I read a little bit of My Accessibility Stack and the future on Wayland, but I personally couldn't continue. I got pissed specifically here:
And this response from a GTK maintainer in a thread discussing Talon (which is not mentioned by name) who refuses to engage with the discussion, refers to us as “accessibility maximalists”, and refers to resources that are not topical to the point at hand (again, this is about input, not output).
The reason I'm really pissed about is because that is not at all that was said. If we actually read the linked comment from said GTK maintainer (Matthias):
Accessibility-focused people tend to come with maximalist lists of demands ("We need to have all these very intrusive capabilities, or the system will not be accessible at all").
As written, "maximalist lists of demands", not "accessibility maximalists". And to be honest, I do agree with Matthias. It's not uncommon to find accessibility-focused people asking to turn Wayland into a free-for-all protocol like X11. This is indeed a maximalist list of demands in the sense that it is unscalable because we'd essentially be turning it into abandonware with extra steps. This is, however, not calling accessibility-focused people out as "accessibility maximalists".
Still though, it hurts to read these kinds of articles. While I do believe that those who don't actively need accessibility features (including myself) should absolutely be more sympathetic towards those who do need them, I would really appreciate to have that kind of sympathetic feeling in return towards those who actually put in the work to make software as accessible as possible.
Accessibility is hard whether you rely on features or not; my needs are different than yours, and yours are different than others', so doing the research and inquiries to understand how someone else uses their computer demands exponentially more energy, arguably even tenfold. This is why we absolutely need people to engage.
Then:
What it tells me is that Wayland as an ecosystem demands our participation, yet makes said participation either impossible (“oh, you’re an accessibility maximalist, I don’t need to listen to you”) or requiring multiple years of full-time work to move the needle ever so slightly forward (see: any major Wayland protocol written in the last five years).
Ignoring "accessibility maximalist" as it was addressed above, I will quote Matthias again:
I don't feel like answering this point-by-point.
This is simply because there is way too much to go through, that asking someone to make a list of accessibility improvements would literally ask them to write these lists for several hours for a couple of days. Matthias also refers to some information about them later.
This section I wrote last year, It’s True, “We” Don’t Care About Accessibility on Linux § It All Trickles Down to “GNOME Bad” applies here. The moment GNOME was painted in a bad light, people just started attacking GNOME, but yet "accidentally" ignored about the accessibility work and funding.
This goes without saying: I can't blame the author for misinterpreting it. It's just upsetting that it happened in the first place, and it has negatively tainted my perception of the article so much that I can't even read the rest of the article.
(And before people jump at me and point out that I completely missed the point: no, I didn't, that was essentially the point of the section.)
#Accessibility #a11y #GNOME
