• Spectacle8011A
    5·
    6 months ago

    GNOME is working on a new Accessibility Toolkit for all desktops, funded by the $1M from STF. It’s intended to make accessibility better on Wayland.

    Watch thisweek.gnome.org for updates on accessibility; there’s usually one. Here’s a very recent article about how it’s going from LWN: https://lwn.net/Articles/971541/

    “At this point, some of you might be thinking ‘show me the code’”, he said. The audience murmured its agreement. Rather than linking to all of the repositories, he provided links to the prototypes for Orca and GTK AccessKit integration. Campbell said these would be the best way to start exploring the stack.

    If all goes well, Newton would not merely provide a better version of existing functionality, it would open up new possibilities. Campbell was running out of time, but he quickly described scenarios of allowing accessible remote-desktop sessions even when the remote machine had no assistive technologies running. He also said it might be possible to provide accessible screenshots and screencasts using Newton, because the accessibility trees could just be bundled with the image or pushed along with the screencast.

    The conclusion, he said, was that the project could provide “the overhaul that I think that accessibility in free desktop environments has needed for a little while now”. Even more, “we can advance the state-of-the-art not just compared to what we already have in free desktops like GNOME”, but even compared to proprietary platforms.

    He gave thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund for funding his work through GNOME, and to the GNOME Foundation for coordinating the work.

    There was not much time for questions, but I managed to sneak one in to ask about the timeline for this work to be available to users. Campbell said that he was unsure, but it was unlikely it would be ready in time for GNOME 47 later this year. It might be ready in time for GNOME 48, but “I can’t make any promises”. He pointed out that his current contract ends in June, and plans to make as much progress as possible before it ends. Beyond that, “we’ll see what happens”.

    Also: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

      • Spectacle8011A
        31·
        6 months ago

        My understanding is that AccessKit is an entirely separate thing to the portal.

        Unfortunately, for several things, your choices are X, which is broken by design and few developers QA their software for anymore, or Wayland, which works pretty well in many areas, but where several important (or even basic) features are quagmired by bike shedding. But things are improving really quickly, and part of that is everyone shifting focus to Wayland.

        I recently tried to navigate my GNOME desktop via screen reader and did not enjoy the experience. If I ever need it, I hope it works properly by that point…

        At least for me, X is a worse experience on every computer I own (including the NVIDIA one), which is why I use Wayland. Neither is problem-free. I’m fortunate enough not to depend on accessibility features; perhaps my opinion would be different then.