1mo ago

I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back: A letter from those with a disability.

fireborn.mataroa.blog

I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back: Post 1 – Built for Control, But Not for People — fireborn

A great writeup on the experience of blind users navigating GNU/Linux and the many pitfalls that prevent them from being able to use their machine.

Linux “just works”—if you can see.

If you’re blind? You boot into a live image and get nothing. No speech. No braille. No login prompt feedback. Maybe Orca starts, maybe not. Maybe you know the shortcut (Alt+Super+S?) but does that even work in this session type? Is it Wayland? Is it X11? Is the screen reader bound to a key combo that doesn’t exist on your keyboard?

You open the installer?

“Next. Button. Button. Button. Button.” That’s all Orca says.

Ubuntu MATE 12.04 had a working, labeled, navigable installer. Ubuntu MATE 24.04? It’s garbage.

No headings. No structure. No sense of where you are. Just unlabeled buttons and blank space.

This isn’t a bug. This is neglect.

I think a great takeaway from this is that a11y finds itself at the end of the pipeline, as the last thing that needs to be done.

6 comments

Thanks for sharing this. I'm surprised to hear the situation is so rough. All the pieces seem to be there, and it is easy to assume "Someone is working on this. Someone is keeping on top of the situation," but clearly that is not the case.
- One of the key issues is that disabled people can't build the accessibility they need to participate. There's no "contributions welcome" that one can say.
  It's a very dire situation, but I'm glad this is getting more attention in the community. This is probably one of the most important blogposts I've read in a while.
  
  The author has a follow up article and I'm dying lmfao
  You Call This a Stack?
  People call it a stack.
  But it’s not.
  A stack implies layers. Order. A single interface at each point.
  This is not a stack.
  This is a tangled mess of everything ever built for Linux audio still being required right now because no one can kill anything off without breaking something else.
  You want to play sound? You need:
  ALSA, because it’s the actual driver
  PipeWire, because it’s the new standard
  Pulse emulation, because most apps still use Pulse
  ALSA plugins, because some things bypass PipeWire
  JACK shims, because a few pro audio tools never moved on
  And config files for all of it—if they even exist
  This isn’t backwards compatibility.
  This is a graveyard, and we’re all just camping in it.
  Edit: In my personal experience things have gotten a lot better since PipeWire was introduced, but the author is correct that whenever this shit breaks (or malfunctions) it is incredibly difficult to debug. There are so many layers, each with their own logs, and you're lucky if they even log anything relevant to your problem in the first place. For all the hatred and death threats Lennart Pottering recieved for introducing systemd into this world (which is fine, actually) his real crime was PulseAudio. :)

6 comments

You Call This a Stack?