Accessibility in the software world is a problem in general, but it’s an even bigger problem on open source desktops, as painfully highlighted by this excellent article detailing the utterly broken state of accessibility on Linux. Reading the article is soul-crushing as it starts to dawn on you just how bad the situation really is for those among us who require accessibility features, making it virtually impossible for them to switch to Linux.
This obviously has to change, and it just so happens that both on the GTK/GNOME and KDE side, recent work on accessibility has delivered some valuable results. Starting with GTK and GNOME, the framework has recently merged the AccessKit backend with GTK 4.18, which enables accessibility features when running GTK applications on Windows and macOS. On Linux, GTK still defaults to at-spi, but I’m sure this will change eventually too.
Another major improvement are the special keyboard shortcuts normally provided by the screen reader Orca. Support for these was in the works for a while but incomplete, but now this work has been completed, and the new shortcuts ship as part of GNOME 48. Accessibility support for GNOME Web has been greatly improved as well, and Elevado is a new tool that shows you what applications expose on the a11y bus. There’s a ton additional, smaller changes too.
On the KDE side, a number of accessibility improvements have been implemented as part of the project’s goal to improving input handling. You can now use the numerical pad’s arrow keys to move the mouse cursor, there’s a new 3-finger gesture to invoke the desktop zoom accessibility feature, keyboard navigation in general has been improved in a wide variety of places in KDE, and a whole bunch more improvements. In addition, a number of financial grants have been given to developers working on accessibility in KDE, such as a project to make file management-related features – think open/save dialogs, Dolphin, and so on – fully accessibly, and projects to make touchpad and screen gestures fully customisable.
Accessibility is never really “done” or “perfect”, but there’s definitely an increasing awareness among the two major open source desktops of just how important it is. A few confounding factors – like the switch to Wayland or the complicated history of audio on Linux – have actually hurt accessibility, and it’s only now that things are starting to look up again. However, as anyone with reduced vision or auditory problems can tell you, Linux and the open source desktop still has a very long way to go.
Accessibility has been terrible in the early alphas of COSMIC but they seem to be making a real push on it now. Overall, I expect the accessibility story on Linux to improve quite a bit.
Nah, it would never improve. It goes in circles: first they rewrite everything and accessibility is toast, then they spend 3-5-10 years to bring accessibility and other niceties till things start working adequately… just in time for the new grand rewrite when everything stops working, again.
Just accept the fact that GNU/Linux would never be usable as a desktop OS… maybe in a couple of years, when Google would bring Android to desktop, we would finally get a Linux on desktop that may be trusted to have accessibility and other such things, but not while we have that endless CADT cycle of rewrite.
Indeed this is the way they have always worked in the twenty-five years I have used it. I have been waiting for the next new shinny chase they will do, the trash AI enshitification rewrite. Though strangely enough not even a peep from them in this direction yet.
In GNOME 2 they had well-designed and tested GUI guidelines, including accessibility. They throw all that work to the garbage with GNOME 3.
I miss those days! They were like the free software version of the Windows 95/98/2000 era in terms of UI: well thought-out, consistent, soon-to-be replaced by a pile of poop. Just look at something like Gnumeric which is a relic of that time (except bug fixes). It’s no wonder, as the author notes, that MATE is the only consistent Linux desktop for accessibility.
Just stop making everything flat, and you saved 90% of the effort!
There is no OS called “Linux”, just hundreds of distros that use the Linux kernel. Every single one of those distros was made by someone that wanted their system to run a certain way. Apparently there are no people who want their distro to run the way the author of this article, “fireborn”, wants a distro to run – or at least that’s what this author intends us to believe. Did this author try Trisquel, the distro that I run, that’s widely known for its accessibility features? I don’t know – fireborn doesn’t mention it in the article. Did this author try Emmabuntus or Vojtux or Accessible-Coconut (AC), all of which are distros that are specifically hand-crafted for the visually impaired? I don’t know – none of them are mentioned in fireborn’s article. fireborn mentions Fedora, Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, NixOS – the big ones – but those are all general purpose distros that are not focused on accessibility as a primary issue – they are focused primarily on being excellent server distros and secondarily on being somewhat useful on the desktop. There are lots of things the big distros are not good at – they are also not terribly good at gaming and streaming, they generally aren’t able to be embedded successfully to run a cell phone and don’t do overly well on tablets or e-readers. That’s not the purpose for them – they are server first, and a remote second is desktop useability, and then far, far down the line is accessibility for the visually impaired. So – why are you using a server first, big, general distro for accessibility purposes and then complaining that it’s not any good at accessibility? Might as well complain that you can’t win a round of Call of Duty online with it either – that’s not what those distros are trying to achieve, and no amount of complaining about it is going to change them from being big, general purpose, server-first distros into narrowly focused, specialized, accessibility distros. However, narrowly focused, specialized, accessibility distros do exist – the author should at least try to be aware of them and talk about them in this accessibility context.
Booohooo, they are mostly the same. There is very few pure distros. most are just builds upon others. if you exclude the ones built on the big five, you get Void, arch and Slackware.
What is this nonsense? All of those are excellent desktop OS. Sure, they could have better a11y support, but the biggest issue is on the part of the Desktops, which are in the process of rebuilding the a11y stack.
What are advantages of Wayland for the end user? Maybe half of stuff that used to work on X11 is broken, but in exchange there’s screen glitching and GPU acceleration doesn’t work in some cases (I don’t care who is at fault here. It used to work, it doesn’t now, therefore for end user it sucks). When Wayland issues and regressions are resolved user will switch just like that and never look back.
Now both X11 and Wayland are broken. Yaay….?
I wouldn’t call X11 “broken”. I have used it for decades, and haven’t seen any of the “screen glitching” problems, but maybe because I use boring HP Laptops and Desktops. I am sure Wayland will be great when it’s finished.
Same here X11 worked for me very well for the same amount of time, that steaming pile of dung Wayland not so much.
Accessibility: Having only one usable hand, I need Sticky Keys to be enabled in order to use the keyboard [eg for Ctrl-Alt-]. The only Desktop Environment I have found with this is XFCE4 [x11], but that recently “forgets” Sticky Keys are enabled, and needs frequent fixing. When using Openbox I must enable them with the low-level Xkbset in a tiny daemon loop script.
There is a Console solution as well, but I visit it so infrequently that I always forget the details.
I have yet to find any other Desktop Environments that support Sticky Keys [eg Gnome, KDE].
I don’t know if Wayland has these accessibility mechanisms.
From what I understand, Wayland was designed to leave accessibility to window managers and desktop environments.
Can you list the Wayland WMs and DEs that have Accessibility support?
I’m afraid not. I don’t think any Wayland GTK4-based WMs or DEs are making use of the Newton project (only some apps are) but that’s where I would start looking. In fact, I probably *should* start looking, as I’m starting to lose mobility in my right arm and hand.
Funny enough, just four days ago there was this (https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1kkuafo/wayland_an_accessibility_nightmare/) interesting conversation on r/linux started by a developer working on accessibility software pointing to the Wayland wall he’s facing now.
While i myself don’t need nor use accessibility features i do help regular people transition towards Linux and worry very much about other people’s point of view, this one being crucial … which personally frustrates me as each & every time i can’t find a solution.
EDIT: not sure how many people nowadays actually read linked articles… so i’ll take this chance to encourage reading the first article linked on this post, even though it’s infuriating to read the sorry state of everything.