Q. “I am blind, and I have been since 2021. I have...

Q. “I am blind, and I have been since 2021. I have grown very accustomed to using NVDA on Windows, which is a free open source screen reader. It's great… my question is, does Linux have good support for screen reading software?”

A. “As someone that deals with this on a daily basis: The short answer is 'no' … The best advice I can give you is to not bother investing too much in Linux and keep with Windows, or move to macOS.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/13rym2j/linux_and_scren_readers_for_the_blind/

#accessibility #linux #wayland #a11y

Like 19 February at 16:40 | Open on mastodon.ar.al

45 comments

Bernie the Wordsmith

@aral This is absolutely heartbreaking

19 February at 16:48 | Open on masto.es

Cogito ergo mecagoendios

@aral "Overall open source doesn't care too much about accessibility" Ow fuck that hurts. There was a time when I was impressed how much accessibility was by default installed in my first Ubuntu 8.04.

19 February at 16:48 | Open on mastodon.gal

Rachel Rawlings

@aral Peeking at their GitHub page, I see the software is 87% python, so is it just picking a GUI engine and finding programmers who want to do the work that's keeping it from being ported to Linux?

19 February at 16:50 | Open on mastodon.social

Michael T. Bacon, Ph.D.

@LinuxAndYarn @aral At a quick look there's some API calls to Windows that are going to be extremely platform specific and are pretty crucial to operation. So, no, I guess not.

(Insert my rant about how Linux on the desktop has been "just about ready for most users, just another year or two" since roughly 1994. I've given up waiting.)

19 February at 16:53 | Open on social.coop

DELETED

@MichaelTBacon I trialed Linux about two years ago for a year and, even as a fully abled person, it was a complete uphill battle and a struggle fighting my system over small paper cuts and tiny deficiencies. I’ve always felt it was almost there, but still not quite there, yet.

There are great developments all the time, but it’s always too little too late. The fragmentation is a bug and a feature simultaneously.

@LinuxAndYarn @aral

19 February at 18:02 | Open on mastodon.online

Rachel Rawlings

@apollon @MichaelTBacon I've been using Linux for over 20 years, and have spent most of them wishing that gnome and KDE could get it together amongst themselves to have a common UI library for developers to define interfaces that the rendering engines could just be skins on top of. So I do understand the pain

19 February at 18:29 | Open on mastodon.social

Γιάννης Εκελδεκερές

@apollon I think this is a matter of what you are used to. I have been using some flavor of Unix (mostly linux recently) as my desktop for about 20 years and I am extremely uncomfortable when I have to use Windows. That being said, I understand why people find it inaccessible. @MichaelTBacon @LinuxAndYarn

19 February at 18:40 | Open on mathstodon.xyz

hexaheximal

@aral CC @bgtlover (since they would probably have some ideas on how to solve that problem)

19 February at 16:52 | Open on mastodon.social

bgtlover

@hexaheximal @aral yes? what is it?

19 February at 18:29 | Open on linuxrocks.online

hexaheximal

@bgtlover @aral I just thought you'd have something to share about screen readers on linux.

19 February at 18:32 | Open on mastodon.social

bgtlover

@hexaheximal @aral ahh, yes, I may have, I think I did so with the @esoteric_programmer account, depends which thread though, I believe both

19 February at 18:33 | Open on linuxrocks.online

MatthewToad43

@aral Boosting this because as a lifelong Linux user with blind family, it's not okay. We need to do better. And we should listen to users as here.

Would be interested in any views on screen magnification, as opposed to screen reading, software. My family member is going to have to replace their computer shortly because of Windows 11 requires a TPM, ewww. But they're dependent on screen magnification software.

Also, one of the main complaints in the Reddit thread was the need to switch from graphical to virtual terminals, causing crashes due to audio conflicts. I would certainly have that problem, should I become blind, but I doubt my family member would.

@aral Boosting this because as a lifelong Linux user with blind family, it's not okay. We need to do better. And we should listen to users as here.

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19 February at 16:55 | Open on climatejustice.social

Aaron

@matthewtoad43 @aral I have even run into this wall as a seeing user. My monitor broke and my laptop is now bricked because I cannot get an external monitor to work no matter what I try. I can't tell if anything I'm doing is working or how it is breaking. If I could turn on a screen reader, I could still navigate the situation.

Accessibility features benefit *all* users, so even if you're an ableist jerk, it still makes sense to implement them.

19 February at 17:02 | Open on techhub.social

Jonathan T

@aral This is not news to anyone who follows the screen reading user community here.

