least some of this... Esp since I will be maintaining significant patches to the kernel, and handrolling my own DE, package manager...
thanks for documenting all the issues. I've thought of switching to Linux but will never do so if it's this bad. I've experienced some weird behaviour with Orca on various distro installers and had trouble, this seems to be the norm and not the exception. I thought I was just doing something wrong.
I was reading this and thinking "hm, I wonder if NixOS might be a good platform to pursue for accessibility". Then I got to the section you had on NixOS.
It definitely seems like a good starting point. Some sort of configuration as code approach, anyway.
Though I think it'll continue to be a power tool that's hard to use for a long time, maybe forever.
Interesting article, thank you! One thing that's depressing is that it sounds like the technology to make it work well is (mostly) there, but no one does the last 10% of work to make it accessible. If one desktop-centric, not-totally-outdated Linux distro had an accessible installer and offered an installation profile for blind users that installs necessary software *and* pre-configures everything accordingly (and doesn't break it on updates) that would probably go a long way..
But then again, I'm not sure if there currently is any desktop-centric not-totally-outdated Linux distro that I would recommend to *anyone* who can't (or doesn't want to) fix technical problems. Ubuntu seems in a bad shape these days, all those rolling release distros are kinda fragile by nature (and even if things continue working, you don't want noticeable changes in your software all the time), Debian stable is too old, ...
> You're not just using Linux anymore. You’re wrangling demons.
Anyone sufficiently far into Linux is not using Linux, but rather wrangling demons
> Not with fragile scripts or one-person distros—but with reproducible systems that treat configuration like infrastructure.
I switched from NixOS to a one-being mess of wrangled demons with hand-rolled Nix-on-Arch stuff with Fedora packages and random stuff shoved into /usr/local and a bunch of handrolled containers and aaaa
And I am sighted, and the reason why my system is the way it is is probably due to my attention disorder and other various needs.
Wayland is such a PITA, even for sighted people. So many basic things they refused (and sometimes still refuse) to even acknowledge - IDK how it got any traction.
But at least for now using X11 is still feasible (I'm using it with XFCE myself)
urgh - again a case of >90% there, but no one does the last 10%... how hard can it be to at at least document the env vars?! (I vaguely remember trying to figure out some Qt env vars a while ago and didn't find any proper documentation either, so that's a general problem there)
And wouldn't it be nice if toolkits and desktops could agree on *one* (hopefully simple) way to enable such features...
BTW, do you have an opinion on the ADRIANE desktop system? I remember seeing a long time ago on a KNOPPIX live CD (it's from the same guy, Klaus Knopper) and it seems like it's still developed, but not available in common distros. It has the approach of being text-based first with screen readers and braille in mind
As someone who was involved for a short while in bug triaging and testing for accessibility functions of LibreOffice on macOS, I can sadly only confirm the sorry state of affairs. For many years, the bugs reported against accessibility in LibreOffice went pretty much unresolved/ignored. Until fairly recently, the version for macOS was still using code that used a deprecated Apple API - not surprising then, that it didn't play well with the built-in accessibility functions of the OS, and that calling these functions often caused LibreOffice to crash or hang. It was so bad at one stage that we were recommending to people to turn off all accessibility functions of the OS if you wanted to work with LibreOffice on macOS, which really does kind of defeat the purpose of the goal of providing an office productivity suite usable by as many people as possible.
@StriderLongshanks I have an anecdote about LibreOffice. Once upon a time they were asked why their PowerPoint equivalent is not accessible at all. They said (quote not exact, but the meaning is this): blind people don't see images, all presentations are graphics, so we didn't bother to make them accessible. As far as I know, it's not accessible till now.
These problems are frustrating because without a screen, sighted users can't use a computer either. Hopefully braille and text-to-speech will be treated as first class citizens one day.
A question. How practical is a full text mode linux system for blind users, at the moment? I know edbrowse exists, and standard command-line can do most other things. Is the main problem running specialised programs that only provide a GUI?
@Aydan @aaron There is much blind users and other power users can do on the text console with no graphic, but browsing the modern web is not practical, no matter what the browser. These days web is too much interactive. Even those who are using emacs for almost everything have to use chromium and firefox for browsing the modern web sites.
