A sad, painful, and infuriating read for this calm Sunday. In recent years, a lot of attention has gone into improving the output side of the accessibility story on Wayland – screen readers and the like – but apparently, the input side has languished. People with reduced mobility need affordances and tools to use computers, but those aren’t ready for Wayland.
A popular set of tools here is Talos Voice, which allows people with reduced mobility to create powerful hands-free input methods. The examples the article gives are incredibly cool, and it’s easy to see how Talos would become a cornerstone for people with reduced mobility who needs hands-free (or hands-fewer?) computer input methods.
So what’s going wrong here?
Talon requires deep integration with the window manager and compositor to carry out even the most basic of its duties, and Wayland offers… Absolutely no way to perform any of those actions.
[…]
Frustrated by the endless lack of progress towards a real set of solutions for the entire ecosystem, and inundated by an endless series of requests for Wayland support which he cannot provide, Aegis, the main (and only) developer of Talon, has made a declaration: Enough. Talon Voice will imminently remove ALL Linux support from the public release, as X11 continues to sunset and users are switched to an environment in which their system can no longer function, with no option to go back.
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So not only will Talos not gain Wayland support any time soon, its developers are even removing X11 support from it. What this means is that even if you decide to stick to X11 because Wayland doesn’t fulfill your needs, you’re eventually going to run into a brick wall. This is merely annoying if you need to use a different application for remote desktop or whatever, but it’s absolutely devastating when it involves the very input method you use to use your computer in the first place.
There is some important nuance here though that the article doesn’t mention. The article takes the word of Talos’ developers as gospel, but in my conversations with KDE developers, a different story emerges. What they tell me is that Wayland implements all the APIs needed for Talos to work, but that Talos’ developers are simply not interested in using them. Apparently, KDE developers and others have tried to contact Talos’ developers, but their offers to help are being ignored. They’re being told Talos is simply not interested in supporting Wayland, “end of story”.
So, the story here seems to be a lot more complex than just “Wayland bad”, and I’m getting a bit of a vibe that the Talos developers are, despite claims to the contrary in the article, indeed removing X11 support out of spite. Talos is entirely within their right to not want to work on Wayland support, but then just be honest with your users and say so, instead of pinning everything on “Wayland bad”, being dishonest about Wayland’s capabilities, and ignoring offers of help and support from some of the most knowledgeable and capable developers in the field.
Of course, that’s absolutely of no relevance to people like the author of this article who depend on these tools to use their computers. They’re caught in the middle of a transition and experiencing the worst byproducts, and that’s a huge failure on everybody’s end – Wayland, Talos, and desktop environments alike. I hope the parties involved can sort this out quickly, because everyone deserves equal access to computers, doubly so in the open source world.
