Is accessibility designed by someone that doesn’t require that accessibility any good? I think that hesitance keeps some maintaners from fixing some of the longer standing issues.
I do think there should be a unique distro attuned to users requiring speaker or braille output. It can be a bit lacking on local security but it should be the software for a computer that you can listen to and can listen to you.
I’m not blind but MATE has been my goto DE. I want a modern yet no-frills desktop.
A separate but equal OS is tricky because it will be perpetually teetering on the edge of collapse because of lack of support. These features need to be baked into the major distros (or done in a way that they can be quickly and effectively layered on top). That way your accessibility maintainer doesn’t have to be an entire OS maintainer.
Is accessibility designed by someone that doesn’t require that accessibility any good?
It can be if it’s tested with users. There are guidelines/principles (just like with sighted users), but what makes a good (robust) experience is subjective and requires testing.
I’m sorry this dude has to go through this shit. If I could, I would help, but there just isn’t any time. I’m fighting NixOS and just getting things to work for me. There isn’t even time to get it working for non-technical folk, let alone disabled folk.
My blame goes to the gate keepers who want to keep linux an elitist space. The people that want things to be hard so that they can feel superior and laugh at others who can’t do what they do. The people that unironically say RTFM.
Linux could be such a great distro for normal users but the very first step of installing it is already a hurdle for many people. And yet many linux users recommend dumb shit like Arch to beginners or tell them to buy (and support) non-Linux hardware vendors instead of funnelling money into the linux ecosystem.
If the majority of Linux users who could actually invested monetarily into opensource and the linux ecosystem, and the Linux Foundation invested more than 2% of it 200 million annually into the kernel and advocacy, maybe things would look different. But it seems like we’re a long way from the linux community actually being welcoming and self-funding. We’ll have to wait for corporate sponsors like Valve to actually make the OS popular and worthy of interest to app developers and accessibility advocates before the community realises that being popular does come with more benefits than negatives.
I don’t think I ever saw a Linux user that doesn’t want it to have widespread adoption
You’ve never met an eternal September Linux user?
I regularly encounter such people online and offline, as well as people who abhor GUIs or making Linux easier to use.
I wish I was better at coding. But maybe I can give it a shot, try and figure out how good accessibility tools work and make some kind of effort at copying it.
Testing is absolutely a problem, however almost no sighted person finds audio screen readers pleasant and the braille displays cost thousands of dollars. If there was an emulated braille display (as in had the USB or serial parts that functioned identically to a real unit, just lacking any actual tactile, expensive, necessary for it to be usable for the blind, braille) testing would probably be more common.
