mastodon - Link to source
I didn’t plan to write about Wayland yet. But Xorg is dying — not eventually, but now. GNOME’s dropping X11 support. RHEL already removed it. Ubuntu and Fedora are next. And if you rely on accessibility, you don’t get to wait this one out.
So here’s Post 4 of I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back.
I’m using Wayland now. Primarily. Not because I love it. Because the fallback is disappearing, and I want to be there helping fix what comes next. GNOME with Orca actually works. KDE and COSMIC are making progress. I’ve talked to the people involved. They care.
But a lot is broken.
MATE — the desktop most blind users preferred — isn’t on Wayland.
ocrdesktop doesn’t work. xdotool is gone.
wlroots compositors still don’t reliably support Orca’s keybindings, especially on laptops.
This isn’t GNOME’s fault. They’re the only reason accessibility on Wayland works at all.
But the old excuses are gone. “Just use Xorg” isn’t going to be an option much longer.
So yeah. I’m a Wayland shill now. Because I’m using it. Because I have to.
And I want to make sure we’re not excluded from what comes next.
fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-w…
#Linux #Wayland #Accessibility #Orca #GNOME #KDE #COSMIC #FOSS #a11y #BlindTech #xorg

I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back: Post 4 – Wayland Is Growing Up. And Now We Don’t Have a Choice — fireborn

fireborn.mataroa.blog
#a11y #Accessibility #linux #foss #gnome #KDE #Wayland #orca #cosmic #blindtech #xorg

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in reply to Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺

mastodon - Link to source

aaron

@tardis @FreakyFwoof Going straight to Arch, as a user with accessibility needs isn't the best choice. It can be done, but I hope you're prepared to read parts of the Arch wikki that are obscure, sometimes contradictory, and forum posts with answers that or only sort of related to your problem and inferring the info you need. I'd hole-heartedly recommend Fedora over Arch to get started. You don't really even need to touch the terminal.
@Andre Louis @Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺
in reply to aaron

gotosocial - Link to source

Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺

Yeah, I found out it's not ideal, when I tried making a 5 year-old computer with three destroyed, and I mean physically, hardware components and, apparently, a failing hard disk, because it wouldn't hold anything I installed, not even after cleaning the disk, so I just sat using Linux on a flash drive, and then was like... Okay? My parents probably could not use this, even though I changed the boot order to USB.
in reply to Alexis

mastodon - Link to source

aaron

What would you want to run under WINE? there might be an alternative for you. What I do for running Windows apps on linux is have a windows virtual machine that is completely stateless. when I shut it down, anything I did or saved and didn't save elsewhere is entirely deleted. then it doesn't get bloated or send any useful historical usage data.
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Alexis

mastodon - Link to source

aaron

@lexipic @tardis @FreakyFwoof Be my eyes or a 5-minute Aira call is enough to get through it. All you need to do is turn off secure boot, maybe not even that with some distributions. Mint supports secure boot I believe, so does Fedora. You can boot from a USB accessibly if you still have windows installed by using the windows recovery environment, and then once Linux is installed with efibootmgr.
@Andre Louis @Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺 @Alexis
in reply to Alexis

mastodon - Link to source

Majid Hussain

@lexipic @J3317 @tardis @FreakyFwoof
err, may I interseed here?
if you have windows as the host os,
search for change windows to go startup options
here's what you hear with nvda.

Windows To Go Start-up Options dialog Do you want to automatically boot your PC from a Windows To Go workspace?
Having trouble? RightOptionHelpTopic
No

You might need to change your PC's firmware settings to use the workspace. radio button checked ALT+ N
Yes

Some drives can harm your PC. Make sure that you only insert the USB drive that contains your workspace before booting your PC.

radio button checked ALT+ Y
Save changes button ALT+ S
I selected yes clicked save and now I can boot off usb drives no problem
without fuddyduddying with firmware.

@Andre Louis @Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺 @Alexis @Joshua
in reply to aaron

mastodon - Link to source

Adam MacLeod

@FreakyFwoof Hey folks, I apologize for breaking in on the thread. I have a room mate with a mid-2011 27-inch iMac. Clearly, this is rather long in the tooth, so I was wondering if anyone knows if this Linux distro can be run on this particular iMac? If so, he is used to using Ubuntu dirivitives called Mint or Cinamon. Can this distro be configured with a similar look and feel? is there a good known link to get started? Thanks.
@Andre Louis
in reply to Matt Campbell

mastodon - Link to source

aaron

@matt I'd highly recommend looking at quickemu (github.com/quickemu-project/qu… It's really easy. You will need to run from source or build a package yourself if on a Debian or Fedora based system, because the qemu version is 10.0.x which the application in its latest stable can't detect.

GitHub - quickemu-project/quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux virtual machines

Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux virtual machines - quickemu-project/quickemu
GitHub
@Matt Campbell
in reply to aaron

mastodon - Link to source

Matt Campbell

Oh, since you mentioned headless automation in this article, I cobbled together a way to do it for a specific application running under Wayland, for a bot in a server environment. I did it running sway in headless mode (there are wlroots environment variables for that), AT-SPI from Python to screen-scrape the application, and a combination of the wayvnc server plus a Python package called vncdotool to inject keyboard input. The app in question is Qt-based. All in a Docker container.
in reply to aaron

mastodon - Link to source

Dickson Tan

Hey, I've just read your posts on the state of accessibility on Linux.
What's your recommendation for a distribution that has working accessibility, if any exist? I'd love to use a free and open source OS and screen reader combination, especially since Microsoft seems determined to make Windows worse each day, but at least I don't have to worry about whether sound works.

