this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
139 points (96.0% liked)
Linux
54099 readers
488 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is a really well written article. It's unfortunate that this person has to deal with all these issues.
I suspect the reason that both MATE and the Debian installer have good accessibility support is because their codebases are quite old. In general, it seems like older software is more likely to have better accessibility support than newer software.
Accessibility should be something that's built into software from the very beginning, but I totally understand that not all developers have time for it or properly understand it. It's unfortunate.
Edit: I forgot to mention that accessibility is going to be mandated for some types of sites and apps in the EU thanks to the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into effect later this year, which should help somewhat. Won't really help with Linux itself though.
I was about to say that I've been using Debian for the better part of 20 years, and the accessibility support is pretty good.
One thing I've had troubles with when trying to implement accessibility is in web dev. There's so many attribute tags and I think a few different software based standards as well? I'm not entirely sure. The documentation on it felt a bit hard to follow and implement. Then I'm not sure how to go about testing it fully either without having those proprietary softwares either. I'm on an all Linux machine and the only accessibility software I know of is Orca and it's so and so last time I tried it.
While I slowly figure that out however I make sure to follow tag recommendations and keep things in sections, only one h1 tag per page, descriptive and short alt tags, and so forth. At least that helps a tiny bit.
Web is a bit easier than native since the browsers handle all the platform-specific details across all common platforms, and you mostly just have to follow some guidelines that aren't overly technical or arcane. Some examples:
<label>tags to label for all your<input>s,altattributes on all images,titleattributes where appropriate (e.g. on<table>s to describe the data contained inside the table), etc.If you use Firefox, its developer tools have an "Accessibility" tab that can audit for common issues - things like missing labels on checkboxes and radio buttons, colours that don't meet WCAG contrast ratio requirements, etc.
It's a good time to learn more about building accessible sites and apps given it's becoming a legal requirement in some jurisdictions. For example, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) goes into effect later this year, and it mandates that sites and mobile apps for various industries (like ecommerce, airlines and other transport, media streaming, social media, banks, and some others) meet accessibility guidelines.
It's probably worth spinning up a Windows VM to test in NVDA. It's one of the most popular screen readers and probably the most popular open-source one, but only works on Windows since it deeply hooks into the Microsoft Speech API, accessibility APIs, and and other Windows APIs.
Dan... I fucking love you. Thank you for this writeup. Not only is it helpful but it gives me encouragement to continue finding ways and figure things out.
I couple years back when I did my photography education we had an assignment to create a photo book as our final "exam" thing. I decided to document and show the daily life of a blind man and his tools and what he's had to go through as his blindness got worse over the years. He showed me how he uses his computer and phone and such so I really really saw the importance of accessibility.
Somewhat luckily I've been able to keep the forms somewhat sane due to using component libraries which implement accessibility well. I always make my things in SvelteKit which does have good support for accessibility and I always keep my colours contrasty with as close to as AAA as possible because it's easier on my own eyes too hahaha.
There's a national deaf-blind association nearby and I've been thinking of going there to chat about accessibility and website usage with them one day.
I'm working on digitizing the book I made into a website and of course want to make that website extroniously accessible so even a blind person can hear through descriptive wording of what's happening in the images. I also plan to make a scrolly-type thing using as little JS as possible which is nicely achievable now with the CSS scroll modifiers that's been added over the years.
It's going to be exciting to see how everything will work out. I can't thank you enough, while my only computer is a Steam Deck where running VMs is a bit so and so I'm gonna see if I can use some public computer or see if someone in the association can help me test things out and fix things from there.