Olson
Devin Prater :blind:Blind folks, what would make you want to use, or try out, Linux?
Boosts okay.
modulux@pixelate A stable screen reader and accessibility that's reliable and comparable to what one gets in proprietary systems.
Juan CBS
Casey Reeves (it/its)@modulux @quetzatl @pixelate The removal of the vt subsystem was what I was refering to.
Not coming from the kernel folks, but rather the distro folks like fedora, which heavily drives the development of systemd and other distros. Can you imagine that? Having to get a full wayland stack with at-spi and orca just to get a terminal? I cannot. And the extremely ableist comments from the kernel mailing list drove it home for me. Nicolas Pitre himself is pissed off about this change. And noone listens to him in all of this. What chance do the rest of us have?
@modulux @quetzatl @pixelate And, as windows is as bad but for various other reasons, I am going away to mac. I have never tried it yet, after all. It was a combo of several things happening that caused me to decide this extreme:
https://xogium.me/173-times-why-a-simple-arch-linux-reinstall-pushed-me-to-look-at-macos
https://xogium.me/the-next-best-decision-stepping-away-from-the-linux-desktop
https://xogium.me/173-times-why-a-simple-arch-linux-reinstall-pushed-me-to-look-at-macos
https://xogium.me/the-next-best-decision-stepping-away-from-the-linux-desktop
TheHorrorOfEmbrodery@pixelate If it gave me some sort of functionality or Accessibility, more than just being an open source, that I could not get on a Mac or windows. I don’t know what that would be, and I certainly haven’t found it yet, so I haven’t tried it beyond the brief time I had a BTSpeak.
Graham Downs@pixelate Screen reader support. Or if it has screen reader support, then better visibility (no pun intended) of what screen reading software is available and how to enable it.
The vOICe vision BCI 🧠🇪🇺@pixelate Not blind, but Windows 12 reportedly going to be infested with AI will make me consider moving to Linux.
@seeingwithsound Oh yay, The vOICe for Linux!
@pixelate If only the Linux Wine developers implemented the Microsoft Video for Windows video capture function capCreateCaptureWindow() then The vOICe for Windows would run fine under Linux with Wine. For now, The vOICe web app works with modern browsers in Linux (or any other platform).
Ramin Honary@pixelate
I'm not visually impaired, but if there isn't a UEFI screen reader that you can flash onto firmware, there ought to be, and a Linux driver to use the UEFI screen reader ought to exist as well, if it doesn't already.
I'm not visually impaired, but if there isn't a UEFI screen reader that you can flash onto firmware, there ought to be, and a Linux driver to use the UEFI screen reader ought to exist as well, if it doesn't already.
@ramin_hal9001 I've not heard of anyone trying to make a UEFI screen reader. That would be so, so nice though.
@ramin_hal9001 @pixelate Hah we wish!
Unfortunately everyone is far too busy making pretty UX for uefi bootloaders to care about this.
Unfortunately everyone is far too busy making pretty UX for uefi bootloaders to care about this.
@pixelate Desktop Linux is a no go for me. The level of accessibility is far below acceptable. I have used headless servers though, and have a Pi 4B which I've set up to be headless. I'm fine with setups like that.
André Polykanine@bscross32 @pixelate Hot take: Linux Desktop is like Windows Server. A misused operating system, I mean. I've never said a bad word about Linux on servers: the only solution I use and recommend, the best system for that. But on desktop…
Wenwei@pixelate Audio demos of some cool applications
Jochen Wolters@kaveinthran @pixelate That's a really interesting idea! Are you thinking about a narrated walk-through here, possibly with an interactive component?
Jesper Larsson@pixelate I know @standupmackan.bsky.social is fond of Linux. (Note: that’s a bridged Bluesky account, so he probably won’t see [!] your replies if yours isn’t bridged the other way.)
Terry Wallwork@pixelate Also not visually impaired. But I have always thought there should be a blind specific version on Linux which runs entirely off sound and tactile feed back and with no screen just a slate tablet with no LCD but does sound and is touch sensitive. Built with an entire tool chain that can be both used and developed by blind people.
gloriouscowThere have been a few accessibility-focused distros - like check out
https://zendalona.com/accessible-coconut/
There's a whole range of sightedness from legally blind to totally blind. For example, one can lose central vision but have peripheral vision. Vision loss can be progressive as well, so allowing people to transition slowly to assistive technologies as a condition progresses is important too.
