this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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If only linux actually cared about accessibility.
Umm... what?
I'm saying that a lot of people cannot switch because linux is not accessible enough, sadly.
I think that Linux has done huge strides in that regard.
I'm not saying you're wrong when I ask this but, what do you mean? My niece just flashed her laptop to Linux, she's 10. I just showed her which website to go to and handed her a USB drive and answered which buttons to click when she was being too distracted to read things.
Thanks for asking!
Well, to give one example: It has a lot of work to do for blind/visually impaired people, at the very least. Most installers do not come with a screen reader or if it does then it often crashes (it also crashes a lot when installed I am told, at least Orca does). Pipewire, which is used primarily for sound, requires major messing with to be used between user sessions as it cares about security over accessibility, and thus is tied to user permissions, unless you modify it to be accessible, which is going to be difficult when things cannot be seen by the user.
There's a lot of projects for which either patches or the technologies already exist to make things more accessible. However, sadly, a lot of devs prefer new features over fixing things to help make things more accessible. So a lot of people who need such fixes are left behind and thus cannot use linux.
This makes a lot of sense. Thank you very much for the detailed reply! It's a perspective I've thankfully never had to see from so thank you for sharing a different side of life with me. That does sound very limiting for someone who just wants software to work the way it should in a way they can use it.