Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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Thoughts on the freedom of operating systems (self.Blind)
submitted by devinprater
Hello all. As I've used all major operating systems: Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android multiple times over multiple hardwares, I'd like to share my thoughts on them.
First off, Linux is not freedom, for us. Let me just get that out of the way. We are trapped by inaccessibility not only because developers don't know, but because in Linux, developers can do whatever they want, make a whole new way of drawing icons, handling clicks and key presses, all disreguarding blind people. Now some may say, "well the console..." But the command line is only as powerful as the commands which it can issue, the accessibility of the resulting output, and the knowledge of the user. Also, look at the community, as a whole. They don't need us; they don't care one bit about us. A few developers may be rather interested in making their program work for us, but not nearly enough to make a difference. One user on Reddit, in r/linux, said that we should just have our own distribution of Linux. Shall we now be segrigated? I would not stand it. I would not trust the code of my running operating system to such a person or group who would segrigate us into more of blind ghetto.
Yes, fredom sounds great, it really does. But there is no such thing. We either are beholden to one master or another. With Linux, we bow to the 95% that Linux was made to serve. No, developers do not build an image describing program, even though the programming interfaces are there to do so. No good eBook readers, few games, only one desktop OCR program that definitely isn't for the 98% of blind people to set up. The only good eBook reader on linux is within Emacs, using Emacspeak of course, which few blind people would want to jump through the hoops of setting up and learning to use.
Now, if I "hate" Linux so much, why keep coming back to it? Because freedom sure sounds good, and I really would love for it to be all I need. But it's not. And it probably never will be.
Now, the Mac. This will be a more cheerful section, because would you look at that, Apple actually cares a bit. Kind of. At least, on the iPhone. When a Mac first starts up, it waits for a good minute, then asks if the user would like to learn about, or turn on, VoiceOver. Yeah, an actual tutorial, imagine that. From there, the Mac is a pretty smoothe experience. But does the Mac offer freedom for us? A little. We can be assured that our screen reader will not su.enly break after an update because of some bug in our TTS service. Even if VoiceOver crashes, macOS itself will try its best to bring it back to life. We can setVoiceOver to always come out of the system speakers or headphones, so we won't lose speech if something goes wrong with audio. And braille, well, that's the part that needs plenty of work. Treat it like iOS, and it'd be instantly better, Apple. Application-wise, though, its about the same as Linux. The only desktop OCR costs about $30 or more, with kezboard-mystro being the driving engine. the Books app on macOS is awful with VoiceOver, so no dice reading books on the Mac. Again, only Emacs and Emacspeak work well for reading. I find it insane that old programs like that outdo "modern" apps.
Windows is a little brighter still. When one sets up their PC, Cortana tells them that Narrator exists, and how to turn it on. No tutorial at that stage, whough. Or, did I mention that Linux has nothing like this? You have to just find out how to start Orca by looking it up.
Application-wise, it has games, NVDA can OCR the desktop right aweaay, and has plenty of addons to boot... but reading, unless you're a ser, is ' not all that great. Adobe Editions works well with speech, but not withbraille.
iOS is the brightest, in my oppinion. It's not perfect by a long shot, but it is most accessible for the most part. You turn it on, and... well... what then? Its just a screen. Yes, there should be a tutorial for iOS, to help blind people know that, tripple press the home, or power if X or newer, and VoiceOver will start. But "not, what now? yes, a basic tutorial after that should be included as well. But the real power of iOS is in its apps. There ais the Books app, which works great on iOS, especially with braille, Voice Dream Reader, Kindle, BARD, and probably many others. There are games, OCR apps, so much for us. truly, if Apple can do being a huge company, Linux could definitely do it, if its community desired it to be so.
I won't spend much time on Android. It is arguably the most dark. No braille out of the box. Few games. Around 1 good reading app. Necessary to use third-party apps the Google ones just aren't good enough. TalkBack uses single-finger gestures, because accessibility construction of Android doesn't allow anything more.
The biggest problem with Android to me, is that BrailleBack isn't included. Why would anyone choose to support such a brazenly inaccessible OS, to our most underserved bretheren, his people who are Deaf Blind. Some say its okaz, because they don't want or need braille. But BrailleBack isn't ! large of a program. Google has no excuse for not including it.
