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
@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…
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