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The state of Unix/Linux accessibility is even worse then I feared 🙈 . Fedora has been shipping with a broken screen reader for NINE YEARS?

Orca doesn't work on any distribution that ships with Wayland by default? 😭 (thanks @aral for bringing it my attention)

Do all the distributions and such know that next year they should be accessible?

I can't code and I am not familiar with testing desktop apps, but I would really like to know how I can help to fix this.

(allthough it shows a bigger problem in open source and it's culture)

Read more: https://ar.al/2024/06/23/fedora-has-been-shipping-with-a-broken-screen-reader-for-nine-years-but-the-real-problem-is-me/

Luckily the Newton Project should fix this https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/, but still: it shows accessiiblity is often an afterthought.

#accessibility #opensource #orca #gnome #wayland #screenreader

This entry was edited (5 days ago)
in reply to Sophie

What is the legal grounds that desktops should be accessible next year?

Is that requirement applicable to individual volunteer programmers who share their code freely "as is"?

Or is this requirement only applicable to a company like Red Hat who get paid to deliver a distro based on open source code?

Apart from the moral imperative which I agree with, serious question... I worked on gov websites for 15 years and the a11y requirements for those was obvious.

@aral

in reply to Frank

@fschaap Next year the European Accessiiblity Act comes into play, and it also applies to operating systems: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/accessibility-of-products-and-services.html.

It is not exactly clear how open source operating systems fall under this, but without more clarification I would say they fall under this act.

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