Linux Accessibility: An Unmaintained Mess | Hacker News Reader

Linux Accessibility: An Unmaintained Mess

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12 pointspabs37 comments

Is anyone interested in forming some kind of working group to log and hopefully fix accessibility issues that people keep running into in the open source desktop space? Open source is for everyone, and it's a shame that some people are excluded.

I'm not too familiar with the Linux desktop stack and I only have a couple of very minor contributions to desktop/graphical projects, but it's something I'd gladly donate a few hours a week to help improve.

Lots of the distros have accessibility teams and they are good places to get involved, for eg here is the Debian team's documentation:

https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility-devel

I am interested.

I'm maintainer of WeKan Open Source kanban https://wekan.github.io

I'm trying to add accessibility to WeKan etc, but problem is, how do I get contact to blind community to understand how to help.

Accessibility issue is at https://github.com/wekan/wekan/issues/459

Or someone can email me, address at https://wekan.team/commercial-support/

For simulating a completely blind user, you could put on a blindfold and try out the software after turning on your desktop's accessibility features. I think there are resources for simulating different kinds of color vision. Also try using your app with one hand. And with no hands but a joystick or other device you use without your hands.

This is a really good start! Good list of possible testing avenues :)

I'm sure that the blind community has UX conventions documented or otherwise that would be best practice to stick to, but may be very hard for seeing people to understand or know off the bat. I definitely think abled people should test accessibility, but no replacement for getting feedback from the target audience.

One of many problems with the Bazaar model and everyone mostly just making stuff for themselves.

I suspect things will improve one day, as things get more cathedral-ized.

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