Back

@aral GNOME folks are well aware of the problems with Orca on Wayland, and actively working to fix them. There's even funding for this work, thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund. I'm personally working on a new Wayland-native accessibility stack that aims to eventually replace AT-SPI and support sandboxed apps, but there are also efforts to fix problems in the existing stack in the short term. cc @sonny

@matt @sonny That’s great. So will the x11 session not be removed until this work is done and there is a functional screen reader for Wayland then?

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @matt@toot.cafe @sonny@floss.social Well, I don't know if you've read that MR, but it's targeting GNOME 48, which leaves plenty of time to fix the accessibility issues.

@nah @matt @sonny Well, here’s the thing, Wayland is already the default and the screen reader is broken so…

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @matt@toot.cafe @sonny@floss.social It's the default because it's already quite functional, except for the problems you point out. Additionally, if you increase the number of users on Wayland, it is easier to identify problems and fix them. If it weren't the default, who even knows how long it would have taken us to identify that there were problems with Orca

@nah @matt @sonny If the GNOME folks didn’t realise that Orca was broken before making Wayland the default that’s even worse. It would mean no one on the GNOME team is testing accessibility. If they knew and made it the default anyway, it just shows that accessibility is seen as not essential. So I’m actually not sure which is worse. And we can’t go back in time so hopefully lessons will be learned and this will remedied as soon as possible.

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @matt@toot.cafe @sonny@floss.social Ok, but I remind you that GNOME is not a company, it is a project created by a lot of volunteers. Everyone works on what they want/can, the idea is precisely that there are people who test Wayland and come to help and fix the problems

I think we all agree that accessibility is important, and we all want to create software that is inclusive enough for everyone... but we must also come down to reality, where as long as the problem can be worked around, a lot of ppl think that nothing needs to be fixed

Removing the possibility of workarounding and shoving problems in your face is a strategy to attract volunteers to help improve the software

Finally: public appeals where bad faith is assumed and the project is criticized as if it were a company with a team of full-time developers is a strategy to reduce people's motivation to work on things. You don't need to shit on GNOME for things to be fixed, but on the contrary, the strategy is to show up with proposals and willingness to improve the situation

@nah @aral I'm removing Sonny from this thread. I don't think we need to bother him with this extended debate.