I know this has been a long post, and I've written us all in Braille, on an iPhone, so sorry if some things didn't out right. Notifications coming sort of makes the phone's braille system go crazy. iInin turn
First off, Linux is not freedom, for us. Let me just get that out of the way. We are trapped by inaccessibility not only because developers don't know, but because in Linux, developers can do whatever they want, make a whole new way of drawing icons, handling clicks and key presses, all disreguarding blind people. Now some may say, "well the console..." But the command line is only as powerful as the commands which it can issue, the accessibility of the resulting output, and the knowledge of the user. Also, look at the community, as a whole. They don't need us; they don't care one bit about us. A few developers may be rather interested in making their program work for us, but not nearly enough to make a difference. One user on Reddit, in r/linux, said that we should just have our own distribution of Linux. Shall we now be segrigated? I would not stand it. I would not trust the code of my running operating system to such a person or group who would segrigate us into more of blind ghetto.
Yes, fredom sounds great, it really does. But there is no such thing. We either are beholden to one master or another. With Linux, we bow to the 95% that Linux was made to serve. No, developers do not build an image describing program, even though the programming interfaces are there to do so. No good eBook readers, few games, only one desktop OCR program that definitely isn't for the 98% of blind people to set up. The only good eBook reader on linux is within Emacs, using Emacspeak of course, which few blind people would want to jump through the hoops of setting up and learning to use.
Now, if I "hate" Linux so much, why keep coming back to it? Because freedom sure sounds good, and I really would love for it to be all I need. But it's not. And it probably never will be.
Now, the Mac. This will be a more cheerful section, because would you look at that, Apple actually cares a bit. Kind of. At least, on the iPhone. When a Mac first starts up, it waits for a good minute, then asks if the user would like to learn about, or turn on, VoiceOver. Yeah, an actual tutorial, imagine that. From there, the Mac is a pretty smoothe experience. But does the Mac offer freedom for us? A little. We can be assured that our screen reader will not su.enly break after an update because of some bug in our TTS service. Even if VoiceOver crashes, macOS itself will try its best to bring it back to life. We can setVoiceOver to always come out of the system speakers or headphones, so we won't lose speech if something goes wrong with audio. And braille, well, that's the part that needs plenty of work. Treat it like iOS, and it'd be instantly better, Apple. Application-wise, though, its about the same as Linux. The only desktop OCR costs about $30 or more, with kezboard-mystro being the driving engine. the Books app on macOS is awful with VoiceOver, so no dice reading books on the Mac. Again, only Emacs and Emacspeak work well for reading. I find it insane that old programs like that outdo "modern" apps.
Windows is a little brighter still. When one sets up their PC, Cortana tells them that Narrator exists, and how to turn it on. No tutorial at that stage, whough. Or, did I mention that Linux has nothing like this? You have to just find out how to start Orca by looking it up.
Application-wise, it has games, NVDA can OCR the desktop right aweaay, and has plenty of addons to boot... but reading, unless you're a ser, is ' not all that great. Adobe Editions works well with speech, but not withbraille.
iOS is the brightest, in my oppinion. It's not perfect by a long shot, but it is most accessible for the most part. You turn it on, and... well... what then? Its just a screen. Yes, there should be a tutorial for iOS, to help blind people know that, tripple press the home, or power if X or newer, and VoiceOver will start. But "not, what now? yes, a basic tutorial after that should be included as well. But the real power of iOS is in its apps. There ais the Books app, which works great on iOS, especially with braille, Voice Dream Reader, Kindle, BARD, and probably many others. There are games, OCR apps, so much for us. truly, if Apple can do being a huge company, Linux could definitely do it, if its community desired it to be so.
I won't spend much time on Android. It is arguably the most dark. No braille out of the box. Few games. Around 1 good reading app. Necessary to use third-party apps the Google ones just aren't good enough. TalkBack uses single-finger gestures, because accessibility construction of Android doesn't allow anything more.
The biggest problem with Android to me, is that BrailleBack isn't included. Why would anyone choose to support such a brazenly inaccessible OS, to our most underserved bretheren, his people who are Deaf Blind. Some say its okaz, because they don't want or need braille. But BrailleBack isn't ! large of a program. Google has no excuse for not including it.
I know this has been a long post, and I've written us all in Braille, on an iPhone, so sorry if some things didn't out right. Notifications coming sort of makes the phone's braille system go crazy. iInin turn
TheFake_VIP_yt 2 points 4y ago
Disclaimer: I haven't finished reading your post yet but ...