Bleh, that sucks. I tried installing linux on a computer with a few... Rather broken components, and that didn't hold up too well. Hard drive probably failed me. So, I wish you good luck with fixing all that mess that it is producing for you. Having no speech sucks.
this, is, awesome! goddamn, a very, very good article!
However, and consider this the well...but, section. Essentially, a lot of your issues happen because ubuntu exists, and particularly because you're using it, especially ubuntu mate. Ubuntu, to me, stopped mattering the moment canonical did their whole snap thing and slowed down their system, not sure if that's still a thing, but I know they're using that flutter installer which is...ahem, definitely not a very good thing for us. I didn't try it, but I know from trusted sources that it's pretty bad, I wouldn't have the patience for that tbh.
Next, the login issues...stop using ubuntu mate, and in particular, the issue here is a display manager called lightdm. It's possible to make it work again by editting configuration files, but meh, I don't care at all at this point, use gdm is my recommendation. I know it's bulky and a bit meh, but it's bad for everyone, as someone once said. With gdm, if you start your screenreader once, it's gonna be on pretty much for ever, unless some specific thing happens, but that thing is so rare that you shouldn't ever encounter it. Also, persistance, you don't need a script for that, that hasn't been a thing for me ever since the dark ages. I'm using arch, but like, if people's first experience of stuff is ubuntu and especially ubuntu mate, no wonder they run in terror at the whole brokenness of it all, let's just say ubuntu is even more known for not caring
About pipewire: the way to make that work is to use systemd's support for linger and enable that, then indeed as you said, you share sockets with root, but you don't have to modify service files or session files or anything of the sort. If I would have to do that, honestly I would have given up a long time ago. I like challenges, but challenge for challenge's sake isn't something I'm after. O also, for configs, use the user wide location, $XDG_CONFIG_DIR/pipewire.conf.d, that wouldn't be overridden by updates of pipewire. I have a script for that, if you need it. It's still using the old lua based configuration for wireplumber, but that's not needed anymore anyway. Also, a lot of gtk4 apps just work nowadays, way fewer accessibility issues than before.
About alsa, the kernel and espeakup, no comment, unless you do what you said and what I also said above, it's kinda oofed and screwed. About brltty and friends, absolutely no idea there either, I don't have a braille display.
You mention the thing that if one doesn't know the secret command to turn on the screenreader, they're screwed. True, but there the only winner is mac OS, because unless you know to press ctrl+windows+enter, you won't get speech in windows. Is it consistent and all distros have it? hell no, definitely not! but just pointing that bit out.
Alright, that being said, if you want to know how a good linux future would look like, can you do the following? no problem if you don't want to, but still
go on the fedora website
download the fedora workstation iso, important, workstation, v42
boot into it
this issue is unescapable for now unfortunately, but when you think it booted, press alt+super+s to do the screenreader command
the voice would fluctuate weirdly in pitch, but either way, try to just install it as usual, without going in and editting config files, or doing anything a regular user wouldn't be able to do. If you want to do that, can you please reply with how that went? I'm really curious, because I got a relative newbie to tech to install it with this new installer without issues, and yes, this is specific to 42, and yes, I think only workstation has it
Yeah, unfortunately, customisations aren't so huge with fedora and gnome, but yeah, that's the quickest way to get started. There are also some gnome peculiarities, but I'm assuming you know them, so I won't repeat those.
About the whole wayland stuff, totally agreed! however, starting from the premis that any app can snoop on my keyboard all the time, can read every single file I have access to, and can perform anything I can, and maybe more if it can become root, that's definitely not a good situation either. I hate the whole accessibility is left by the wayside as much as you do, hell, I'm making a screenreader along with some awesome people specifically because we want to be free to just experiment and maybe write something better than orca one day, aka what commentary is to talkback in the android realm, and we can barely figure any of this stuff out, we didn't even get to implementing orca's heuristics because we don't know what they are, since you guessed it, they aren't documented.
And yeah, I can't wait for your next article, it's gonna be awesome to read it! thanks for the very insightful text once again, it was really well written!
I may reply to some other posts of this thread because there are some things to still be clarified, don't like how the fediverse represents threads in a linear fassion, but yeah, telling you this so it wouldn't be confusing afterwards, because I was indeed confused when I saw this issue for the first time.
