Post #1436121

@iaruffell @Npars01 @ammdias Sorry, but no; I've seen a fair amount of hostility being thrown around in the last week or so on this topic. Hate is appropriate. As far as age verification vs. a11y, I don't think this is anywhere near an "apples to apples" comparison. Accessibility is a problem on Linux, no doubt, and there's not enough being done there. However: it's unclear to me what legal requirements are not being followed *and* whether they apply to volunteer projects. The thing that has caused a lot of concern with the age-verification stuff is that it clearly is meant to apply to anything that looks like an OS. Secondly, we're talking orders of magnitude difference in addressing a11y versus a single "supply a user's age bracket" requirement. Implementing a simple API vs. the work across the stack to improve a11y are two very, very different things. I'm sure you must know this, so it's odd that you would try to juxtapose the two as a good faith question. If a state or national government were suddenly requiring specific a11y requirements that obviously applied to distributions like Fedora and Debian, then I expect we'd be seeing discussions about the implications. As far as I know, they are not. I've followed a11y discussions around Linux for a long time; I can't recall anyone suggesting that there were *legal* requirements that were not being met. ISTM that, by now, somebody would've gone after vendors like Red Hat for commercial workstation products if that were the case. I don't mean in any way to dismiss concerns about a11y on the desktop, but the two are not seriously comparable.