Someone please tell me screen reader support isn’t broken on the major Linux distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu that ship Wayland as default.
(I can’t get the modifier key for Orca to work under the latest Fedora Silverblue and, according to the linked issue, it’s because… it just doesn’t work under Wayland? That can’t be right, right? It would mean the major Linux distributions are inaccessible.)
Wow, OK, so I wasn’t missing anything. It looks like the only available screen reader on major Linux distributions is broken and has been for some time.
https://github.com/xkbcommon/libxkbcommon/issues/425#issuecomment-1951360916
Lack of accessibility not being a show stopper for an operating systems blows my mind.
We’re talking about distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with enterprise customers (aren’t there some accessibility laws that apply here? )
Just installed and had a quick play with a new screen reader for Linux called Odilia. It doesn’t support key bindings at all at the moment but it did read stuff out and performed better than Orca at that with the custom Festival voice I’m using (Orca performs very well with its internal robot voice but the Festival voices are far more human.)
Anyway, not ready for use in any way but might be worth keeping an eye on:
@aral Yeah its actually a big problem that NEEDS to be addressed
@aral …Fun fact, customers can bypass compliance for things that they really want to buy. They have to fill out a form that says "we looked at alternatives that were compliant and they sucked, and $vendor solemnly swears they’re aware of this and will fix it real soon now.” This has to be refiled with every renewal until the product meets standards, so it’s painful for everyone and a good barrier to remove, but not impermeable… http://monkeynoodle.org/2023/09/16/pick-your-poison/
@puercomal @aral I would note that such tricks don’t eliminate liability under US laws like the ADA, though they can buy time against mandated compliance requirements until an actual disabled employee or other protected individual with standing sues.
@krisnelson @aral yes. Tl;dr, it means the teams in compliant environments who need interactive access to Linux desktop environments aren’t suing for screen reader accommodation
@aral
Some people are mentioning this for ages but waylanddevs think it's not their problem...
They passed it down the stack apparently...
Let alone the fact that lots of automation tools rely on the same mechanism as accessibility tools I think some things have been "oversimplified" or "intentionally underengineered"
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/
@aral One of the missions financed by the Sovereign Tech Fund is precisely "Design and prototype a new accessibility stack". It's discussed almost every week in This Week in GNOME, for example https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2024/02/twig-135/.
@lebout2canap And that’s awesome. My question remains how it was decided to make something (Wayland) the default when it is inaccessible. (I guess it’s a rhetorical question because the answer can only be “because lack of accessibility is not a show stoppper.”)
@aral I was just responding to say that Odilia was not the only hope, I was not responding to defend the decisions and/or the current state of things.
@aral wow that's shitty
@aral@mastodon.ar.al Does it still work on X11? Many of the distros have had Wayland as only a secondary option and recently started making it the default, clearly this should not have been allowed to happen.
@aral I use linux as a daily driver, and while it might have some accessibility issues here and there, I wouldn't call it entirely inaccessible. Sure, orca keystrokes are also passing through the system, but without some egregious keyboard hooks, that's how it is at the moment. The keys do work though, and I'm speaking from experience, because I'm running kde sometimes, the wayland session. There are genuine problems with linux accessibility, but this one isn't it, and only because it's technically impossible with wayland, it doesn't mean that it's not currently working in some way, due to xwayland. Also, the author of the issue is working on a portal and wayland protocol to make this work in such a way that the system doesn't get the jesture before the screenreader does, and it'll first come to mutter, the gnome compositor, so there's a lot of hope. That issue is grossly simplifying and miswording the graveness of the problem a bit, and it paints linux in a worse light than it deserves. I personally worked with some people in this sphere to make their apps accessible, I was there when a lot of the protocols around wayland and accessibility technologies was discussed in the gnome accessibility room a relatively short amount of time ago, so were others, and many of us are doing the best we can. That comment explains some things right, but by saying that accessibility on wayland is currently broken, more or less invalidates my and others hard work on the matter, because stuff isn't totally broken in wayland. I know people who use sway, I know people who use plasma, same for myself, and it seemns like either only gnome/mutter has this problem, or something really bad happened over night, when I wasn't looking. Keygrabbing in the x11 form is, yes, not possible, but the thing we currently have works well, though of course a pure wayland solution would be much better. Please don't fully believe what you read on face value, however well intended that comment was, I really recommend you try it for yourself, though I do agree that if I were to pick between gnome and kde for accessibility, I'd pick kde, simply because those people seemn to care more about this stuff, at least for now. So, to clarify, did this start recently? I got gdm issues recently too, where orca just wouldn't start speaking at the first login screen after turning on the computer, but it would work afterwards. I dk, I think this total inability of passing keystrokes to orca is unique to mutter, because in other environments, and mutter before some version I didn't use apparently, did pass the keys to orca, but same for the actual system, so kapslock would be toggled while the orca key combo would still work, but work it did though.
@aral Why do you think I left linux in june and haven't gone back since, for the gui? I fought for years to use it, and at one point I went like, fuck it I'm done.
I still use it day to day and only in command line. I'm not willing to deal with the state of the gui any time soon, especially that on my machine, I'm forced to use wayland, since xorg keeps acting up and causing actual major crashes.
@aral Last I checked (which, admittedly, was at least a few months ago) you can't change keyboard layouts on Fedora due to Wayland as well...which is why all my systems are still running X for the foreseeable future...I did ask about it on the Fedora forums when I first hit that issue and was advised to remove Wayland...
@admin @aral when you install Fedora Workstation or KDE, for instance, you can configure the keyboard layout during install, and that works correctly all the way through. Both GNOME and KDE also have desktop-level configuration where you can change it post-install.
trying to configure the layout for graphical environments via localectl post-install may not work as expected, I have not tried it. But then, I'm not sure it'd work as expected in GNOME or KDE *on X.org* either.
@adamw @aral
I'm not sure you're understanding the issue. On Wayland, when I went into the display manager's keyboard layout settings, QWERTY was the only option available. If I switch to X and go into those same settings, there's whole lists of languages and layouts to choose from. The other things like localectl mentioned in that post were attempts to work around that issue, and none of those worked either. I did configure it for Dvorak during the install. The terminal was Dvorak, the window manager's login prompt was Dvorak...but once I got logged in it reverted back to QWERTY, and even after asking for help I could not find any way to switch back to Dvorak, even temporarily.
Although to be fair, "asking for help" didn't get much -- because accessibility is not a priority. Then again, I've been switching keyboard layouts on every PC I've ever used for about twenty years now, and it has never been a difficult thing until I tried Fedora with Wayland...
@admin @aral Ah. I missed that this was specifically about Enlightenment. It seems to be simply a known missing feature in Enlightenment upstream:
"Keyboard layout switching is not available"
I guess the Fedora maintainer decided that wasn't important enough to stick with X by default, or just didn't know about it. it's a pretty lightly-maintained desktop for Fedora, in all honesty, we (the QA team) don't really test it at all.
@aral@mastodon.ar.al i was trying to figure this out the other day, as i recently started using a screen reader on my phone after a minor eye injury, and decided to keep using it since i found having an eyes-free interaction method very convenient
i wanted to set up something similar on my Linux systems, but i have had a horrible time trying to get something working, and basically gave up
i would be perfectly happy to only have this work within a single terminal window, and i can't even get that working enough to be useful. i wouldn't blame a blind user for not bothering - if that were me, i'd probably be running straight for apple
it is beyond disappointing