What's worse is that while Windows and macOS are better, they're also not the 'great' they should be.

19 February at 16:59 | Open on mastodon.me.uk

Stephen Farrugia

@aral there is this line in https://fasterandworse.com/the-aura-of-care/ about open-source which I wrote with some anecdotal confidence it was true, but since I've learned it is far from true:

"In non-profit, government, or volunteer-based open source projects, the posture can, and usually does, match the reality but in commercial tech it’s always contingent to the strength of a business case."

19 February at 17:01 | Open on hci.social

Peter Bindels

@fasterandworse @aral It's not entirely wrong, but disregards legal requirements. When a company sells something, they can be required to do some things, like support accessibility. Open source doesn't let itself be legislated quite so easily.

19 February at 18:45 | Open on mastodon.social

Charismatic Batman

@aral

As both a #linux advocate/enjoyer, and the son of someone with extreme vision loss, yowza, this hurts. 😢

19 February at 17:11 | Open on theres.life

Adrian Vovk

@aral This really stings, but we do have some good news coming in this front. Through a grant provided by the Sovereign Tech Fund, GNOME has been investing money into accessibility development and making progress on it.

CC @sonny

19 February at 17:16 | Open on fosstodon.org

Yuuka

@aral I looked for it quite often due to being dyslexic. And yeah, macOS for me is the only way. I constantly get annoyed with a lot of the Linux choices. Like getting rid of global menus yes, KDE has it. But some applications don’t use it and if you’re trying to set up a system for somebody with limited mobility, the little hamburger menu is a terrible option. With a global menu, it’s always in the same place and I can map gestures there that they can manage. So I get the macs

19 February at 17:51 | Open on mastodon.cloud

Sabella

@aral accessibility is where open source _should_ be excelling, and yet here we are...

19 February at 17:52 | Open on furs.social

John Breen

@aral I take your word for it, but I'm really surprised that no such screen reader exists for linux. Hopefully others have an idea. If it is open source, has no one tried a port ?

19 February at 17:52 | Open on universeodon.com

Carnildo

@jab01701mid @aral The problem isn't a lack of a screen reader, it's the lack of a consistent user-interface API. Linux has two major UI frameworks (GTK+ and Qt) and a whole mess of minor ones, so there's no single point you can plug in to and start describing what's on the screen.

19 February at 20:41 | Open on indieweb.social

John Breen

@carnildo @aral True, the fact that Windows (and MacOS ?) supports only one Windowing system might seem like a "feature".
But assuming people are willing to use GNOME/GTK, or even Wayland, on Ubuntu, it seems like there is a good chance this could be available for linux soon, which despite the complaints, offers some significant advantages compared with Windows platforms, for all users.

19 February at 20:59 | Open on universeodon.com

John Breen

@carnildo @aral I'm curious, have you tried the Orca screen reader ? It seems to be installed by default with Ubuntu 22.04, and I had never tried it, but did just now, and while I'm not sure how it compares with NVDA, and am not sight-impared, it seems to work. ???

20 February at 1:21 | Open on universeodon.com

Carnildo

@jab01701mid @aral No experience with Orca. I'm not sight-impaired; my screen-reader experience consists of researching and using Windows and Mac screen readers so I can tell my co-workers "no, a screen reader isn't going to be able to do anything useful with that".

20 February at 6:35 | Open on indieweb.social

DELETED

@aral What is sad is not only the state of accessibility on Linux, but also the hoops that person you quoted had to go through to accumulate that knowledge about the horrible state Linux accessibility is at.

19 February at 17:59 | Open on mastodon.online

Scott 🏴

@aral 🤔 maybe "scratch your own itch" isn't the best way to manage software development

19 February at 18:19 | Open on tams.tech

The Penguin of Evil

@scott @aral Accessibility is hard. And not only do you need accessibility in the core libraries for the UI (which is actually there) you then have to wire it to something useful. That gets really hard.

There has always been good console screenreading because it's an easier problem and also because there are/were blind developers maintaining it (at least one kernel developer is blind - and I didn't discover this until I met him).

19 February at 20:31 | Open on mastodon.social

DELETED

@aral @briankrebs I’ve never used NVDA on Windows, but yeah, there’s nothing good on Linux. MacOS is great.

19 February at 18:33 | Open on infosec.exchange

mausmalone

@aral Orca exists, at least. So if you're a screen reader user and you find yourself having to navigate a Linux desktop some day it may be your any port in a storm.

To turn it on in Ubuntu it's Alt+Super+S for Screen reader. (This might be all GNOME but IDK for sure.)

