I stood in front of a bunch (maybe 100) people at GUADEC in 2015, and made them listen to the default screen reader in GNOME with their eyes closed. A whole lot of people expressed to me after that it's very important that we work on accessibility on free desktops.

Almost 9 years later, and the situation is somehow worse now :(

There was a time when Linux led the pack for accessibility. I switched to Linux in 2000, and at the time, it was the only operating system that I could install without sighted help. Furthermore, I didn't need to pay $175 a year to some blind tech company so that I could use a screenreader. The screenreader was free. There were and are great options for the console, as well as self-voicing systems like Emacspeak. Granted, at the time, I didn't need a GUI at all. The web still mostly worked well with text-mode browsers. I wrote my documents in LaTeX or HTML or plain text; no need for a word processor.

There is a phenomenon I call the accessibility hamster wheel. Once we (blind people) have an accessible technology, the world turns around and raises the bar on us, and what we are using is no longer adequate. Wayland being broken with Orca is another example of that hamster wheel thing, where we're running to stay in place, and still falling behind.

Multi-billion-dollar open source companies releasing inaccessible products is part of the problem. So is the ever-increasing spiral of complexity in software.

@xbezdick
What?

Red Hat was a 3.4 billion dollar company at the time of its acquisition by IBM. You don't reach that solely through unpaid volunteers.