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.
I know the author will probably never read this, but in the off chance they or someone else working on open source accessibility reads it:
Thank you. So much ❤️ Your hard work and dedication keeps me going when times get rough.
And thanks for the rant. Nobody should have to suffer in silence, and that includes you. So any time you want to rant at us leeches about working in open source, please don’t hesitate to put us in our place.
I hope that we find a way to make the internet a more positive and celebratory place for people like you who do hard work the rest of us don’t have the time or energy for.
It’s crazy that Elementary is the only OS that seems to care about these things, but that’s what you get when you’re the only distribution to focus on design at all.
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:
- GNOME devs can pour hundreds of hours of free labour specifically into accessibility
- GNOME accessibility still sucks
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.
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Even external and blind reviewers like Fireborn said GNOME was the only working option on Wayland.
Damn, I went to read the linked post I Want to Love Linux, it Doesn’t Love Me Back and it is, indeed, a banger.
I agree I remember reading it when it came out and it’s heartbreaking to see these things not only not progress but slowly regress. I have found a relatively stable home on silverblue but even with that things can go wrong and I cannot imagine having to debug blind. While I support the general motive for migrating to Wayland I don’t think it’s worth losing accessibility.
I (probably erroneously) expected better from software pushed by enterprises.
“code it yourself” if i could, noone would ever had to open a console or a terminal or cmd ever again. even the poweruser windows experience is a nightmare, i cant imagine how shit linux can be for someone with a disability. big respect to the writer.
The one I like is “Document it yourself.”
Hey, this application exposes a Python API to the user, where’s the API reference? How do I learn how to use it?
We didn’t write it.
Well…could you?
If you want it to exist, you write it.
How am I supposed to do that?
Examine the app’s source code.
Console experience is better for all kinds of disabilities. Text is the best instrument to convey info we have. For most of the accessibility issues the best thing you can do is to present text on a screen, and expect text as input.
Just fyi, console can be more usable than gui for many disabled people. Text-to-Speech software relies on there being text, and mouses require fine motor movements.
haha partway through the article I was like why don’t you just use NixOS and then they actually covered it.
It looks like if NixOS spent some time working on its accessibility during setup, It could be a really good solution.
Does NixOs have a set of good documentation yet, or is it still “just read these 6 different articles/ebooks, but dont listen do the what the 3rd book talks about in its second half, except for chapter 7. Do chapter 7, but how guide 4 describes it. Then you should have a default config and everything will be perfect.”
Having learned Nix recently and still not being great at it, writing your personal config is relatively easy. The website has a search feature for options you can use by default, so it’s pretty straightforward. Just search for relevant keywords and set the options you like.
If you want to package software for nixpkgs, define custom options, or anything else that’s going to require custom Nix, it’s… Better than you make it sound but not great. I only read one guide, and it wasn’t great, but it covered the basics well enough. From there, I managed to figure out what I’ve needed so far just from the official documentation for the Nix language. It’s not everything it could be, but it’s not too bad.
If you wanna really get into the thick of it and extensively write Nix for some detailed purpose, you might run into some more problems. I still don’t think it’d be as bad as you make it sound, but you probably won’t be thrilled, either.
NixOS’s installer has been seeing a lot of work, I’m not aware of the a11y changes but it has been getting a lot simpler and compact.
Not just the installer but setting up stuff for a11y in general.
