this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Too bad Linux completely abandoned accessibility with Wayland by putting accessibility API implementations up to the distros. Which, by far, don't. And when they do it's fragmented as fuck.
Making Linux an absolute no go for anyone that needs accessibility tools like Talon, which does work on X11 APIs. Since those were actually consistent.
I really do not like such comments. Do free alternatives always have to be better than everything else? Even if people would find out that Facebook was always watching them via their cameras and were selling their nude pictures to the Hezbollah, someone will jump into the comments and say that they can't use Mastodon, because some bogus reason. Yeah, accessibility could be better, but have you even taken a look at whatever nightmare UIs Microsoft has been pushing for years?
It's not about being better than everything else.
It's about literally maintaining the same capabilities that it had before that don't alienate an entire class of users. And taking into consideration how dropping centralized APIs and ecosystem fragmentation affects users.
Accessibility apis are non-optional for accessibility tools that many individuals require in order to use their device effectively.
That's a pretty big difference from what you seem to be thinking. We're not talking about how the user interface looks here.
Accessibility apis on Windows and Mac actually work and are actually consistent.
They're only consistent across Linux Desktop environments if you are using X11. Wayland kills that
I think most of the commenters that are replying to me or completely missing this point
Also, linux is open source. Heck with arch you can compile your own. Dont like the accessibility tools? Be the change you wanna see.
I mean, I can see that it is kind of hard to program your own accessibility tools esp. when you're disabled. But in this case it literally is "Pay money to be spied upon by a ruthless company in bed with the Trump administration" vs. "use this free software that is not spying on you"
(and accessibility on linux is not that bad)
I mean if you rely on accessibility apis you're not going to use it because it's not there.... You literally cannot use the OS because you require accessibility tools to use your computer effectively.
And implying that someone should just make it their own is kind of asinine. This is a big shift in the Linux Desktop ecosystem that one person cannot affect when decisions have already been made and contributions that go against project decisions are not necessarily welcome.
Developers of large accessibility projects slowly dropping Linux support because of Wayland Is a Wayland problem, not a "devs of accessibility tools problem".
They are already vocal about it, to frustratingly no effect.
I've been using Wayland for months and haven't noticed any glaring differences between it and X11.
What are you talking about? Sorry but it is these types of comments that confuse new users. Same with the systems init.d bullshit.
I am running endeavour os on my laptop with kde Wayland and I have absolutely no issues. None! Sure there are some fringe cases but for the large majority Linux is working flawlessly!
What are you talking about? They weren't talking about the large majority, they're explicitly talking about the minority who needs accessibility tools to use a computer. I personally don't know what these deficiencies are, but i can imagine with Wayland's strong security focus, screen readers would be busted.
Hi, we use accessible features (os wide captions for VCs and videos without CC to help with hearing issues/audio processing disability) and haven’t had issues with that. Tho from what we’ve heard, screen readers are trash no matter what OS you use. :P Haven’t had much of an issue otherwise.
That's good to know! Glad not everyone is having issues with Wayland :)
Wayland is responsible for kneecapping linux desktop in so many ways its infuriating, especially since linux basically figured out the golden standard of UX design back in the 2000s with stuff like GNOME 2 and Compiz.
It's such an unnecessary burden with progress as slow as ripoff projects like star citizen.
I hope valve picks up the slack with frog protocols or at least gets PRs merged, because it would be stupid to ship steam machine and then explain to the user that the clipboard doesn't work yet, even though it used to work perfectly fine in X11.
Except accessibility, Wayland has been a huge upgrade over X11.
Much better security isolation, proper HDR, full multi-monitor support, full VRR support, better application scaling, no screen tearing and reduced latency. (The clipboard also works fine)
Without Wayland I would not be on Linux right now.
Almost nothing you mentioned here has to do with accessibility and accessibility tooling.
I get the feeling that most of the people replying here and downvoting the folks that are right don't actually know what accessibility means.
Which.... Honestly tracks. If the community in general doesn't actually understand what accessibility is of course the projects themselves aren't going to give a shit about accessibility.
And the Linux community, par for the course, shits on anyone who has real critical feedback.
My comment starts with "Except accessibility". I'm not downvoting anyone because they say accessibility on Wayland sucks, because it does.
I'm downvoting the other person that compares Wayland to Star Citizen, because they paid so much for Wayland and they take so long.
Is completly up to each compositor to implement properly. Its still experimental in KDE because afaik theres no proper SDR + HDR tone mapping for mixed apps on the display, like a desktop.
Valve made their own compositor and cheats the problem by ensuring their client and overlay supports HDR colors + only having to handle the HDR from game output.
Not if you have an Nvidia GPU before 2017, and again already a thing in X11.
Again, VRR and wayland's ingenious solution to this was triple buffering, which is a pure software solution that adds latency making it unsuitable in several cases like this: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/3373
Welcome to Xwayland clipboard hell: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/6132
Its not that Wayland can't easily fix any of these issues or that the other major improvements you mentioned are not worth it, its that it took Wayland like 13 years to do so.
Most of this should have been sorted out in the first couple years of development. People were already making fun of Wayland back in the day for pretending to be "decoupled from the graphics hardware" and then deciding on the aforementioned triple buffer.
Wayland didn't even merge in HDR support until 9 months ago: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/14#note_2777587
The graphics stack is better, but the security isolation is IMHO solving a problem no one really had, at the cost of breaking a bunch of integration mechanisms people actually used.
You want UI security isolation for something like Android, where most software being run is fundamentally opposed to the interests of the user and wants to steal anything not nailed down, and you also contain things at the file system level. If Facebook could screenshot every other app all the time it absolutely would, and people would download it anyway. To some extent the enforceable promise that it can't do that is why people are still willing to download it anyway and let it do all the other things it does to compromise a system.
In a distro shipping legitimate software, isolation at the desktop UI level is nice for defense in depth, but not really drawing a real security boundary around any program to the point where a user can trust a machine with malicious software running. It doesn't matter if I can't steal Firefox's pixels if I can
echo "export PATH=$HOME/.evil-firefox/bin:$PATH" >>~/.bashrc.Have you last used wayland 6 years ago??
Here's a feature list
~~Yes~~ Yes I have been continously using it and it wasn't viable until around late 2023 and early 2024.
My complaint isn't that it sucks now, its that it sucked for a solid decade doing nothing.
If it doesn't suck now, then valve doesn't have anything to explain, no?
Its still lagging is its MRs, like HDR coming in just less than a year ago.
Valve's complaint was that even after getting approval from at least 3 DE projects, protocols were not getting merged due to hypothetical discussions and implementation baggage.
I imagine it all started with them making their gamescope compositor a few years ago and realizing a bunch of stuff was still missing.