At the desktop environment level, KDE eV is currently employing/contracting the legally blind Ritchie Frodomar, 1 of 11 eV staff in total, which should hopefully help improve this situation. Still, it's awful that many Linux distros have currently got themselves into this state.
Note to self: I must install a screen reader on my GNU/Linux system (1) to know what the experience is like, (2) to be able to report/fix the bugs, and (3) to be able to test the code projects I will create.
Well said. I revisit Linux every couple years to see if there's a straightforward installation for me, a sighted user who tends to use Apple hardware. The last time was just a few weeks ago and I found the language even on the various distro download pages to be confusing enough that I didn't feel comfortable going forward. There are a lot of dependencies that you have to understand to get started with Linux as a non-programmer and they can be very daunting.
when was that? you updated what packages and what part of it broke? but yeah, if you want to install everything yourself and so on, the only viable way imo is arch. I did read the whole article, but I was focusing on ubuntu mate there because those kinds of issues you only get there. The post-login stuffage is an issue with lightdm and sddm, so yeah, I hate the whole stuff with that. The issue here is basically that display managers have to implement the launch an accessibility service command themselves, which is of course not something most of them would do, unfortunately. That's why x11 was better in some arias though, it allowed us to make some hacks which would work almost all the time. Either way, gnome and kde are really underwhelming when it comes to wayland protocols, the best stuff is wlroots based, they have extensions for practically everything, it's just that an AT has to interface with those protocols. But yeah, quite a grim situation over all, and about the fedora stuff, dk when that happened, however I haven't heard of such issues in quite some time. Also, fedora is now updating more like windows, so it restarts and updates like that. If you interrupt the update process, you could get a broken system. But then, that's what immutable distros are supposed to fix, and imo, immutable/atomic systems are the best compromise we currently have between nix and just plopping stuff in /usr/bin and making your system function by installing scripts everywhere and holding it together with duct tape.
hmm, that's concerning. Do you still have the affected machine, vm, or whatever it was? do you also have matrix? I know a place where you could ask for a postmortem of sorts. But yeah, I upgraded the fedora system from 41 normally and I didn't have issues, maybe because I used gnome's software tool since I got lazy and didn't want to use the command line? the GUI is corrupting it seemns! :p
ha! arch ftw! are you using gdm for the login screen? also, can't wait for the grub and full disk encryption related article, I have a lot of frustration with that myself
Incredibly powerful stuff here. Hopefully you have better luck explaining this than I have. I’ve seen so many “linux on Ubuntu is great actually!” threads from people who don’t know and it triggers me every freaking time.
Again this is a nice opportunity to remind of my story. I have installed arch at the end of 2012. I am updating it incrementally to this day. I have changed three laptops so far during all these years and my install procedure was to clone both my system and home partitions to the new laptop, booting linux uefi stub directly.
The only thing that really bothers me is that I can't or don't know how to enroll my own KSK to make my file systems encrypted by my-self. Perhaps some three times something has broken for me because of broken GDM, accidentally interupted building of initramfs. At those times I simply boot arch iso off of an USB, chroot to my install, fix the broken stuff and continue from there. I am using gnome by default and very rare switching to the pure text console enabling speakup manually as I need it.
So I am looking to the brighter future.
Perhaps one day we'll get touch screen support similar to android and IOS on linux and we'll be able to also enjoy linux on our phones.
While the original post aims to make this readili available for the masses, some of us do really like to live on the bleeding edge enjoying the geeky stuff.
I recall someone here on the Fedis shared a sad thread years back, about the two (2) times that the biggest American charity for blind folks partnered with serious Linux devs to improve accessibility in the core OS.
Both times, Microsoft threatened to defund the Charity, who received most of their money from MS, and the project fell through.
MS wins gov contracts on accessibility grounds, so they sabotaged the open alternative twice.
@seachaint Had no idea about this and it's quite disturbing to me that they would stoop so low. Planning on reading this article, maybe it will inspire some action to improve things.
That isn't to say "This is why, so it's fine". I would rather think of accessibility as a first class part of design that doesn't need a "funded project" to bake in. But it's still saddening and angering to learn how MS will absolutely screw users who need accessibility features, if it helps them win contracts. And they get the credit for being accessible, in the end.
