My first paid software development job was on accessibility software. I remember visiting a user to help set up our code, and the sheer joy he had at being able to communicate more quickly than he had been able to for years.

Seeing the effort put into improving modern Linux accessibility is heartwarming. There's been almost 20 years of almost nobody caring. It's important. It's worthwhile.

Say thank you to the people doing that work. Stop amplifying the people saying that work isn't happening.

(It was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher_(software) - I worked on integrating it into Gnome and tying it into accessibility infrastructure there and Windows so it could be used to directly enter text into other applications. What was notable at the time was that the Windows accessibility infrastructure *sucked* - introspection of the widget tree in Word took literally minutes, and doing the same for Openoffice took under a second. Anyway, that was my first GUADEC talk)
Dasher (software) - Wikipedia

@mjg59 what sucks is.... we had to go install word 078 to have a word processor that doesn't lag horribly, because libreoffice now does that
@freya @mjg59 there’s also onlyoffice and other alternatives
@lcruggeri @mjg59 hmm, hopefully they have screenreader suppoort

@mjg59 Hey I remember Dasher! I used it in college just for fun. I enjoyed the challenge of typing words with my mouse.

Thank you for helping me remain somewhat productive when I was bored, and for helping people with more accessibility needs than I had.

@mjg59 Oh Dasher, yeh I remember that - it was a damn clever and simple idea!
@mjg59 oh my friend/former OLPC coworker @cjb maintained Dasher for 2 years.
@mjg59 Remember it well… was nice to have GUADEC almost literally on my doorstep.
@mjg59 can you shout out some specific projects/people doing this work?
@Mae @mjg59 Going to jump in with a few: https://userbase.kde.org/Accessibility/Plasma https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.4.0/ https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/ https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-accessibility/. I appreciate a lot of this is docs, but it's what I had on hand. I can provide more if you want.
Accessibility/Plasma - KDE UserBase Wiki

@mjg59 @matt There’s a good article by Linux Weekly News summarizing some of the recent work, based on a conference presentation by one of the key developers. It’s currently subscriber-only, but, as usual, the article will become public in a few weeks.
@mjg59 a lot of tech social media is people yelling that something isn't being done at the people doing the thing
@mjg59
Which distro or DE would you say is the most accessible? Still Gnome? How are the others doing?
@mjg59 Early in my career, I subcontracted development of custom Apple II software for people with various disabilities. I never met any of the individuals, but I did receive some feedback, and from that, got a bit of a sense of how much I was improving even just a few lives, or one, It was a great feeling.
Making "normal" software accessible must multiply that feeling by a zillion fold!