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Subtoot. Alright, look. My disability isn't your disability. My blindness, is not your autism, or Deafness, or others. My blindness means that I need screen readers to access digital technology which has screens. So, when we, blind people, say that it's hard for us to use Linux, or that the command line can be difficult because of some commands using a table layout, like top, we um, I don't know, actually fucking mean it. When we boot up your Linux distro of choice, and find that Orca, the Linux screen reader, isn't even available on the install media, or that it cannot read the installer, that's Linux, and foss as as a general whole, being ableism. Clear and simple. If someone with low vision can use Linux well, that's great. I sure as hell wish I could just pop in any distro and get something that I can at least use like a sighted person, but no. If someone with Autism finds that desktop environments allow them to make things the way they need enough for them to get their work done more easily, that's great. Be glad you don't have to use a screen reader on top of that, okay? Next time you go distro hopping, I want you to try something for me. Shut down your computer, then put in the flash drive, press the power button or do whatever you need to to start the computer, then close your eyes. Then, set up your new distro. Then tell me how it went. I thought about just letting this kind of shit go, but damn it it's bad enough when we fucking get this kind of shit from non-disabled people, but when other people with disabilities pile on and basically accuse blind people of lying and that Linux is fine, no. I get that all disabled people have a disability. But just because you can see, that the world is *made* for you, doesn't mean everyone else has that privalidge. And right now, Windows is still usable by people who are blind, mainly because Windows is so open that we can have screen readers that can grab just about anything they want, and the Windows foss screen reader is amazingly scriptable. Wayland kills accessibility in the name of security. Orca doesn't support addons yet. So what's that about Linux being customizable? Linux distros only come with one, extremely barebones, sound theme. Orca still doesn't have sounds for important events, like when it enters browse or focus modes.
This isn't even getting into the fact that a lot of people with Autism on Mastodon seem to do really well with programming and techie stuff. Blind people? Most of us live on our iPhones. Oh, try browsing the modern web on that CLI that you say works so well for us. Try reading output of the top command using a screen reader. Do you like Ascii graphics? Screen readers sure don't! Like damn, do we need another label just for people with sensory disabilities? Because "disabled" is really getting crowded, and it's almost like blind people don't belong anymore.
mas.to/@libreleah/112486130165…
#accessibility #blind #linux #foss #ableism
Leah Rowe (@libreleah@mas.to)
@piper@sunny.garden linux (and free software in general) has much more accessibility features available, and the nature of it is that the software can be more easily adapted to suit special needs windows and a lot of proprietary software often doesn…mas.to
Devin Prater :blind:
in reply to Devin Prater :blind: • • •Sensitive content
And I'm one of the maybe 5 blind people, on Mastodon even, who use Linux at least once a week. And I use an old fork of Gnome 2 called Mate, as my desktop. Why? Because it's well, as accessible as Gnome 2 was in the day, pretty much. Even other techie blind people would rather not deal with it and stick to Windows where they can get things done. And Orca *is* more reliable these days. Imagine a year ago, your screen just suddenly goes dark for no reason and you have to restart it to see your computer again. Every 30 minutes or so. Even better! You like games? Got a Steamdeck? Imagine you buy it, and it turns on, but your screen is blank. Nothing there, and you can't figure out how to turn the screen on. Well I mean you could install Windows on it, but that's just, so much extra work! That's ableism. That's discrimination. But oh no instead of helping us, instead of fucking using that talent for programming and shit for good, people would rather just go "meh it works for me stupid blink blink" instead.
blind folks, we sure as shit ain't the worst population there is. Believe me. You, reading this, think you're bad? You, general blind population, think the audiogames forum is bad? Nah. There's definitely worse out there. And there just comes a time where we have to just speak our feelings, speak what's true for *us*, about tech, about life, about having a sensory disability, that other communities will *never* face. Honestly, I doubt me ranting about this will do any good in the wider community, but more validation for other blind people will never hurt anything. Just because some smart people on Mastodon makes you feel like hey maybe I'm just too disabled, or too stupid to work Linux, remember, you're not. Linux is just *that* freaking hard.
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The Cube
in reply to Devin Prater :blind: • • •Sensitive content
Devin Prater :blind:
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Jookia
in reply to Devin Prater :blind: • • •Sensitive content
the esoteric programmer
in reply to Jookia • • •About the bios, that's infinitely more complicated. For now, the biggest problem is that there's no standard for a soundcard, no single API all of them would use, like you can now drive absolutely any graphics card using a very rudimentary API, called VGA I believe, yes, even nvidia. And no, the pc speaker isn't a good enough substitute, because who knows if it's universal, I know of at least two computers who don't have it at all, and also you can't really transmit lots of things through it, much less intelligible speech, though as with anything, I'd be glad to be proven wrong. But anyway, basically, firmware has to be small, right? Well, forget small, start thinking how would it fit the current chips flash memory size, because basically you'd have to put in there drivers for all the soundcards linux has access to at least, and even excluding external sound cards, that's a lot. So, to actually answer your question, I dk if it's possible at all to do this, bake something like that into the firmware. You may then be asking, how does apple do it then? Well, first off, you may be familiar with the amount of restrictions mac OS has, if you tryed making a vm or hackintosh before. Well, that's part of the reason, they integrate everything in there. But also, the most important, I'm not aware of a single instance where you actually interact with the UEFI menu of apple hardware and it actually speaks. Instead, you either interact with the bootloader, which could probably be larger on linux as well, to contain all those drivers, but apple has only one hw combination so it's easy for them, or essentially half of mac OS, with voiceover included, just that the graphical part is a fullscreen application, accessible and readable with voiceover. There you go, that's how apple does it. So, in order for an accessible bios to be doable, we have to first solve the sound card problem, because afterwards, things are relatively simple, integrate flite or something similarly lightweight, then wire it up to speak when selection changes, in the same parts where the selection is redrawn. That's all there is to this problem, and it seemns easy kinda, except for the soundcard issue, which would basically need the whole w3c and a lot of soundcard companies to make a standard followed by at least all of the new cards past that point. I know a person who tryed to make a proof of concept audio stack for uefi, as preparation for screenreaders on actual firmware, but not only there's no onboard audio support in the uefi specification, but there's no usb audio either, so that would have to be solved, because it ties in with and is exactly the first problem.
modulux
in reply to the esoteric programmer • • •the esoteric programmer
in reply to modulux • • •modulux
in reply to the esoteric programmer • • •Drew Mochak
in reply to the esoteric programmer • • •There is a similar discussion for recovery managers in Android with a similarly unproductive result. The closest anyone got is TeamWin which lets you use script commands like "install" "format" etc on the commandline from a connected (USB) terminal. I've also seen a few environments that will look for a file to execute a list of instructions from when it launches.
I wonder if either approach would work here: an interface that will except instructions from a properly-credentialed device (SSH, say), or a utility/scripting language that will allow you to change BIOS settings from another OS that the BIOS will load upon boot.
@jookia @pixelate @seedy
Matt Campbell
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Jookia
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Bren
in reply to Devin Prater :blind: • • •Sensitive content
Partially sighted person here, can definitely confirm. Reinstalled Debian 2 weekends ago and identified at least 15 bugs* during the audio install process, some of which seem completely show-stopping for someone blind. This is on top of the BIOS issues and before first boot.
*Yes, I hope and plan to report the bugs, but Debian's bug search and reporting system has a learning curve and I haven't submitted any yet.
WestphalDenn
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Devin Prater :blind:
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WestphalDenn
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