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.
this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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I remember a blind person posting to the Gentoo mailing lists for install help a couple of years ago. They were having considerable issues getting screen reading working at the command line so that they could continue forward from there. Yeah, definitely a fair number of bugs that aren't being prioritized at the level they should be.
It is a difficult catch 22. When there's so little resources and manpower it is more effective to work on the issues which affect most people so that the user base grows. When the user base grows there will be more contributors which will have time to fix the accessibility issues for the minority of users. But at some point those issues need to be addressed and the question is when.
Great read, thanks for sharing. Fingers crossed that Nix gets there for you.
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.
You're jumbling things together here that come separately from separate individuals and have nothing to do with one another. I will reply only to this one:
The people that unironically say RTFM.
If someone literally replies "RTFM" to your request I'm on your side.
If they reply something like "what you are asking is literally the first paragraph of that utlity's man page" I find it much more reasonable. It might be nicer to then quote that paragraph, but it's not wrong to point out that often the info you're looking for is just a few keystrokes away, on your machine, even without an internet connection.
Read The Fantastic Manual
I'm not jumbling anything together. The Linux community is full of toxic, elitist edgelords that expose various behaviours which are entirely uninviting to beginners. Those behaviours are also very annoying for people like me who want stuff answered without responses that sound belittling or like a challenge of ones skills.
Of course there are users who seem incapable of reading a manual and even pointing them to the passage with "you can find more information here, it should answer your question. If that doesn't, feel free to explain further and I'll gladly help you" nets a question about exactly what's written in the passage. My way of dealing users unwilling to read is not to respond, not RTFM.
Can I hazard a guess?
Did you complain that linux needs to ditch the CLI to become more usable, to which people responded "actually I like the CLI and it's necessary to keep for these 14 reasons even if you never had to use it due to gui, and help will always be offered through the CLI commands because it's easier to offer a simple one liner that fixes the issue instead of walking you through 15 screenshots of some arcane GUI program they may never even have used?"
Gotta be honest, people can be dicks for sure, but usually when I see it, it's because instead of learning the operating system that exists they demand the entire FOSS community bend to their specific need instead of them learning anything. It's the digital version of moving to CA from Texas because of their shitty laws and then trying to make CA's laws match the ones you're used to, that you just left, because they sucked. Sometimes the answer is to learn the new thing instead of reshape it into the old, and that's ok! Frankly when I switched I saw it as an exciting learning opportunity (even if it was kinda frustrating sometimes, so was biology class and that was fun too!)
I may be wrong about it in this case, but I would def be interested in what was said preceding them being dicks to you (which I totally believe they were dicks, I'm just curious if it was completely unwarranted, or if it was in response to the usual unreasonable demand.)
That's a well-meaning assumption, but no. My personal experiences asking for help from the linux community are very spaced out, and I understood long ago that asking for a GUI for something in linux is akin to requesting the murder of Torvalds.
For sure there are lots of people who start using linux and demand it works for their very specific usecase, verbally assault project maintainers, expect they be treated like paying customers despite getting something for free, and just do not understand that many opensource projects are passion projects with no commercial goals. I won't even get into the FLOSS purists who lose their minds when somebody does want to make money with opensource and dares use a different license.
But what I see more often is somebody asking for instructions to do something and being told to RTFM, "just do X", or copy-paste some commands into their terminal. And when the person asks for something without terminal commands, the responses are less than friendly. What worse is when developers suggest building a GUI (or even presenting a GUI) to make things easier for newcomers and advanced users going "but there's a CLI for that" or "please don't" or some other response like that.
And of course this isn't limited to the OS. As a developer, the "just use vim/emacs" crowd are equally as annoying. Trying to get neovim configured was such a terrible experience I just dropped it. Not only because of neovim itself, but because of the community too. "just learn LUA", "just copy this into your config, it's not that hard", *copy-paste some link to a stack-overflow question that has nothing to do with the question I asked*, etc. . It's quite similar with the Rust community that would love to lynch anybody using unsafe in their code.
It's that unhelpful and dogmatic attitude that I find is pervasive in tech communities. KDE developers and Gnome developers get along well, KDE and Gnome users could wage wars over which DE is the best. Zeus help you if you're a beginner and get in between.
I don't think I ever saw a Linux user that doesn't want it to have widespread adoption
It's the paradox of wanting Linux to be widely supported but not wanting it to become a walled garden experience. The average consumer is not keen on "different" and "complex" and designing all of Linux around the preferences of those average consumers would mean sacrificing the advanced features and customisation power users enjoy.
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.
Arch is not dumb shit and recommending it to beginners is fine if they are curious and want to learn about stuff.
Recommending Arch to people who just want a working machine is silly, and stuff like Gentoo is kind of dumb shit.
