Gregory's ServerAnother good example of this is GTK. When GTK 3 came out, there was a bit of fighting over accessibility, but nothing alarming. The GTK folks were generally happy to make the toolkit in a way that it had built-in accessibility support. Default widgets came with accessibility from the get go, a bit like html 5 does nowadays for websites. And it was great this way.
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This all filled the glass of my patience pretty quickly, I do have to admit. I went through this for months. What put the figurative nail into the coffin for me was that I realized that somehow, GTK 4 programs are actually even worse on wayland than they were on xorg. The accessibility and usability degraded further! How's that possible? No clue. The very same program will behave a miniscule bit better on xorg than on wayland. Go figure that one out. So then, you might ask me, why don't you just use QT programs if they work better? Well, the fact that QT 6 is out is great, but it also cause regressions. QT is nowhere near perfect. It is nowhere as usable as gtk 2 and 3 ever were, when things used to be done properly. That aside it seems that QT accessibility features are opt-in rather than opt-out. I could be wrong about that, and as a matter of fact, I hope I am. @jookia To be fair, to use Linux as a blind person these days, you do need to be a power user in the first place. But that.s for another thread... @xogium A lot of this makes me wonder if the current solution should be to just write applications that provide accessibility itself. Like bundling espeak in to an app, colorblind modes, etc. It's not a pretty solution but it's becoming clear that we can't rely on infrastructure to stay accessible. @jookia Nah, I doubt it. It would just lead to programs not being usable at all. Next to no dev would bother. @devinprater @jookia @xogium Or the ones that would would all do so differently, requiring the users to learn every program as if it were an entirely different AT stack, like switching between JAWS and NVDA and VoiceOver and different browsers and... Perhaps the mainstream understandable Linux equivalent would be being required to know how to totally use both emacs and vim without any adaptation scripts to make one feel like the other. @devinprater @jookia @xogium And to switch constantly between those each hour depending on what you need to do |
When GTK 4 came out, on the other hand, things had shifted. No longer were the GTK people happy to provide accessibility for us. No longer did they care about it. Their grand plan was to remove accessibility from GTK altogether, claiming that it was up to the applications themselves to become accessible. It took several weeks, and even days during fosdem for them to recognize this wasn't the way forward, thanks to the orca developer and the Hypra folks, but they got the idea. Or did they?