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Linux Accessibility: an unmaintained Mess

Devin Prater shares his experiences of trying to use Linux as a blind person.

He reminisces about the days of Gnome 2 on Vinux, which was “accessible and easy to use” when used with Orca, the Linux GUI screen reader. Around 2015, Sonar came along, based on Antergos (Arch Linux). Both projects “are no more”, due to infighting when the two planned to merge.

With Vinux and Sonar abandoned, many blind Linux users moved to mainstream distributions, which vary in their accessibility. Devin shares tale after tale of the barriers he faces and overcomes, only to be faced with another barrier. I won’t reproduce it all here, but safe to say that even when doing everything right, Devin would need to enable settings on a per-app basis, find things were incompatible and that key processes would crash. If someone as technically competent as Devin faces these issues, other users have no hope.

Devin ends with a call to action, for the open source community to care enough about accessibility to “clean up the mess they started”. He was forced to reinstall Windows, and highlights how not being able to use Linux is impacting his ability to get a skilled, well-paid job. Devin points out that the blind community are the very people that stand to benefit most from gaining system administrator skills and so on, if the accessibility barriers can be overcome.

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