Ditching a display entirely would end up excluding a large number of people who could utilize additional visual context, and would make it difficult for caretakers or assistants to offer help if technical support is needed.
@pixelate 1. A spare PC dedicated for this.
2. A robust audio system and accessibility support that won't be as flaky as described in some famous articles.
3. A screen reader that just works and allows to carry out various commands, with decent Braille support, ideally scriptable. Keyboard shortcuts reassignment is a must.
4. Detailed thorough instructions about installation, distro choice, desktop choice, updating process, settings, screen reader usage, designed for advanced users of another operating system, all of those able to be executed by a blind person alone.
5. Developer tools accessible by themselves *and* allowing to develop accessible apps.
6. Decent console processing by screen reader, and it must be the same one used for desktop.
7. Basic software, powerful and accessible: mailing client, browsers (not only Firefox), media players, cloud solutions, word processing with advanced capabilities (commenting, track changes, tables, multi-level lists, various list bullets etc., etc.), spreadsheets, presentation viewer. All of this accessible.
8. All of the above must not be, as one podcaster uses to say, written by aliens for predators. I.e., it must be at least fast learnable, configurable and usable by someone who has a very high raised bar of usability, accessibility, and customizability.
9. Decent choice of TTS voices, both "robotic" and more human-like, with multilingual support (it's a must!), especially for languages in different alphabets: cyrillic, Hebrew, Greek.
10. Punctuation customizability, emoji reading, math processing, various abilities to read Unicode characters.
11. (Not necessary, but ideally) a book reader with DAISY, EPUB, FB2 support.
12. Something I definitely forgot. #Accessibility #Linux
2. A robust audio system and accessibility support that won't be as flaky as described in some famous articles.
3. A screen reader that just works and allows to carry out various commands, with decent Braille support, ideally scriptable. Keyboard shortcuts reassignment is a must.
4. Detailed thorough instructions about installation, distro choice, desktop choice, updating process, settings, screen reader usage, designed for advanced users of another operating system, all of those able to be executed by a blind person alone.
5. Developer tools accessible by themselves *and* allowing to develop accessible apps.
6. Decent console processing by screen reader, and it must be the same one used for desktop.
7. Basic software, powerful and accessible: mailing client, browsers (not only Firefox), media players, cloud solutions, word processing with advanced capabilities (commenting, track changes, tables, multi-level lists, various list bullets etc., etc.), spreadsheets, presentation viewer. All of this accessible.
8. All of the above must not be, as one podcaster uses to say, written by aliens for predators. I.e., it must be at least fast learnable, configurable and usable by someone who has a very high raised bar of usability, accessibility, and customizability.
9. Decent choice of TTS voices, both "robotic" and more human-like, with multilingual support (it's a must!), especially for languages in different alphabets: cyrillic, Hebrew, Greek.
10. Punctuation customizability, emoji reading, math processing, various abilities to read Unicode characters.
11. (Not necessary, but ideally) a book reader with DAISY, EPUB, FB2 support.
12. Something I definitely forgot. #Accessibility #Linux
Isabel RuffellI had a Linux machine for a while, and I only used it for data analysis in console mode. I would need to be convinced that there was community support on accessibility of a variety of applications.@
I work wwith open science communities and software and their interest in fixing accessibility varies a lot.
[email protected]
Peter Saathoff-Harshfield@pixelate Not having to do hours and hours of research into distros and packages and shell commands to get things minimally working. Like, someone just tell me what to install and have it not involve 50 steps. Also a comprehensive guide/tutorials about how to do basic stuff with keyboard navigation and Orca, like navigating around parts of the OS and common GUI programs.
@pixelate I'm already a heavy linux user, but what would have made me switch sooner would be, well, accessible firmware, but we all know that's probably never gonna happen, and also more of a community support where I could ask questions and have actual linux users answer them eventually or something. This stuff exists more now than it did then, for sure, but still something more informal than a forum would be awesome
Mirppc@pixelate if my vision where to become impaired i would likely use the distro made by Klaus Knopper for his wife. Beyond that Orca has done a great job and monitors in the larger sizes have dropped in price.
Better OCR to speech would be handy. Though i have heard there are some projects using large language modles that help. Whisper has replaced Dragon Natualy Speaking for me when it comes to Speech to Text. Google Doc's speech to text has been decent enough too.
skua