Aral Balkan
Someone please tell me screen reader support isn’t broken on the major Linux distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu that ship Wayland as default.
(I can’t get the modifier key for Orca to work under the latest Fedora Silverblue and, according to the linked issue, it’s because… it just doesn’t work under Wayland? That can’t be right, right? It would mean the major Linux distributions are inaccessible.)
Aral Balkan
Wow, OK, so I wasn’t missing anything. It looks like the only available screen reader on major Linux distributions is broken and has been for some time.
https://github.com/xkbcommon/libxkbcommon/issues/425#issuecomment-1951360916
Lack of accessibility not being a show stopper for an operating systems blows my mind.
We’re talking about distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with enterprise customers (aren’t there some accessibility laws that apply here? 🤔)
#linux #accessibility #a11y #orca #GNOME #wayland #fedora #ubuntu #RedHat
Jeff Fortin T.
@aral Did you see https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2023/10/27/a-new-accessibility-architecture-for-modern-free-desktops/ a few months ago?
Aral Balkan
@nekohayo I did, yes; thanks for the reminder. However, what I don’t get is how these Linux distributions decided it was OK to make Wayland the default *before* it could be made accessible.
Bobby Moss
@aral fwiw the Orca project links are here: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca
GNOME project hosts its own Gitlab server with bug tracker, so they might not have visibility on this. 🤔
Aral Balkan
@trechnex I’m assuming the developers know their app is broken on the popular distributions that it runs on.
Aral Balkan
Just installed and had a quick play with a new screen reader for Linux called Odilia. It doesn’t support key bindings at all at the moment but it did read stuff out and performed better than Orca at that with the custom Festival voice I’m using (Orca performs very well with its internal robot voice but the Festival voices are far more human.)
Anyway, not ready for use in any way but might be worth keeping an eye on:
Aral Balkan
@lebout2canap And that’s awesome. My question remains how it was decided to make something (Wayland) the default when it is inaccessible. (I guess it’s a rhetorical question because the answer can only be “because lack of accessibility is not a show stoppper.”)
lebout2canap ⏚
@aral One of the missions financed by the Sovereign Tech Fund is precisely "Design and prototype a new accessibility stack". It's discussed almost every week in This Week in GNOME, for example https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2024/02/twig-135/.
Aral Balkan
lebout2canap ⏚
@aral I was just responding to say that Odilia was not the only hope, I was not responding to defend the decisions and/or the current state of things.
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