I never thought I’d be this upset to a point I’d be writing an article about something this sensitive with a clickbait-y title. It’s simultaneously demotivating, unproductive, and infuriating. I’m here writing this post fully knowing that I could have been working on accessibility in GNOME, but really, I’m so tired of having my mood ruined because of privileged people spending at most 5 minutes to write erroneous posts and then pretending to be oblivious when confronted while it takes us 5 months of unpaid work to get a quarter of recognition, let alone acknowledgment, without accounting for the time “wasted” addressing these accusations.
I beg you, please keep writing banger posts like fireborn’s I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back series and their interluding post. We need more people with disabilities to keep reminding developers that you exist and your conditions and disabilities are a spectrum and not absolute.
TheEvilSkeleton is a pretty big GNOME developer whom I’m pretty sure I’ve bumped into before.
Not surprised that OOP knows better what users need than the users. That’s pretty much the whole concept of “opinionated” GNOME.
GNOME isn’t even accessible to non-disabled users.
I don’t think they’re saying they know better. Seems more like they’re tired of pouring hundreds of hours of free labor specifically into accessibility only to hear people bitch about how they’re not doing enough when the people bitching probably don’t even genuinely care beyond using it as a way to bash GNOME.
To which your response is to take the opportunity to talk shit about GNOME and disregard his meaning, which kinda illustrates his point.
Two things can be true at the same time:
And GNOME is not alone with that problem, it’s prevalent in the large majority of apps and platforms, because accessibility is really hard especially if you don’t have a tester with the specifically accessibility need on staff.
OOP says they have a legally blind and a semi-blind person on staff, but that’s by far not the only accessibility issue. Accessibility is much more than just screen reader support.
A big one is learning difficulties, and for that, having an UI that can be used the way the user wants/expects/knows how to is very important. And here, the very concept of an opinionated DE contradicts accessibility.
The measurement of success isn’t the hours put into it. I will continue to bash Gnome because no matter how much hours the devs put and no matter how much they believe they know better, their products sucks all kinds of balls, and that kind of it. I don’t have any underlying agenda or double meaning behind it. The product is shit. You made a lot of effort and put a lot of labour in it. This, unfortunately, means you put a lot of labour into shit.
Do you have to dunk on something just because it’s decidedly not for you? There are, in fact, many avid GNOME users who’ve tried Plasma or other DEs, including Linus Torvalds.
Even external and blind reviewers like Fireborn said GNOME was the only working option on Wayland.