It's mostly good enough to use Firefox for basic web browsing but that's about it. I use it for quick web dev spot-checks but I have to boot Windows with NVDA to give any site a thorough rundown.

19 February at 19:08 | Open on mastodon.social

Sebastian {DarkMetatron}

@mausmalone
@aral
Yes, Orca exists but it is utterly broken when used with Wayland due to higher security standards in Wayland and it looks like it will stay broken for some time.

And with more and more distributions using Wayland as the main display server it is a really bad time for accessibility on Linux.

So in this regard, visually impaired or blind people have no choice but to stay away from Linux.

@mausmalone
@aral
Yes, Orca exists but it is utterly broken when used with Wayland due to higher security standards in Wayland and it looks like it will stay broken for some time.

And with more and more distributions using Wayland as the main display server it is a really bad time for accessibility on Linux.

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19 February at 21:08 | Open on rollenspiel.social

mausmalone

@DarkMetatron @aral yup, this is the "any port in a storm" part.

I would never recommend desktop Linux to a blind person.

But if you're blind and you somehow get stuck on desktop Linux (i.e. borrowing a computer, helping a friend), it's good to know it's there.

19 February at 21:12 | Open on mastodon.social

smxi

@aral Standard desktop #Linux just broke 3% global market-share. Almost nobody pays a cent for their non-commercial Linux. There is a constant theme I find that "oh they should do this or that", as if there were thousands of developers just itching to donate time worth often north of $200 an hour for a lifetime payback of often 0, or very close to 0.

Because of this reality, free desktops (free as in liberty) remain largely engineer built and oriented. Not right choice for everyone. Can't be.

19 February at 19:32 | Open on fosstodon.org

smxi

@aral vast bulk of funding goes to server #linux kernel features, which is why the kernel is incredibly robust compared to in particular OSX's kernel. Right now, for example, #Pop_OS is building their new #Cosmic desktop/compositor, with a team of 7 developers. MS, Apple, Google field 10s of thousands, and can assign any group of them to any feature, that's their job.

I'd say if you interact with Linux, desktops, compositors, tools, and go YES!, it's for you. If not, maybe not best fit.

19 February at 19:37 | Open on fosstodon.org

smxi

@aral Every Apple and MS user pays for the base OS install, usually as part of a hardware bundle, always in the case of Apple. This is what pays for the features and development. You have to wrap your heads around the fact you are NOT comparing apples to apples, I have never paid more than 0 for any Linux or desktop or window manager. So I contribute what I can back to the larger free software ecosystem as my way of doing my part. Free desktops don't have the luxury of dropping millions on x, y

19 February at 19:41 | Open on fosstodon.org

smxi

@aral when I was doing active #linux forum and IRC distro support, there was a specific type of user, who never stayed, never contributed anything, yet was the most loudly vocal in demanding x or y feature, with a certain sense of entitlement that could only come from using apple or MS products their whole lives, never realizing the true cost they were paying. Chromebook similar issue re google.

I no longer do that type of support, thankfully. Ask yourself: what did you pay? who did the work?

19 February at 19:49 | Open on fosstodon.org

Aral Balkan

@smxi You’re going to have to ask that question of Red Hat and IBM’s enterprise customers, among others – I believe they pay quite a bit.

19 February at 19:54 | Open on mastodon.ar.al

smxi

@aral That's why I specifically excluded those. That constitutes I'd guess a tiny fraction of 1% of real world desktop installs. But IBM's Redhat division probably uses 99% code that they did not write, despite their absurd complaints about people using their code for free.

The closest you'll come to significant numbers of realworld RHEL users are Fedora users, who pay nothing.

In #FreeSoftware, real question is what have I done? Not they, or you, or someone else, but I. Confuses consumers.

19 February at 19:56 | Open on fosstodon.org

Aral Balkan

@smxi I don’t know, man, I just work on free software all day every day and I don’t have any enterprise customers and neither am I a ~$200B corporation like IBM that profits from Linux because I’m making tools for people not corporations or governments. So maybe, just maybe, folks have a valid reason to ask why something is inaccessible with corporations are making billions with it.

Anyway, have a good day.

19 February at 19:59 | Open on mastodon.ar.al

smxi

@aral I wasn't saying it would not be nice to have a good solid native screenreader, but that 'would be nice' isn't magic, it has to be built by people who are either willing to fund it, or do the work. And it may not be possible if it requires certain APIs that are simply not there, which means integrating the work with other projects, which is not easy.

I make tools for free as well, but not for the money, it's just to give back, and help fill needs I found in support and sys admin, eg #inxi