this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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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.