Sensitive content
Thoughts on my first week daily-driving Linux accessibility after a while away:
The good: It's fast. Like, if you remember the days of "press h, wait half a second, land on header," that's not really a thing. At least, not for me. Speaking from personal experience, if you've debugged out the performance issues and have something that mostly works, you're in a good place. Everything is snappy and responsive to a degree I don't think I've experienced under Windows since, well, the day or 2 after I get a new machine and haven't loaded it down with crap. Also, interestingly, open source programs like Thunderbird seem to work better in general. HTML messages that don't display under NVDA seem to present in Orca just fine, so at least for the moment, the apps I use feel snappier and marginally less accessible, but more in some cases, under Linux. Not an awful tradeoff, but certainly not ideal either.
The bad: It's still not ready. That makes me sad and I want to fix it.
The other good: Folks are actively working on it with what seems like energy I haven't seen in a while. Looks like keyboard handling is about to get some major fixes in GNOME 48, and if I had to slap a lazy label on the root of a bunch of my current papercuts, broken keyboard handling would be right or nearly on top.
Feels like a good time to work on open accessible alternatives. I'm glad we have Microsoft and Windows today, but who knows if we will tomorrow. We'll still need accessible technology with or without large corporations, though.
Lukáš Tyrychtr
in reply to Nolan Darilek • • •the esoteric programmer
in reply to Lukáš Tyrychtr • • •Lukáš Tyrychtr
in reply to the esoteric programmer • • •Nolan Darilek
in reply to Lukáš Tyrychtr • • •Agreed, but for context this is a microblog and I only have so many characters before folks peace out. :) The place to report issues is, well, the issue trackers which I use, so I didn't want my first post in the thread to basically info dump a bunch of issues which I'd then be requested to provide necessary context on.
That said, as alluded to in the post, keyboard handling issues are the biggest. I'd prefer if capslock state got retained because the number of times I typed a message in chat only to discover it was in all caps except for the first letter is huge. Same with shell commands. I'd like focus/browse mode state retained per tab so alt-tabbing out of VS Code into a browser window doesn't, in turn, switch to browse mode in VS Code which is probably not what you want. I'd like to figure out why I can't use the Discord inbox. I'd like it if switching back to a Firefox tab where I'm reading an article doesn't lose my place in the article. I'd like it if I could use pgdn/pgup to find my place again, but I have to use a combo of structural nav and the arrows. I'd like it if I didn't have to tab 8 million times to use settings, or if gnome-tweaks didn't auto-open whatever tweak setting panel last got focus (vs. which you actively clicked on.) I'd like it if dropdowns, like the ones in the sound menu where a bunch of blind folks will naturally gravitate to configure how their computers sound, actually spoke what items had focus so you didn't have to guess.
To be clear, none of this is me bitching or shaming folks for not doing these things. I'm a developer myself, I get it, and have an embarrassing backlog of things I need to fix in my own projects. But I can't in good conscience recommend Linux for others without a lot of caveats right now. I don't think any of us wants to see that, which is why I'm actively volunteering my time and effort to help fix things.
Anyhow, a couple folks asked how my experience was, so I updated them. Issues and patches to come.
Lukáš Tyrychtr
in reply to Nolan Darilek • • •Nolan Darilek
in reply to Lukáš Tyrychtr • • •To be clear, I don't just mean the output chooser dropdown. I literally mean every dropdown on that screen--input, output, configuration for choosing whether something is stereo/5.1/7.1. I'm glad there's an alternative for this specific case but a whole widget class not working feels like kind of a big deal. Also, the output chooser dropdown only lets you select outputs AFAIK. If I plug in a headset that isn't detected, I'll need to switch inputs too. And it was tricky configuring my media PC because I couldn't figure out how to indicate that the system I was connecting to was 5.1.
I plan to do a bit more formal digging next week to figure out whether it's just this specific screen or this widget class entirely, but I do want to fix these things. Is #a11y:gnome.org the best place to go with any questions improving the GNOME apps/widgets?
Lukáš Tyrychtr
in reply to Nolan Darilek • • •Michael Johann
in reply to Nolan Darilek • • •Sensitive content
Nolan Darilek
in reply to Michael Johann • • •D.Hamlin.Music
in reply to Nolan Darilek • • •Nolan Darilek
in reply to D.Hamlin.Music • • •Oh, and do we know what happened to that "let's hijack alt-space for Copilot" meme that made the rounds a month or so back? Did Microsoft walk that one back? I hope so.
Are we going to slowly lose accessibility features we depend on to AI, or whatever the latest hype cycle is? It's great today, but the theme of the world these days seems to be not to count on things always staying as they've been, and having a backup ready when they change. I'd rather have it and not need it, than not have it and need it. :)