this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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nah, there’s nothing selfish about that. it’s fucking embarrassing how bad Linux is with accessibility, especially when the distro model gives it the ability to specialize an entire OS around those kinds of concerns from the ground up. I’ve also stopped hearing good things about macOS for accessibility, which doesn’t feel like a good sign.
how has GitHub been for accessibility since the recent changes they’ve made? I’ve had a lot of trouble with them aggressively fucking with my browser’s keyboard navigation bindings, but if there are accessibility benefits to what they’re doing then I can’t be too critical of the effort
It's not. It's entirely to be expected, because the focus of the vast majority of kernel development was not desktop usage. Gnome honestly has become quite good at implementing accessibility concerns and they take advantage of the desktop environment philosophy to do that, which seems to be what you expect distro developers to do.
Of course, if by "accessible" you mean "like Windows" since that is the most popular desktop by far, then everything that's not Windows is going to suck for your usecase.
Explaining why it's bad doesn't really excuse it.
Here's a semi-related rant where one of the developers of Darktable finally lost it and launched his own damn app: https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralenti/
UX/a11y is a specialized skill, which might look easy to pick up from the outside, or is dismissed as "soft" by hardcore C hackers, but if you don't think deeply about it or listen to those that know their shit, you get situations where the color of the clock in the dock is almost indistinguishable from the background (yes this has happened to me, and no, I don't want to learn how to fix it), or how you can literally lose image information because "user choice" (==being able to reorder modules just they way you like them) is seen as more important than enforcing correct usage.
No, but it does explain it. There's nothing to excuse in the complete abscence of any promises.
I also explained why it's not all bad, so unless you have semi-recently used a desktop environment that tries to be accessible instead of catering to power users, then maybe you wouldn't dismiss my comment with an unrelated rant about Darktable's UI and C-nile Unix greybeards reordering their modules every couple minutes. Believe me, I understand the frustration of nearly every app UI being a thoughtless mess, but you're acting like big-FOSS sold you Linux™ - the Desktop OS under the pretense of it being an accessible interface for even the most casual computer user.
I can rant all day too about Windows UI design inconsistencies if you want, like the most basic settings being split across 2-3 different generations of UI design in 2-3 separate levels of "basic" to "advanced" which you navigate to by clicking really inconspicuous blue lines of text, which are randomly placed on the bottom of a dialog page or in a sidebar to the right.
My experience is with whatever Gnome-centered desktop ships with Ubuntu. It's on a headless box that I shut off today for ¤reasons, so I have no clue what it's called.
And thank god I am hale and hearty and sighted and a nerd, and it's not my daily driver, so I have not yet been cut to ribbons on the sharp edges. I do however have a blind partner, whom I know better than to try to impose Linux on. Her daily experience with the shit webdev/mobdev pumps out daily is not good, so yeah, there's plenty of blame to go around.
I have no idea what Canonical calls it either. It's basically just a skin that makes Gnome look a bit more shit as far as I can tell.
I thought this was about C-niles, but apparently all mobile and web devs are shit as well. I'm sure that random mobile and web apps are somehow very relevant to Linux DEs being accessible or not, but since you already "know better", there's no need to discuss this further really.
Accessibility is shit everywhere, much like Linux reply guys apparently.
behind almost every shit linux design decision, there’s a handful of reply guys with nothing but the time and energy to defend it to the death, to the detriment of everyone involved
Yes, your Windows user experience is super relevant to the point about Linux desktop environments being accessible or not.
This discussion was started by me after someone called the Linux desktop accessibility a "fucking embrassment" and I responded very clearly to that specific point. I'm not interested in scoring imaginary points in some misguided attempt to treat comment sections like a team fight for/against the linked article or whatever.
holy fuck shut the fuck up
as always, the most fucking embarrassing part of linux is the reply guys
in a weird way, they demonstrated my point for me — I’d fucking hate linux if all I could use was a shitty version of my least favorite desktop environment, with no real ability to customize anything or even drop into a vt to fix it when it breaks
and why in fuck is gnome of all things the layer where any of this shit gets implemented? why (other than the functionality being a bad clone of what windows and macOS have) is a desktop and mouse considered ideal for accessibility? there are a wide array of accessibility needs but the Land of a Thousand Tiling Window Managers has decided that windows but shitty is the only achievable goal
and fuck me I guess for implying that maybe the distro system could be a great way to have these needs met out of the box? nah distros can only ship yet another shitty identical package manager and your choice of gnome or KDE, cause linux reply guys are actually fucking terrible at linux and can’t function in it unless it’s actually just windows
I browse comments by new so somehow missed they’d necro’d a week old thread ffs. Gonna be more discriminating in the future.
that is absolutely one of the tactics shit reply guys use to avoid moderation, so don’t be hard on yourself (also check their post history, reply guying is basically all they do on their suspiciously fresh account)
That's why I'm asking, because if we're being honest, all desktop OSes kind of suck at accessibility, leaving the heavy lifting to third parties, so I'm confused why the billion dollar product with the largest market share is praised for being the most accessible and "Linux" is apparently a fucking embarassment for not emphasizing accessibility.
I'm not sure what that statistic is supposed to be telling me, except that with the amount of participants, the amount of Linux users is within margin of error of the general desktop market share.