I've had a more positive experience over the years, but first with Debian, and later Arch Linux. I'm currently running Arch. I know there's work to be done in Linux accessibility, and a need for more development resources. On the other hand, I worry that posts such as this are going to discourage people from trying it - even people who would benefit from doing so.
I feel the pain reading this. Being a long term Linux user as well knowing the how hard it can be to install a simple application from source sometimes. And imagine doing it with the screen turned off... I think this is one of the problems with the OSS world. There are too many distros out there and "no one is forced" to make it accessible. Are there any projects out there working on this?
wait - THAT'S what brltty is for? I recently messed around with an esp32 dev board and I couldn't flash it. The documentation just told me to disable or uninstall brltty. This worked, so I didn't question it further then. Now it sounds like this was similar to the docs telling me to just shut off all my monitors?
holy shit that's depressing. at least NixOS lets you share the horrible crimes you have to do to get things working but this is little assurance.
if you want reviews on nixpkgs changes, feel free to tag me (LF- on GitHub) but i don't know how else to practically help; it feels like basically everything is undermaintained, nobody has any time, and that the reason stuff worked in 2012 was that there were government contracts to be had for gnome people at redhat that required that the accessibility works.
ultimately all those things just set environment.etc.* so you can just do that there as well with raw text; the modules that give you something nicer are just implemented on top of that. it's also possible to manually create it if you don't want to manage it with NixOS.
in principle it's probably possible to use another distro's ISO to install NixOS. it's *very* possible to install NixOS over ssh with a custom ISO and i do it most times. building custom ISOs with your ssh keys built in is like 20 lines of code on *any* distro with lix/nix installed and it's my preferred installation mechanism; see LF-/dotfiles on GitHub, the iso stuff in configs/nix/flake.nix.
the iso not being accessible really sucks and i am willing to lend social capital to efforts fixing it; the solution of adding ssh keys to the installer can bypass that for now, and probably is more pleasant than doing an arch style install process entirely in a vt console
@ZBennoui It was shared as a thread here and it's probably gone, but I _think_ the charity was the American Council for the Blind. The partnership may have been the Linux Foundation or GNOME.. It's been a while. I hope it's documented on the web somewhere and wasn't just discussed here. The person sharing it claimed direct participation both times. Sorry if that's not much help
I saw your blog post passing by in another toot, and wrote a mini-thread of three toots about it: exquisite.social/@labellaragas…
I work in website accessiiblity and I am very sorry desktop accessibility on Linux is failing people with a disability. Are there distro's that do better as Ubuntu, or are they all bad?
Wow.
An excellent post from a blind screen reader user, on how bad accessibility is on Linux.
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-1-built-for-control-but-not-for-people/
It is a fucking shame.
a slight correction: GTK4 released with accessibility. We delayed the release to land my rewrite that cut through three different layers to get to Orca. It was indeed incomplete, mainly because we had to wait to get the rest of the stack up to speed, and it had bugs because the whole stack comes without regression testing (something I also worked on). The rest is accurate…
accessibility has been stuck in “held together by hopes and dreams” since the Oracle acquired Sun and chopped the accessibility team, and companies focused on web browsers instead of native OS support; of course, volunteers don’t end up prioritising stuff they don’t use, and you’re left with very few people keeping the lights on and trying to catch up to the changes in the rest of the stack
no worries; I just wanted to make sure to note that there were regressions because the accessibility work was there. You can say that the GTK developers rewrote the implementation for 4.0 but it still needed work at release time.
Having more users doesn't necessarily encourage development in free and open-source software. Prioritizing satisfying the existing users would be a good move. I think various Linux distributors with resources should expand and combine their accessibility efforts via the GNOME Foundation, Linux Foundation, or another suitable, neutral nonprofit.
i think it might be quite possible to inject Wi-Fi credentials into an ISO as well, though I'm uncertain of the specifics of how. there's also the secondary strategy of obtaining Ethernet adaptors though that's kind of annoying of course.
Thank you for writing this. As a sighted developer (with a personal interest in accessibility), I learn a lot from reading the experiences blind people take the time to write down and share with others.
I hope we can get to a point where people stop accepting or normalizing accessibility failures. People seem to treat it like an "extra", but when core functionality fails for a portion of your users, that's not an extra, that means your software is broken!
