This now makes all current mainstream distros 100% unusable for blind users, as all built-in screen readers are broken on Wayland, and all the main distros now use Wayland, so you cannot even install the OS at all.
I’m not up to speed on this issue, but it seems like the solution is to push forward with making the readers work in Wayland? Is there a technical issue with Wayland’s design that prevents readers from working properly?
Basically, X11/Xorg doesn’t isolate programs from one another. This is horrible for security since malicious software can read every window, as well as all the input from mice and keyboards, just by querying the X server, but it’s also handy for screen reading software, streaming, etc. Meanwhile, Wayland isolates programs in their own sandbox, which prevents, say, a malicious browser tab from reading all of your keyboard inputs and logging your root password, but also breaks those things we like to use. To make matters worse, it looks like everyone’s answer for this and similar dilemmas wasn’t “let’s fix Wayland” but “let’s develop an extension to fix Wayland” and we wound up with that one fucking xkcd standards comic that I won’t bother linking because everyone has seen it a zillion times.
ETA: Basically, my (layman’s) understanding is that fixing this and making screen readers work in Wayland is hard because the core Wayland developers seem to have little appetite for fixing this themselves. Meanwhile, there’s 3-4 implementations of Wayland that do things differently, so fixing it via extensions means either writing multiple backends in your program to do the same damn thing (aka a giant pain in the ass) or getting everyone to agree on the same standard implementation (good fucking luck).
This now makes all current mainstream distros 100% unusable for blind users, as all built-in screen readers are broken on Wayland, and all the main distros now use Wayland, so you cannot even install the OS at all.
I’m not up to speed on this issue, but it seems like the solution is to push forward with making the readers work in Wayland? Is there a technical issue with Wayland’s design that prevents readers from working properly?
Basically, X11/Xorg doesn’t isolate programs from one another. This is horrible for security since malicious software can read every window, as well as all the input from mice and keyboards, just by querying the X server, but it’s also handy for screen reading software, streaming, etc. Meanwhile, Wayland isolates programs in their own sandbox, which prevents, say, a malicious browser tab from reading all of your keyboard inputs and logging your root password, but also breaks those things we like to use. To make matters worse, it looks like everyone’s answer for this and similar dilemmas wasn’t “let’s fix Wayland” but “let’s develop an extension to fix Wayland” and we wound up with that one fucking xkcd standards comic that I won’t bother linking because everyone has seen it a zillion times.
ETA: Basically, my (layman’s) understanding is that fixing this and making screen readers work in Wayland is hard because the core Wayland developers seem to have little appetite for fixing this themselves. Meanwhile, there’s 3-4 implementations of Wayland that do things differently, so fixing it via extensions means either writing multiple backends in your program to do the same damn thing (aka a giant pain in the ass) or getting everyone to agree on the same standard implementation (good fucking luck).
That sounds awful. And a major loss to accessibility. Here’s hoping one of the standards gains traction as the one path everyone can agree on.
Afaik Pop still uses X11
It won’t in 24.04 because Cosmic doesn’t support anything else
I’m not blind, but … there seems to be quite a bit of progress in this area to the point where (at least on the surface) your claim seems outdated.
https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/