In celebration of accessibility

Accessibility in the free and open source world is somewhat of a sensitive topic.

Given the principles of free software, one would think it would be the best possible place to advocate for accessibility. After all, there’s a collection of ideologically motivated individuals trying to craft desktops to themselves and other fellow humans. And yet, when you look at the current state of accessibility on the Linux desktop, you couldn’t possibly call it good, not even sufficient.

It’s a tough situation that’s forcing people who need assistive technologies out of these spaces.

I think accessibility on the Linux desktop is in a particularly difficult position due to a combination of poor incentives and historical factors:

• The dysfunctional state of accessibility on Linux makes it so that the people who need it the most cannot even contribute to it.
• There is very little financial incentive for companies to invest in accessibility technologies. Often, and historically, companies invest just enough to tick some boxes on government checklists, then forget about it.
• Volunteers, especially those who contribute for fun and self enjoyment, often don’t go out of their ways to make the particular projects they’re working on accessible. Or to check if their contributions regress the accessibility of the app.
• The nature of accessibility makes it such that the “functional progression” is not linear. If only 50% of the stack is working, that’s practically a 0%. Accessibility requires that almost every part of the stack to be functional for even the most basic use cases.
• There’s almost nobody contributing to this area anymore. Expertise and domain knowledge are almost entirely lost.

In addition to that, I feel like work on accessibility is invisible. In the sense that most people are simply apathetic to the work and contributions done on this area. Maybe due to the dynamics of social media that often favor negative engagement? I don’t know. But it sure feels unrewarding. Compare:

Now, I think if I stopped writing here, you dear reader might feel that the situation is mostly gloomy, maybe even get angry at it. However, against all odds, and fighting a fight that seems impossible, there are people working on accessibility. Often without any kind of reward, doing this out of principle. It’s just so easy to overlook their effort!

So as we prepare for the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, I thought it would be an excellent opportunity to highlight these fantastic contributors and their excellent work, and also to talk about some ongoing work on GNOME.

If you consider this kind of work important and relevant, and/or if you need accessibility features yourself, I urge you: please donate to the people mentioned here. Grab these people a coffee. Better yet, grab them a monthly coffee! Contributors who accept donations have a button beneath their avatars. Go help them.

Calendar

GNOME Calendar, the default calendaring app for GNOME, has slowly but surely progressing towards being minimally accessible. This is mostly thanks to the amazing work from Hari Rana and Jeff Fortin Tam!

Hari recently wrote about it on Mastodon. In fixing one issue, Hari accidentally fixed at least two other issues. Jeff, as an exemplary product manager and co-maintainer, was the one who noticed and also blogged about these collateral fixes.

If you consider this kind of work important, please consider getting them a coffee!

Elevado

Back when I was working on fixing accessibility on WebKitGTK, I found the lack of modern tools to inspect the AT-SPI bus a bit off-putting, so I wrote a little app to help me through. Didn’t think much of it, really.

But the project started getting some attention when Bilal Elmoussaoui contributed to it while testing some accessibility work in GNOME Shell. After that, Matthias Clasen – of GTK fame – and Claire – a new contributor! – started sending some nice patches around.

In preparation for the Global Accessibility Awareness Day we have made the first public release of Elevado! The project is evolving mostly without me these days, and it’s all thanks to these people.

GTK

Of course, almost nothing I’ve mentioned so far would be possible if the toolkit itself didn’t have support for accessibility. Thanks to Emmanuele Bassi GTK4 received an entirely new accessibility backend.

Over time, more people picked up on it, and continued improving it and filling in the gaps. Matthias Clasen and Emmanuele continue to review contributions and keep things moving.

One particular contributor is Lukáš Tyrychtr, who has implemented the Text interface of AT-SPI in GTK. Lukáš contributes to various other parts of the accessibility stack as well!

Design

On the design side, one person in particular stands out for a series of contributions on the Accessibility panel of GNOME Settings: Sam Hewitt. Sam introduced the first mockups of this panel in GitLab, then kept on updating it. More recently, Sam introduced mockups for text-to-speech (okay technically these are in the System panel, but that’s in the accessibility mockups folder!).

Please join me in thanking Sam for these contributions!

Infrastructure

Having apps and toolkits exposing the proper amount of accessibility information is a necessary first step, but it would be useless if there was nothing to expose to.

Thanks to Mike Gorse and others, the AT-SPI project keeps on living. AT-SPI is the service that receives and manages the accessibility information from apps. It’s the heart of accessibility in the Linux desktop! As far as my knowledge about it goes, AT-SPI is really old, dating back to Sun days.

Samuel Thibault continues to maintain speech-dispatcher and Accerciser. Speech dispatcher is the de facto text-to-speech service for Linux as of now. Accerciser is a venerable tool to inspect AT-SPI trees.

Eitan Isaacson is shaking up the speech synthesis world with libspiel, a speech framework for the desktop. Orca has experimental support for it. Eitan is now working on a desktop portal so that sandboxed apps can benefit from speech synthesis seamlessly!

One of the most common screen readers for Linux is Orca. Orca maintainers have been keeping it up an running for a very long time. Here I’d like to point out that we at Igalia significantly fund Orca development.

I would like to invite the community to share a thank you for all of them!

… and more!

I tried to reach out to everyone nominally mentioned in this blog post. Some people preferred not to be mentioned. I’m pretty sure I’ve never got to learn about others that are involved in related projects.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, this list is not exhaustive. There are more people involved. If you know some of them, please let me encourage you to pay them a tea, a lunch, a boat trip in Venice, whatever you feel like; or even just reach out to them and thank them for their work.

If you contribute or know someone who contributes to desktop accessibility, and wishes to be here, please let me know. Also, please let me know if this webpage itself is properly accessible!

A Look Into The Future

Shortly after I started to write this blog post, I thought to myself: “well, this is nice and all, but it isn’t exactly robust.” Hm. If only there was a more structured, reliable way to keep investing on this.

Coincidentally, at the same time, we were introduced to our new executive director Steven. With such a blast of an introduction, and seeing Steven hanging around in various rooms, I couldn’t resist asking about it. To my great surprise and joy, Steven swiftly responded to my inquiries and we started discussing some ideas!

Conversations are still ongoing, and I don’t want to create any sort of hype in case things end up not working, but… maaaaaaybe keep in mind that there might be an announcement soon!

Huge thanks to the people above, and to everyone who helped me write this blog post ♥️

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¹ – Jeff doesn’t accept donations for himself, but welcomes marketing-related business