@tess @aral Also, I've been telling people for the past four or so years I've been around Mastodon. I wrote a blog post [1] about it like two or so years ago. And for the last ten years, I've always stuck to using the Mate desktop or spin or whatever, because I knew Gnome wasn't very accessible. So I've always used X11, and broke my audio a few weeks ago on my Fedora 40 system trying to switch back from Pipewire to Pulseaudio, where Emacspeak is more responsive. I've been telling people that Microsoft is going to do something so crazy that people will switch to Linux, if not on mass, then at least more than usual. And Recall was it. And even if they don't launch it this year, we all know they eventually will. So yeah, the time to really pile on to accessibility was years ago. But no. Last year, someone who has been using Linux for the last, oh I don't even know, 15 years ago? Longer than I have, talked about why they decided to not even deal with the GUI anymore, and now they use an iPhone. Lol they've probably gone all Apple by now. And what did the Gnome folks do? Well, a person who I think is even a member of the Gnome foundation basically called them a liar, and when I asked for solidarity from the comunity, I mostly got nothing. No one gives a damn, and that's very obvious to me. I posted on the System76's MatterMost a few years ago, asking about accessibility, and all I got before I left was something like "Well we'll worry about that when we start working on more of the GUI." No, planning needed to start at the beginning, not when, more likely, they're about to ship it. These days, I'm more like it would be nice, but it won't happen. That's why we blind people make the most of Windows and the iPhone, and try to minimize corporate abuse.
[1] https://scribe.rip/@r.d.t.prater/linux-accessibility-an-unmaintained-mess-8fbf9decaf8a