Linux GUI
@xogium A lot of this makes me wonder if the current solution should be to just write applications that provide accessibility itself. Like bundling espeak in to an app, colorblind modes, etc.
It's not a pretty solution but it's becoming clear that we can't rely on infrastructure to stay accessible.
@devinprater@tweesecake.social @jookia @xogium Or the ones that would would all do so differently, requiring the users to learn every program as if it were an entirely different AT stack, like switching between JAWS and NVDA and VoiceOver and different browsers and... Perhaps the mainstream understandable Linux equivalent would be being required to know how to totally use both emacs and vim without any adaptation scripts to make one feel like the other.
@x0 @devinprater [tweesecake.social] @jookia Yes, exactly. I went through this w/ chromevox for years. I am never doing that again. I didn't mind orca vs speakup. But learning a screen reader for each and every app? Nop, thanks.
@xogium @devinprater@tweesecake.social @jookia From my outside perspective, I think along with a fair few developers not caring, there are just too many choices. The reason marginally more Windows apps are accessible is because unless you use something like tkinter which just draws the entire UI, you're eventually using win32, and win32 talks to the accessibility APIs *by default*. Unsure what QT is doing but I know the so-called accessible UI it exposes to screen readers is unnecessarily verbose, all buttons say enter for instance, and edit fields and tables just don't behave like the corresponding native controls. But while AtSpy or whatever it's called exists, the fact of FOSS means that all these UI toolkits and window managers and everything else are so fragmented as to require the NVDA app module/JAWS script style workarounds for every framework just as well as every app's idiosyncratic use of said framework. Of course centralization into one dominent framework for everything is not the answer, as the odds are said thing would be inaccessible by default and be staffed with people who don't care. I personally just don't think it possible without some fundamental change, beyond devs caring about accessibility. Something about the entire ecosystem has to change or it will always be a hopeless tangle of barely working this and that.
@xogium @devinprater@tweesecake.social @jookia Maybe accessibility becoming part of the kernel? That seems unlikely though and probably out of scope for very good reasons. TO my knowledge the kernel doesn't have anything to do with GUI, the only interaction it has is display rendering and you can't hook accessibility into that, that would be absurd.
@x0 @devinprater [tweesecake.social] @jookia Yep that's what I'm thinking too. As long as society will remain the same, it will leave us with such software stacks. A real shame if there ever was one.
@xogium @x0 @devinprater [tweesecake.social] It's not ideal but I don't really know what else to do if I want to ensure a program is usable on systems without a screen reader
@x0 @xogium @devinprater [tweesecake.social] Creating my own would help that :)