@FreakyFwoof @dingodoppelt The how manyth blind distro is this? 5th? 6th? It will go the inevitable path as all the others. Also we don't need a blind windows or a blind Mac so why should we need a blind Linux? And what about other disabilities? Why shouldn't I be able to use arch btw?
@talon @dingodoppelt For all MS and Apple's issues (and yes they both have many) I could get a non-techy computer-user up and running with a fresh install and built-in screen-reader within a day. I'd say a couple hours but a day just to be fair. Every single! Linux distro needs the same level of access, whether that's screen-reader, magnification, braille, high contrast, whatever the case may be. Custom builds of stuff always fall behind mainline. We see it time and time again. Bespoke hardware and software has a tendency to get left behind. Braille display tech is living proof of this a lot of the time.
I frequently get frustrated with commentary about this from disabled people on Mastodon, since it is often entitled if not downright insulting contributors/maintainers. In that sense, I approve of your commentary here because it is much more differentiated and calls out problems and frustrations without attacking people who don't deserve it.
@a11yChief No but he sent it to me to look over, and I told him on WhatsApp that he should message you on mastodon but you're already looking at the thread anyway, so I'm behind the times haha
@FreakyFwoof yeah I have arch and cosmic is the 3rd de I’ve got on the system, after every update I go check it. At least they know what mad effort is involved, they aren’t just bundling orca and calling it a day. Would love to know where the push came from.
Can I just say I am following this series avidly. Been dreading the switch to Wayland and the posts have been very useful, as well as cathartic. I'd support this initiative financially if you continue this work.
@RichieRich this is the Blog i was talking about yesterday with great Insights into current Linux Accessibility. Just wanted to tag you before I loose it again :D
Weekend reading: Apple is celebrating 20 years of Voiceover - I wrote an article about it based on the amazing chat I had with the man who brought it to life on the Mac, and also with people who use it on their iPhone every day. doubletaponair.com/20-years-of…
"[…] However there is a problem on the horizon: GnuPG 2.4.x started to reject third-party key signatures using the SHA-1 hash algorithm. […] This doesn't directly affect the kernel-pgpkeys repo, […] When Konstantin imported the updated certificate GnuPG's "cleaning" was applied which dropped all SHA-1 signatures. So Theodore Ts'o's key lost 168 signatures, among them one by Linus Torvalds on his primary UID. […] That made me wonder what would be the effect on the web of trust if all SHA-1 signatures were dropped. Here are the facts: […]"
Ve čtvrtek jsem po dlouhé době vyrazil s dcerou na kolo. 🚴 Po cca 5 km bum, defekt na zadním kole a šel jsem pěšky domů...💥 Co se mi vesmír snaží naznačit? 😭 😀
#dobréRanko všem Není na to po ránu mít na stanu led. Bratrovi ve stanu zmrzla voda na pití. Dnes to balíme, třetí noc já bych dal, ale bratr má buď úžeh, nebo ho odrovnala už první noc.
Ty jo dobře vy. Já už bych to asi dneska nedal. Jezdil jsem hodně na vandry, ale to už je let. Pravidleně jsme vždy v únoru dělali pochod surovců No, ale tam to bylo hlavně o větším množství rumu, to ani pak ta zima po širákem nevadila
Tak bylo by to lepší, kdybych nevyhodil ten expediční stan od Jurka (dal 15 let skoro), tohle je 900g Čína, to nosím na zádech v létě většinou jen tropiko.
This article's subject refers to MalwareBytes. It annoys me that PCMag didn't mention the name of the software in the title. Top-Rated Ransomware Defense, Web Security, and 24/7 Digital Protection for 38% Off pcmag.com/deals/top-rated-rans…
Award-winning journalist Katie Thornton has launched a new season of the Peabody-winning podcast, The Divided Dial, produced by On the Media and WNYC Studios. In this season, Katie focuses on short…
Kipe
in reply to Archos • • •Já sice birell neměl, ale pěknou padesátku jsem si dal. A doma pak k večeři Nachmelená Opice jako odměna.
Archos
in reply to Kipe • • •Pavel Kout
in reply to Archos • • •Archos
in reply to Pavel Kout • • •Teda aspoň doufám 😃
Ivan Stloukal
in reply to Archos • • •Archos
in reply to Ivan Stloukal • • •Ivan Stloukal
in reply to Archos • • •Archos
in reply to Ivan Stloukal • • •