Matt CampbellApparently this is slightly old news (the Git commit timestamp is just over three months ago), but KWin, the KDE window manager/compositor, now implements the solution pioneered by GNOME for letting screen readers monitor and intercept keystrokes on Wayland, specifically, the org.freedesktop.a11y.KeyboardMonitor D-Bus interface. I prototyped this solution in GNOME last summer. Thanks to @tyrylu for bringing it to production in GNOME, and now to Nicolas Fella for implementing it in KDE.
Oh, and this addition shipped in KWin 6.4.0, which was tagged a week ago. Good work @nicofee.
Take note, @lproven: Your claim that the developers of Wayland-based desktop environments, specifically GNOME and KDE, don't care about accessibility is plainly false, and I dare say irresponsible considering the platform you have as a journalist. To be clear, I'm not offended for my own sake. I'm angry for how that article has affected developers who have done far more for free desktop accessibility, e.g. https://tesk.page/2025/06/18/its-true-we-dont-care-about-accessibility-on-linux/
It’s True, “We” Don’t Care About Accessibility on Linux
What do virtue-signalers and privileged people without disabilities sharing content about accessibility on Linux being trash have in common? They don’t actually really care about the group they’re defending; they just exploit these victims’ unfortunate situation to either fuel hate against groups and projects actually trying to make the world a better place. I never thought I’d be this upset to a point I’d be writing an article about something this sensitive with a clickbait-y title. It’s simultaneously demotivating, unproductive, and infuriating. I’m here writing this post fully knowing that I could have been working on accessibility in GNOME, but really, I’m so tired of having my mood ruined because of privileged people spending at most 5 minutes to write erroneous posts and then pretending to be oblivious when confronted while it takes us 5 months of unpaid work to get a quarter of recognition, let alone acknowledgment, without accounting for the time “wasted” addressing these accusations.
aaron@matt @lproven I want more people to read this article. It's really important that the people who are taking steps to improve accessibility are actually thanked for their work. If not in donations, which would help, but even a simple "hey. Thanks for fixing that. I noticed" goes a long way towards making a contribution feel worth it.
Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) 
Liam Proven@lproven @fireborn @matt At least for KDE Plasma, we've had accessibility features added in Plasma Wayland every release since 6.0.
- 6.0: colorblindness filters, shake cursor
- 6.1: bounce keys
- 6.2: visual system bell, sticky keys
- 6.3: pixel perfect magnification
- 6.4: mouse keys, Orca 48 a11y keybinding support
We've made it a central part of KDE development and much of this has been leveraging capabilities that are only available in Plasma Wayland to do correctly.
Richard Brown@matt best of luck. You’d be the first of many if you succeed. This is a pattern I’ve seen Liam dance through in several different contexts now
Luis Carlos@FreakyFwoof @lproven @matt It seems that @fireborn posts went very popular on YouTube that even sighted people saw it and entered on that. To be fair I don't know if this is an excuse to switch from XOrg to that one XLibre or what it's called
@luiscarlosgonzalez @FreakyFwoof @lproven @matt People attacking others using my writings as a smear campaign was never the point of writing them. I've heard more from desktop makers, distribution maintainers, toolkit developers and contributors to more parts of the Linux ecosystem as a hole after I made them than before that want to improve things that I believe that they did some good. That said: If you're using them to attack people, harass contributors, or dunk on those making the changes because reasons, stop doing it.
Andre Louis@fireborn @luiscarlosgonzalez @lproven @matt The article says your writing was a worthwhile read at the end, he wasn't saying you were attacking Linux accessibility by any means.
@FreakyFwoof @luiscarlosgonzalez @lproven @matt No, not him. I know this. Though I am aware that in some corners of the internet my writing has been used as a jumping-off point to say "hey look Linux developers are evil and ablist!" I didn't talk about them, because quite frankly, they didn't get much attention. I didn't want to give them said attention by making people aware of them.
@fireborn @FreakyFwoof @lproven @matt That article was a read, even mentioning you at the end. Brody compiled all of each post in each video
Hey. Do not attempt to put words into my mouth.
> Your claim that the developers of Wayland-based desktop environments, specifically GNOME and KDE, don't care about accessibility
That is *NOT WHAT I WROTE.*
I said that the a11y of modern Wayland-based environments is worse than X11 based environments were 10 or even 20Y ago. I stand by it. They are.
They are improving, yes. That's good. But I evaluated this stuff with a blind friend of mine back in the GNOME 2 era and it was damned near unusable then.
Now, it's worse than that.
@lproven This quote at least strongly implies that the GNOME and KDE developers promoting Wayland don't care about accessibility concerns:
> As we have said before, we suspect this disconnect between younger, keener developers who don't know or care about late 20th century user interface standards or accessibility concerns, but who strongly want to junk what they perceive as legacy baggage, are behind the moves to deprecate and remove X11 – which is very much still going ahead.
@lproven It's undeniable that the Wayland ecosystem has lagged behind X11 on some accessibility issues. But the legacy baggage that the Wayland and DE developers want to junk isn't any accessibility accommodation directly, but the free-for-all security model where any application could take complete control of the whole desktop environment. The latter has historically been used to implement some aspects of accessibility under X11. Of course, what we need is both accessibility and security.
@lproven If what you meant to say is not what TheEvilSkeleton, I, and others took away from that passage, then please be more careful what you write in the future. I'll leave it at that; I don't want to argue.
@matt I am always _extremely_ careful about what I write.
I have written at length about UI and its importance:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/
I have attended GUADEC at the invitation of GNOME, met the core GNOME team, talked to Allan Day and others at length, and I stand by what I wrote.
I did as I said take away the impression that they do not care about old fashioned UI standards such as IBM CUA.
I care about them a very great deal.
I think this stuff matters more than the GNOME and Gtk4 developers seem to think. I think accessibility is _more_ important than security.
I have written more on this subject that is due to be published soon, and I will be returning to it again.
