I saw another big thread about people talking at each other concerning Linux accessibility where one side goes "no this sucks" and the other side goes "But how?", and then it's a constant back and forth with no real resolution.
I wonder if a lot of this stems from the fact that a lot of people actually putting in work for Linux accessibility don't really need it? Like, for example if I boot up a Linux distro, sometimes I'll be able to do what I want, sometimes I won't. One of the biggest issues is that Orca and the accessibility stack will randomly fall over. Like I'll be in some app like Mate software update center or whatever and then it just stops reading. Even worse if Orca was playing a progress beep at the time, which then becomes stuck. So I have a constantly beeping unresponsive system. That's anything but pleasant. But here's the thing. These systems working together are complex. You can have just a slightly different config, or sometimes even just different apps open, and you'll get a completely different experience. Sometimes the update center works fine. Sometimes it doesn't. Telling me that this is a bug with the update center doesn't help because it's the screen reader that died, and without it, I can't do anything. So that's not the solution. The solution is clearly to make the screen reader or accessibility stack somehow work despite this.
But the real thing I'm trying to get at is that we're expecting a largely sighted developer base to fix this for us. Then they do some work, it works theoretically, so they throw on Orca and mess around for a few minutes and everything seems to work fine, so issue solved right? So off goes Orca, and back to visual working it is without a screen reader.
But not much longer and someone blind tries to use it, has lots of apps open, is doing complex and elaborate work, and something falls over again. So they report it. "Wait, but this was fixed wasn't it? Let me try." So they do. And it works for them. Can't reproduce, must be user error, and Orca gets disabled again and on with normal work.
And who can blame them? I mean this makes perfect sense right? We don't really want to use something we don't need to use. There's really no reason to keep using Orca if you can read the screen just fine.
Don't take this as fact. For example I know that there are at the very least a few blind devs and devs with assistive tech background working really hard on trying to make Linux accessibility better, and I'm not sure how many. But that's probably gonna take some time. Because if all this stuff was easy, we wouldn't even have all these issues right?
Anyway if you're working on Linux accessibility, don't take it personally. This is a hard problem to solve, and it's not your fault. Neither is it ours. If something sucks, listen to the ones who're complaining. It's the same stuff over and over. :)
