Hey there, a blind Linux user here. Well, as for the accessibility of the open platform, I really have to say that I truly admire how far it got over the time. Accessibility is in general quite complicated area, requiring existence of unified standards, protocols and specialized software like screenreader to actually make use of those protocols, speech server to represent the ability to speak and actual synthetic voices, so blind people can actually hear the informations they need. Linux has over time got into a state, where it is in my opinion fully comparable with other platforms. We not just have fully accessible environments like Mate, Firefox, GTK or even QT to some point, but accessibility is taken into account even when designing new stuff like GTK4 or the Linux backend for Flutter. Even Raspberry OS got special attention from the authors to make the environment as accessible as possible, I just have set up one and as far as I have tested by now, it really works. It’s just a small pitty that in the enthusiastic hurry to make the system accessible, the developers have kind of forgotten to include the screenreader itself in the default setup, making the system impossible to use by default. But that’s solvable if one has an ethernet connection, I have SSHed into the machine and set up what was necessary, no big deal.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we can’t do better nor the area no longer requires attention. The biggest issue these days is probably the lack of accessible software in some areas. For example, there are still no decent accessible audio workstations for blind musicians, what’s kind of unpleasant when we consider that it’s one of the typical professions for blind people. But I wouldn’t blame this on community, it seems more than the natural state of things. Even on Windows, in any genre, some percentage of applications is accessible and some not. And because Win has still more software than Linux, the chance of finding an accessible-one is just naturally higher. The programming field has far higher support on Linux than the musicalone and guess what? There is significantly higher amount of accessible development tools.

So, as I said, I dont really think community should be blamed here. In fact, considering the complexity of accessibility, the required effort to constantly “guard the field” and most importantly - the number of potential users, which is (fortunately) really small even on Windows and almost hundred times smaller on Linux, the current state of things is really impressive.

Personally, as a blind user, I feel more free on Linux than on Windows. From my subjective perspective, there may be less amount of linux applications, but the software we have is often very flexible, configurable and therefore more useful than a ton of Windows craps. For some reason, when I use Windows now, I can’t get rid of feeling, that I work with a system designed for idiots. On Linux, even if there are accessibility issues, there is often a way to get around, like with the Raspberry pi. On Windows, if you can’t get it working from the gui, you’re usually done. No configuration files to tweak, no command line interface or even parameters to use, no source code to improve the things manually.

On the other hand, I’m a developer, so Im used to search workarounds and work with the internal structure of apps. May be regular users have a different perspective and i can’t speak for them.

I have to disagree on some of his points, but agree in some of them.

First: I’ve never used Accessibility options on Linux Distros, so i can’t say for sure if it’s or isn’t good, but if he’s blind and is concerning about that, he’s right.

Second: Clear it for me if i’m wrong, but i guess most Linux Developers are not specialized on porting accessibility on something, they’re developers, this kind of port needs to be made from someone who knows how to properly do it, like a professional in Braille, it’s not fair to fault developers on that. It’s possible to fix this if Linux (open source in general) were most spread among casual people, most of them used to Windows btw. His concerns are totally comprehensible, but faulting all FOSS community for that isn’t fair, as they’re always trying to join people on FOSS and Open Source in general. I’d suggest for him to dual boot and try to join people on FOSS community, i’d never stop him for using Windows (I don’t know if accessibility on FreeBSD is fine btw) as he needs to do things by his own, but dual booting with Linux would be really great as he would spread his concerns more widely, as someone who needs these kind of tools.

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