Accessibility seems to be the only real weakness of the open source “contribution drives focus” ethos. If I don’t like the way the window manager ecosystem is growing, it is fine if the only thing that blocks me from fixing it is my own laziness. It must not be that big a concern.
But, if an ecosystem that excludes people through no fault of their own grows up, that sucks.
A11y is a great vector for automation of UI!
Using a11y APIs for an app’s tests exercises both the app and its a11y. Apparently Apple does some of its automated testing this way.
Yes, the test suite must be created and run regularly. So there is a non zero dev effort and ongoing cloud resources. But once in place it’s win win.
Perhaps open source culture could follow in Apple’s footsteps?
> X11 never had a model to permit this for accessibility tooling while blocking it for other code. Wayland does, but suffers from the surrounding infrastructure not being well developed yet.
Does it? Because last I checked, Wayland did not, in fact, have the same features, and you don't get credit for "permitting" use of something that doesn't exist.
> When you read anything about Linux accessibility, ask yourself whether you're reading something written by either a user of the accessibility features, or a developer of them. If they're neither, ask yourself why they actually care and what they're doing to make the future better.
Okay: AFAIK, mjg59 is not a user of a11y features, and is not a developer of them (22 years ago yes, since then no). Ergo, by his own standards he isn't allowed to talk about this.
What's an A11y? I cant find it in TFA or anything... l33tspeak for ally?
friend, its 403 forbidden. I do hope that you can fix it. I wish to read your article! Cheers
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> A lot of the Linux accessibility support depended on X11 behaviour that is now widely regarded as a set of misfeatures. It's not actually good to be able to inject arbitrary input into an arbitrary window, and it's not good to be able to arbitrarily scrape out its contents.
While that may be true, I'd suggest that it is not a consensus view and, more specifically, there is probably a consensus that the capability to do arbitrary scrapes and inputs needs to exist in a controlled fashion. Wayland had a bizarre stillbirth where the core team resisted screenshots, I can't remember when the Wayland ecosystem started getting serious about enabling screen sharing but I've got a memory that it was post-COVID.
It goes to show how challenging the space is that Wayland managed to keep trudging on, but it was nothing to do with "woke" and a lot to do with "I don't accept that screenshots are a significant development hurdle". I still flat out don't trust them to have resolved all the issues crippling things like autoclickers but I'm hopeful I'm just very out of date. The initial take was poorly designed and that bit Wayland's adoption hard.
The ecosystem may eventually reach the level of capability that X had in a standardised and secure way. Maybe it even has (I doubt it). But there is no consensus that security trumps having a usable desktop. I'm happy with an insecure desktop, anyone serious who wants to spy on me can use my phone. It is wildly insecure as far as I care and I carry it with me most hours. People trade this stuff off for convenience. Every time I've tried Wayland I discovered it had been secured against me using my system to get things done.