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@aral GNOME folks are well aware of the problems with Orca on Wayland, and actively working to fix them. There's even funding for this work, thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund. I'm personally working on a new Wayland-native accessibility stack that aims to eventually replace AT-SPI and support sandboxed apps, but there are also efforts to fix problems in the existing stack in the short term. cc @sonny

@matt @sonny That’s great. So will the x11 session not be removed until this work is done and there is a functional screen reader for Wayland then?

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @matt@toot.cafe @sonny@floss.social Well, I don't know if you've read that MR, but it's targeting GNOME 48, which leaves plenty of time to fix the accessibility issues.

@nah @matt @sonny Well, here’s the thing, Wayland is already the default and the screen reader is broken so…

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @matt@toot.cafe @sonny@floss.social It's the default because it's already quite functional, except for the problems you point out. Additionally, if you increase the number of users on Wayland, it is easier to identify problems and fix them. If it weren't the default, who even knows how long it would have taken us to identify that there were problems with Orca

@nah @matt @sonny If the GNOME folks didn’t realise that Orca was broken before making Wayland the default that’s even worse. It would mean no one on the GNOME team is testing accessibility. If they knew and made it the default anyway, it just shows that accessibility is seen as not essential. So I’m actually not sure which is worse. And we can’t go back in time so hopefully lessons will be learned and this will remedied as soon as possible.

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @matt@toot.cafe @sonny@floss.social Ok, but I remind you that GNOME is not a company, it is a project created by a lot of volunteers. Everyone works on what they want/can, the idea is precisely that there are people who test Wayland and come to help and fix the problems

I think we all agree that accessibility is important, and we all want to create software that is inclusive enough for everyone... but we must also come down to reality, where as long as the problem can be worked around, a lot of ppl think that nothing needs to be fixed

Removing the possibility of workarounding and shoving problems in your face is a strategy to attract volunteers to help improve the software

Finally: public appeals where bad faith is assumed and the project is criticized as if it were a company with a team of full-time developers is a strategy to reduce people's motivation to work on things. You don't need to shit on GNOME for things to be fixed, but on the contrary, the strategy is to show up with proposals and willingness to improve the situation

@nah @aral @sonny @matt Accessibility is a human right. Drastic regressions to the accessibility of a system that disabled users rely on are a human right violation.

We can cut a lot of slack to volunteer contributors, but not “human right violations are permissible” amounts of slack.

Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the project’s leadership (volunteer or not) to set norms like “we can only accept your contributions if they’re accessible”.

@nah @aral @sonny @matt As a norm, that’s not particularly new in open-source. I’ve contributed to several projects who only accept contributions that 1) align with project goals, 2) pass peer review and 3) pass multiple test suites.

That can definitely be a barrier to contribution. But there are also smaller hobbyist-focused toy projects with lax norms that people can contribute to, if strict norms are a deal-breaker.

@fvsch@hachyderm.io @aral@mastodon.ar.al @sonny@floss.social @matt@toot.cafe Privacy and security are equally important; however, people's solution here is for us to continue using X11 by default until the alternative is "perfect" and we can switch to it.

The change to Wayland is huge, and requires many improvements across multiple projects (many of which don't even belong to GNOME as such), so it's not exactly trivial. We need more people working on this, and therefore we need to raise the interest of potential contributors to iron out all the remaining rough edges.

As I said in a previous post: until Ubuntu put Wayland by default, many people were not even willing to work with Wayland. It's important to understand this: the world of free software moves by motivation. If you're a software user, and you have a problem with said software that you can work around... how much motivation do you have to improve said software? You'll probably continue working around the problem until you can't do it anymore, and only then you'll contribute to solving the problem once and for all.

Right now, the workaround is to continue in X11, even despite the security and privacy problems that this implies. Many people don't realize how insecure X11 is, and they minimize these problems. GNOME is aware of this, and made Wayland the default several versions ago, also because Wayland was already usable for many users. X11 was still available as a fallback in case Wayland wasn't ready for you yet.

The proposal now is to eliminate X11 once and for all, and to do so a goal has been set: GNOME 48 (which will not be released until March 2025). Blocking issues for this also began to be collected, the current state of Orca being one of them (see Sonny's post), and this has been 4 months now.

I must highlight that accessibility is a fundamental pillar within the development of GNOME, we seek to create a desktop that can be usable and accessible by everyone, without discrimination. However, I must also highlight that there are many more aspects to take into account in order to achieve this. It's not as simple as it seems to be, and at GNOME we always seek to achieve the best solution. Assuming bad faith and criticizing the project as openly as Aral does is not productive. Perhaps putting pressure will work in contexts such as governments or companies, but not in free software.

@nah @fvsch @sonny @matt No one is assuming bad faith on the part of the volunteers. The pressure is for the corporations who profit from GNOME. Take GNOME away tomorrow and what does Red Hat do? What does IBM do? What does Canonical do? They have millions. Can they afford to make GNOME accessible? Yes. Should they be ashamed it doesn’t have a working screen reader? Also yes.

@aral @nah @fvsch @sonny @matt

Two GNOME cycles, when people are actively working on accessibility this year, is a long time.

Before panicking, consider: a reason it's been targetted to GNOME 48 (a year from now) and not 47 is, devs are collectively aware that not everything is ready for this to happen in 47, and that it is reasonably likely that a11y would be working by 48.

The cited link (!99) says pointblank it is a blocker.

@nekohayo @nah @fvsch @sonny @matt No one is panicking. By default, the most popular Linux distributions already ship with a broken screen reader. There’s nothing to panic about because this isn’t some hypothetical about a future harm. The harm (shipping an operating system with a broken screen reader) occurred when the first Linux distribution shipped Wayland as default.

@nekohayo @nah @fvsch @sonny @matt What I find disappointing is that instead of seeing this as a problem and taking steps to ensure it never happens again, I’m just seeing defensiveness that tells me that some folks still don’t understand that accessibility should be a showstopper, not a nice to have. That culture needs to change. And a policy adopted so it never happens again.

@aral @nah @fvsch @sonny @matt Fedora is a development platform and a test bench first, meant specifically for trying out emergent technologies.
I do not see it as a general public consumer product with guarantees, nor a product with public sector tier-1 service agreements.
I have my longstanding gripes with its installer and package management GUIs, so I do not recommend it to non-geeks unless I am the one preinstalling, supporting and maintaining.
You are not paying for it, and neither am I…

@lhp @nekohayo @nah @fvsch @sonny @matt Being told is one thing. Actions speak louder than words. Clearly the people who decided to make Wayland default before fixing the screen reader did not care about accessibility. It’s good that there are folks working on fixing the problem that do.

Now go away with your “dishonest” bullshit.

@aral If you're going to keep repeating your "righteous" indignation, misplaced IMO, please at least remove Sonny from the thread, as I tried to do (after adding him). He's already doing everything he can. The past can't be changed, and I think there's no use belaboring it.