As someone who quite literally is probably the most enthusiastic person on linux accessibility on the planet, I completely agree that there is one whole heck of a lot of accessibility issues linux from almost every angle. Our TTS is either awful, really, really hard to set up or requires really expensive (not to mention really old) pieces of hardware. Electron apps have 0 accessibility support, the same can be said for chromium and chrome, which are the root cause of these problems for electron. KDE has had stacks of accessibility issues going back decades and while the situation is improving, we're still barely getting anywhere. Orca, the linux screen reader, is feature barren, lacks working plugin support and, above all, can only access applications that expose the AT-SPI interface. Speech-dispatcher, which both orca and fenrir (if configured appropriately) rely on is a pain in the neck to configure on anything that's arch or arch based, requiring pulse because I at least have never gotten it to work with just alsa (don't get me started on linux audio, that's a different post)
But ... I think you're getting caught in the general reddit outrage my friend, just a little bit. The situation is still bad, no ones denying that, but it is, really, honestly getting better. Orca gained progress bar tones a few years back and you can only imagine how happy that made me as an NVDA user. The problem is, unless you've quite literally spent 5 years web searching, reading forum post after forum post, developer doc after confusing developer doc, you don't have a good enough picture to say what works and what doesn't. Heck, I've done that for the last 5 years and I couldn't tell you how to set up festival to first of all work and second of all work with speech-dispatcher to get a moderately competent TTS going. The documentation, as with lots of open source software, but more so than ever here, doesn't exist in the slightest. I've been trying to fix this myself for years now by making videos about it on my $1and people find the content interesting because in some (not all) cases, it's practically the only thing they can find.
This is the linux community. Regardless of how mediocre accessibility is, there'll always be someone interested in forwarding it and right now, that person's me.
As someone who quite literally is probably the most enthusiastic person on linux accessibility on the planet, I completely agree that there is one whole heck of a lot of accessibility issues linux from almost every angle. Our TTS is either awful, really, really hard to set up or requires really expensive (not to mention really old) pieces of hardware. Electron apps have 0 accessibility support, the same can be said for chromium and chrome, which are the root cause of these problems for electron. KDE has had stacks of accessibility issues going back decades and while the situation is improving, we're still barely getting anywhere. Orca, the linux screen reader, is feature barren, lacks working plugin support and, above all, can only access applications that expose the AT-SPI interface. Speech-dispatcher, which both orca and fenrir (if configured appropriately) rely on is a pain in the neck to configure on anything that's arch or arch based, requiring pulse because I at least have never gotten it to work with just alsa (don't get me started on linux audio, that's a different post)
But ... I think you're getting caught in the general reddit outrage my friend, just a little bit. The situation is still bad, no ones denying that, but it is, really, honestly getting better. Orca gained progress bar tones a few years back and you can only imagine how happy that made me as an NVDA user. The problem is, unless you've quite literally spent 5 years web searching, reading forum post after forum post, developer doc after confusing developer doc, you don't have a good enough picture to say what works and what doesn't. Heck, I've done that for the last 5 years and I couldn't tell you how to set up festival to first of all work and second of all work with speech-dispatcher to get a moderately competent TTS going. The documentation, as with lots of open source software, but more so than ever here, doesn't exist in the slightest. I've been trying to fix this myself for years now by making videos about it on my $1and people find the content interesting because in some (not all) cases, it's practically the only thing they can find.
This is the linux community. Regardless of how mediocre accessibility is, there'll always be someone interested in forwarding it and right now, that person's me.
PractisingPoetry 2 points 4y ago
It's worth mentioning that, the suggesting that VI have their own distribution in Linux, it isn't segregation any more than the suggestion that everybody have their own diary - the whole idea of Linux is that everyone has a unique install that works for the needs and the wants of the user. To suggest that their be one distro that works for everyone goes against the philosophy of Linux - that our experiences be heavily personalized. Just about everyone starts with a popular distro and modifies it to their needs over time - ussually making it drastically different in time.
It has a steep learning curve, I'll admit, but it's totally worth it. Find a distro that you *can* use - and be decisive about your choice. Switching distros won't help you learn.
Then simply start researching how to change the things you dislike. Some things will be too confusing at first, and so you just deal, but some things you'll find are quite easy. Over time, you learn enough to change everything and in a few months/years (everybody learns at a different pace) - you end up with a heavily personalized UI that can't be bested.
It has a steep learning curve, I'll admit, but it's totally worth it. Find a distro that you *can* use - and be decisive about your choice. Switching distros won't help you learn.
Then simply start researching how to change the things you dislike. Some things will be too confusing at first, and so you just deal, but some things you'll find are quite easy. Over time, you learn enough to change everything and in a few months/years (everybody learns at a different pace) - you end up with a heavily personalized UI that can't be bested.
[deleted] 1 points 4y ago
[deleted]
Balthier1234 2 points 4y ago
I use linux full time, emacspeak is a bit of a pain to get setup though.
Laser_Lens_4 1 points 3y ago
Pretty late but as someone who uses a Galaxy s9+ on a daily basis I beg to differ. It works fine. If you need Braille then buy an iPhone. Don't go buying a Xiaomi whatever because yeah, that's going to have shit accessibility because the OEM decided to add 5000 unlabelled buttons to the OS.
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