A popular Reddit post on this
I was pretty happy to see this post but very disappointed at the amount of ignorance I saw in the comments. I want this post to clear things up for those of you who have barely herd of accessibility on operating-systems.
First, a little background. Screen readers are used by the blind to interact with elements on the screen, generally with either text to speech or braille (with a supported braille display). On commercial operating-systems like windows and macOS, VoiceOver, jaws, and NVDA are used. VoiceOver is macOS exclusive, and jaws and NVDA are windows exclusive. NVDA is free and open source, and mostly feature complete.
On linux, the orca screen reader is used, tho this is limited to Gnome and KDE. Gnome is the desktop environment I use, so this is what I’ll cover.
Graphical applications…
- The most accessible frontends used on the desktop are QT, Wxwidgets, and java. On macOS, support for these is built into VoiceOver by default. On windows, setting it up requires extra configuration, but this is not difficult to get working. On linux, support is lackluster at best. I’ll get to this.
- Gnome has had serious accessibility issues, despite orca having been designed for it in mind. On the latest version I managed to test, gnome 42, these problems were still there. As quick examples, the search bar, as well as the list of applications, cannot be navigated correctly. Orca will simply give me an empty window, and the only way to explore it is by trying to type, which isn’t really documented properly and far from intuitive when compared to windows, for example.
- Tab navigation, which is used by screen readers to explore windows, does not work everywhere. The settings app on gnome is frustrating to use because of this. This isn’t limited to this app either.
- Terminal use is a mixed bag at best, it works depending on the distribution. I usually SSH into a linux machine from a Mac or windows terminal emulator, since that’s usually a lot more accessible than doing it on the machine itself.
- QT based frontends do not work with orca, and running them will usually provide you with just an empty frame. I like to use emulators, but I end up having to use them on windows or macOs.
Installation and documentation…
- The documentation for orca, when compared to commercial solutions like jaws and VoiceOver, is piss-poor. Compare this and this to this. Pay attention to details, and draw your own conclusions.
- Most installers, except perhaps Debian, are not accessible by default. You have to use a live image, which is not always available. Very common with Red-hot distributions.
Given all of these, I can’t go with linux when it comes time to build my own pc. Its simply not viable, unless I want to run a headless server, with ssh. It also means I can’t recommend it to my blind friends, so they’ll be stuck using either windows or Mac for a daily driver, just like me.
(I wanted to quote this as Reddit is a walled garden)
I also saw this talk of Lukáš Tyrychtr, the RedHat engineer working on Accessibility
What is the state of these things currently?