I'm very familiar with NVDA and Orca seems similar, but I would be lost troubleshooting the issues you described.

in reply to aaron

mastodon - Link to source

Rodney

How does a blind user even access/use the top panel in GNOME? Ever since the move to GNOME 3.x with gnome-shell, the old keybindings to access the panels are just gone. I have no idea how to interact with it using a keyboard. This has been one of the biggest annoyances for me since having to switch to GNOME 3 from Unity 7-8 years ago.

MATE is only great at a11y because it's just GNOME 2.x, which we (Sun/Novell/RH/etc…) put a lot of effort in making ADA compliant to sell to gov.

in reply to aaron

mastodon - Link to source

PaulDavisTheFirst

how this feels as an app developer:

kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-a…


KiCad and Wayland Support

The KiCad development team frequently receives questions about our support for Wayland. Given that Fedora and Ubuntu are both planning to drop X11 support from their main desktop environments in the near future, we want to provide clear, transparent …
The KiCad editors (KiCad EDA)
in reply to aaron

mastodon - Link to source

Glyph

It is an infuriating indictment of the entire ecosystem that they could not get it together to correct Wayland's numerous critical deficiencies BEFORE sunsetting its predecessor, or indeed, before even rolling it out in the first place as anything more than a "developer preview" or an alpha test. This is not how _deploying software_ is supposed to work. Accessibility is obviously a big important part of the fuckup but there are crucial oversights up and down the stack.
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

Danielle Foré

@alatiera portals.conf! flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-…

if your distro or desktop provides portals that aren’t accessible—or you just don’t like—you can bring your own 🎉


portals.conf

XDG desktop portal configuration: Manual section, 5,, Manual group, File Formats Manual,. SYNOPSIS:$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/xdg-desktop-portal/{*-}portals.conf$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/xdg-desktop-portal/{*-}portal...
XDG Desktop Portal
@Jordan Petridis
in reply to aaron

mastodon - Link to source

JimmyChezPants 🇨🇦

I'm curious where the big advocacy orgs are in this. Seems to me that any org with a budget in the millions could afford a yearly developer salary or two, but how to make them understand, if they have no nerds in their command structure?

Cause in the final analysis, recreating these long-used tools in the new thing is a solvable problem, and I really don't think it would require a gigantic team, just some capable and fairly-renumerated full time people actively working on it.

This seems like something very much within the purview of any major disability org that collects donations and has, as I said, budgets in the millions.

in reply to aaron

mastodon - Link to source

tsk

People aren't enthused about Wayland because they didn't sell the new features/architecture. All I know about it is "better compositing". I know more about MacOS graphics advances and I haven't used MacOS in a decade.

X11 fell way behind Windows and Mac graphics in more areas than just compositing. The one that really chapped my *ss is the remote modes that are efficient over high-latency networks (Internet) and support multi-user views. (The ancient X11 network support sucks bad.) This is why screen sharing works so much better on non-Linux/BSD systems. So that important use case was ignored for like...two decades+ and I can't even tell if the Wayland project has changed course on that.

My money is on Android or derivative for the development of a good FOSS desktop. Version 16 is coming out with a built-in desktop UI.

in reply to aaron

mastodon - Link to source

tsk

Also, you say you want to love Linux, but seldom will any non-techie consumer love it. Linux really is just a kernel (or to be generous, a kernel with an ever-fracturing distro maintainer priesthood attached). The GUI has no consistency to users, which means they can't learn transferable skills on it, and the proof is that 98% of all "Desktop Linux" help/howto posts focus on the command line.

Even worse, anyone writing a 'Linux' app has to contend with 35 different package-maintainer priesthoods who are telling you (often nonsensically) you did x, y or z wrong and change it NOW or our user base will lambaste you on forums forever. Then at some point you realize the packaging systems were all intended for use by sysadmins or engineers and not regular PC users because underneath this is really a Unix server culture.

Selling people on "Linux desktop" is like selling them on "AC Delco cars"... you are focusing on one part that is buried inside the OS that the user experiences.

Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

aaron

@gemlog That comment was around the time I posted it. it was mid regular work day for a lot of timezones on a Thursday. People disagreeing with me is totally okay – I encourage constructive conversation. I've been on the xorg bandwagon for a while, and only just made the switch a couple of days to a week ago to see what things were like on the other side as it were. It's still not perfect for everyone and I will absolutely tell people to use Xorg where using Xorg makes the most sense.
@Kermode
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

aaron

@gemlog Redhat isn't my distro of choice, and I'm on GNOME because I can't yet explore anything else while maintaining accessibility. I have systems running many things, most for testing stuff that I think might impact other people. Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, chimera, etc.
@Kermode
in reply to aaron

glitchsoc - Link to source

Alba 🌸

thanks for these posts. have you tried the alternatives xdotool suggests for wayland, like dotool? asking because these work at a lower layer (do not coordinate with the graphical server at all) so curious if this causes shortcomings

GitHub - jordansissel/xdotool: fake keyboard/mouse input, window management, and more

fake keyboard/mouse input, window management, and more - GitHub - jordansissel/xdotool: fake keyboard/mouse input, window management, and more
GitHub
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