For eight years Fedora has been shipping GNOME with a broken screen reader!
EIGHT YEARS!
(Wayland has been default on Fedora for eight years – since Fedora 25, released in 2016.)
And a hundred-billion-dollar corporation like IBM ships operating systems today based on it with a broken screen reader.
What is an ableist culture? One in which the people who call this out get ostracised.
#ableism #fedora #redHat #IBM #gnome #cosmic #wayland #a11y #system76 #linux fosstodon.org/@soller/11264637…
Jeremy Soller 🦀 (@soller@fosstodon.org)
I am unfollowing @aral@mastodon.ar.al. No matter my disagreements with GNOME folks in the past, COSMIC and GNOME are going to end up with the same accessibility backend, @accesskit, developed by the amazing @matt@toot.cafe.Fosstodon
This entry was edited (3 months ago)
Dana Fried
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •accessibility is a P0 feature for any product; you shouldn't ship a product without it; a product without accessibility is fundamentally broken.
If X11 is a "security concern" then maybe creating a whole new product and launching it in a broken state wasn't the right answer (Wayland is an absolute nightmare for me, but for other reasons, so I share some of your pain).
Also the fucking _gall_ to ship a broken product and then say, "well, you could always contribute patches to fix it".
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Dana Fried
in reply to Dana Fried • • •like, "oh yes, now that my linux no longer allows me to get anything done effectively, I will be happy to use my broken system to fix my broken system, great plan, A+, no notes"
Honorable mention to "we're creating a library that (at some unspecified future point) you can compile into your application to fix the problem; no, this will not fix every other application on your system or any legacy software, why do you ask?"
Kavya 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️ ∞ 🍉
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •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 :(
chris
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •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
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •John M. Gamble
in reply to xbezdick • • •@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.
Matthew Booth
in reply to John M. Gamble • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Matthew Booth • • •xbezdick
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Florian
in reply to xbezdick • • •It took 8 years for Wayland to develop some kind of semblance of accessibility. Calamares installer has had issues open for almost the same amount of time. Screen reader users, who are definitely not always developers or even open-source enthusiasts, who just want to use a piece of software like everybody else does, can't, and haven't been able to for a very, very long time without all kinds of blackbelt tech fuckery that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, let along a random user who just wants to try Linux. Such a user doesn't care about issues, or giving back to the community, or how to best and constructively provide feedback to the right person. THis user sees people exclude them for years, and then give them a hard time for daring to speak up. I have had people in my streams asking me if it's even worth creating issues because they feel they'll either be ignored or yelled at. Is that the message we want to send?
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Florian
in reply to Florian • • •From this viewpoint, ANY Linux distro is outright hostile to a user with assistive tech needs. Many of them don't include a screen reader at all, which means a user who needs one can't install it by themselves. Some have one, but require a to the user unreachable checkbox to be enabled first. Some have a screen reader, but no voice to speak through. And that's just screenreaders.
Xorg is a security risk so the change was warranted is all well and good, but what a lot of these projects fail to take into account is that accessibility should be up there with security, localization, performance etc., because otherwise you're, at this point, wilfully discriminating against potential users. Not fun to say, not fun to hear I'm sure, but a fact nonetheless. And I get to say this. As a developer who's fully blind, has a 40-hour a week job, and would very much like to find an OS that isn't Windows/Mac OS without having to essentially rearchitect the entire freaking accessibility API before I do anything else, i get to bitch when literally an entire ecosystem figures that I'll get my turn years, maybe even decades after everybody else is already moving onto the next thing. Even if I don't have issues to my name that provide me that street cred, sorry to say
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