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mstdn.social/@ricardoharvin/11…

I should read it soon

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

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...

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.

> 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.

I hate Linux so much that I have spent hundreds of hours on OSDev to replace Linux with my own OS haha

I have a few rants about glibc (nss and locales; vanilla ikik), idk brltty, and I have countless about the kernel.

I do need to learn more about the existing accessibility tools tho.

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)

omg I would love help, I have been fighting LLVM for the past 3 years haha

I wanna avoid glibc due to issues with static linking and code quality and instead wanna fork musl

Same with libstdc++, GCC...

It's pretty fucked up how apparently accessibility was not even considered when developing/specifying both Wayland and Gtk4, though.

And those are not exactly hobby projects developed only by volunteers in their freetime either

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...

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?

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.

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.

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

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?

And have you tried any of the BSD's?