But if you want a simple "it just works" distro you should probably be using Mint or Pop! or similar, and avoiding trying to do anything unnecessarily advanced unless you are cool with reading manuals and so on.
Recommending Arch to people who just want a working machine is silly, and stuff like Gentoo is kind of dumb shit.
This is precisely what I mean. But there are too many people in the community who do exactly this. And then when beginners post a tirade about how shitty the linux experience was because they were recommended a geek distro, the comments are often filled with the equivalent of "skill issue".
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.
There was a major focus shift maybe 5 or 10 years ago towards security in Linux design, especially with the development of Wayland, pipewire and systemd. The problem is that accessibility software behaves in many ways like spyware or malware. It reads all windows, it hooks themselves in programs, it redirects output and input. The security focused (even security first) approach of many developers broke all the accessibility workflows and proper API to do it the new and safe way have low priority. A few exist but it is still far away from feature parity.
That's why I am against the Wayland default or even worse Wayland only approach that many distributions have nowadays, Wayland is still barely useable for many people who need working accessibility solutions and that should be seen as a major stopper issue for a wide release like that.
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'd say that it's on developers to try. It will take some learning, but that's just part of developing the capacity
Running ALSA as root had one huge benefit
Huh? ALSA is not a sound server, but a collection of kernel components and libraries. You don't run it.
With PipeWire or PulseAudio, audio is bound to a user session.
PipeWire has a system-wide mode of operation. It wasn't well-tested when I last asked about it, but it might be worth a try.
GTK3 broke accessibility for years.
GTK4 released with no accessibility support at all.
This whole article is focused on GNOME and other GTK-based desktops. The only mention of KDE Plasma at all is to say that a certain GNOME fork (MATE) isn't like it. This seems like a rather large oversight given that Qt, upon which Plasma is built, has accessibility features built in.
So, nearly every criticism here is not about Linux after all, but about a specific desktop family. I hope the author eventually notices that others exist, tries them, and discovers things that work better in them. (And it would be nice if they were to post a more comprehensive follow-up article, or at least rephrase this one so that it doesn't mislead people into thinking it represents the Linux desktop ecosystem as a whole.)
To be fair, most people who want to install Linux will google "how to install Linux" and most likely will be pointed at the main Ubuntu distro.
Tbftbf, that's not the correct way to do anything, you should always research before big purchases (like a laptop) or big changes (like an OS), even completely divorced from computing (like buying an anything).
We need to bring back the concept of the "informed decision."
I agree, but I'm cynical and don't see that ever happening.
All the more reason to call attention to an easily overlooked alternative, especially if it's able to serve a blind person's needs better.
Very true. Not a lot of outreach you can do on Lemmy, though. Still a pretty niche platform.
idk, the linux comms here are more helpful than the reddit ones imo. The people are roughly as active, and less hostile.
I agree, but what I mean is that Lemmy has a much smaller userbase. Most people don't even know about it.
EDIT: Also, the smaller userbase may itself be a reason for the more welcoming community.
While it has a smaller userbase, the nerds and linux users are more concentrated here, so there's still a lot of people who can help.
I encourage you to try all of the OS out there, blindfolded, and report back on which were easiest to set up without looking. That would be very helpful content.
>try all the OS out there
>person you're responding to is suggesting they try the other one of the two top DEs for Linux desktop before leading with "Linux Is Already Broken Before You Even Start"
This is a ridiculous strawman. I empathize with them and want to see accessibility improve (it's something I do in the project I work on even though you wouldn't conventionally expect that blind people can use it). If you're going to talk in such broad terms about the Linux desktop, not just your specific distro/DE, the onus is on you to at minimum try GNOME and KDE. Instead they chose GNOME and MATE, the latter of which is barely maintained and has effectively zero relevance outside of users who abandoned GNOME ages ago during GTK3 or people whose hardware makes the Atari 2600 look like a supercomputer (it looks like the former here). It's not 2017 anymore; Ubuntu with GNOME isn't some near-universal Linux desktop experience. I'm not telling them "nooooo just try my specific config for NixOS bro I promise Linux isn't that bad".
This isn't even to say that KDE will be better; I don't know, which is why I wish they covered it. If KDE is also bad, then this is a stronger argument that Linux desktop contributors need more awareness of and focus on accessibility. If it's just mediocre, KDE devs can see it and learn how to improve. If it's good, then GNOME and MATE devs have a lesson in how they can improve.
I don't expect anyone to exhaust every DE on every distro, but when the userbase is so firmly concentrated around GNOME and KDE, I expect you to at minimum include KDE (let alone if you include MATE). You don't have to, but I'm free to criticize your essay if you have such a massive hole in it. If you don't want to try KDE, literally just find+replace "Linux" to "GNOME/MATE" and solve the problem that way.
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.