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For eight years Fedora has been shipping GNOME with a broken screen reader!
EIGHT YEARS!
(Wayland has been default on Fedora for eight years – since Fedora 25, released in 2016.)
And a hundred-billion-dollar corporation like IBM ships operating systems today based on it with a broken screen reader.
What is an ableist culture? One in which the people who call this out get ostracised.
#ableism #fedora #redHat #IBM #gnome #cosmic #wayland #a11y #system76 #linux https://fosstodon.org/@soller/112646375569571307
@aral Fedora is not IBM but a bunch of people mostly working on a project for free. Xorg is a security concern so the switch was justified even with not all features being present. Instead of trying to shame opensource developers and unjustly calling them IBM you can grab some issues and help working on them.
@jgamble @aral You have clear misunderstanding what Fedora is. You have Upstream -> Fedora -> CentOS -> RHEL
CentOS and RHEL are fully controlled by RedHat but for Fedora RedHat has stake in Fedora Council. That said GNOME and Wayland are opensourece projects with their own control and decisions. I think we should start shaming all distributions that use GNOME and Wayland here, shouldn't we?
I do see people pointing to the RHEL/Fedora differences, but nobody has really mentioned the core complaint.
Seeing that RHEL moved to Wayland fully in 9, and Fedora people were pointing at Wayland as the problem...
Should we then assume that RHEL is morally pure here? is RHEL shipping with a screen reader in the default config?
I don't run RHEL - anyone know for sure?
@aral @mattb @jgamble I was using Fedora pretty much from day 1. I remember hour and hours spent packaging and helping with Fedora development as an student. I worked on Fedora while slaving hours in an startup and after I joined RedHat I pretty much stopped working on it as I have other things to do. It's offending what you say there. And I will repeat my self - where are the tracking issues, what did you do for them being fixed?
JavaScrippled web sites are show stoppers for me. I feel completely excluded.
It's an accessibility issue for me, because of my rare disabilities, and I'm going to court to fight governments, banks, and whatnot, for not tending to it.
You, however, don't consider this accessibility feature important, and you have even dismissed it before, because other design goals trumped it.
how would it feel if I were to call you out and shame you for not tending to an accessibility need, labeling you ableist for making choices in your developments that are not compatible with my accessibility needs?
@xbezdick @aral @mattb @jgamble I always find this an interesting take. On the one hand I completely get it, it's a valid point. But on the other hand I think it's important to keep in mind it's not just FLOSS developers who use this, or any, Linux distro. A user switching from Windows/Mac isn't going to want to learn a programming language, Linux internals, Orca internals etc. jut to get their system to work. Does that by proxy then mean they can't call out they feel being excluded, when an initiatve (Wayland, pipewire, take your pick) was quite obviously developed in such a way where accessibility was excluded?
It took 8 years for Wayland to develop some kind of semblance of accessibility. Calamares installer has had issues open for almost the same amount of time. Screen reader users, who are definitely not always developers or even open-source enthusiasts, who just want to use a piece of software like everybody else does, can't, and haven't been able to for a very, very long time without all kinds of blackbelt tech fuckery that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, let along a random user who just wants to try Linux. Such a user doesn't care about issues, or giving back to the community, or how to best and constructively provide feedback to the right person. THis user sees people exclude them for years, and then give them a hard time for daring to speak up. I have had people in my streams asking me if it's even worth creating issues because they feel they'll either be ignored or yelled at. Is that the message we want to send?
Let's take IBM out of the equation for a minute and let's not even look at Fedora, let's look at Linux as a non-techie sees it. Oh yeah, Linux, the alternative to Windows. There's different flavors of it right? Cool, I like (insert_favorite_distro_here), let's install it.
From this viewpoint, ANY Linux distro is outright hostile to a user with assistive tech needs. Many of them don't include a screen reader at all, which means a user who needs one can't install it by themselves. Some have one, but require a to the user unreachable checkbox to be enabled first. Some have a screen reader, but no voice to speak through. And that's just screenreaders.
Xorg is a security risk so the change was warranted is all well and good, but what a lot of these projects fail to take into account is that accessibility should be up there with security, localization, performance etc., because otherwise you're, at this point, wilfully discriminating against potential users. Not fun to say, not fun to hear I'm sure, but a fact nonetheless. And I get to say this. As a developer who's fully blind, has a 40-hour a week job, and would very much like to find an OS that isn't Windows/Mac OS without having to essentially rearchitect the entire freaking accessibility API before I do anything else, i get to bitch when literally an entire ecosystem figures that I'll get my turn years, maybe even decades after everybody else is already moving onto the next thing. Even if I don't have issues to my name that provide me that street cred, sorry to say
@zersiax I'm in the exact same boat; with the exact same view point and couldn't have said it better...
@zersiax No one was tagged in this in case you didn't know.
@KaraLG84 nah it was a continuation of a response to an already convoluted thread :) wouldn't be surprised if that just fell over entirely
@zersiax @FreakyFwoof I'm in the exact same boat. Well put.
@zersiax
Ubuntu has a full stack of accessibility options for people with different disabilities, right from the install screen.
@per_sonne ubuntu is one of the very, very few that does, and it's taken a very long time to get where they are now
@zersiax
Good news! ...right...?
@per_sonne oh absolutely :) I'd say Ubuntu is among the good ones that you CAN use provided you need/want to use Linux, but a lot of more specific ones can be rather problematic. Take for example Kali which is de facto for cybersecurity, I found that in the latest version audio has become so stuttery that screen readers cannot be used. And it's anyone's guess if/when that gets fixed. Ubuntu, at literally any point, might fall victim to a very similar problem with a similar uncertain fix, which means that until this stuff becomes more top-of-mind for Linux distros as a whole, running any flavor of Linux is basically a game of Russian roulette every single time a distro updates. Not great if you rely on your machine for any reason at all :)
It is disheartening to see that instead of the fact that instead of seeing the criticism that Lynux is broken when it comes to accessibility, people start arguing on who to pass the blame too instead of banding together and coming up with a solution. (2/2)