The tricky thing with these "unofficial" distros is that they are generally maintained by either a single individual or a small group of people.
This is true for many accessibility projects actually (game mods, third-party UIs for inaccessible services/platforms, etc.).
These are generally really meant as short-term patches while the problem gets fixed, except ... the problem often doesn't get fixed because the platforms in question figure it's been solved now and they don't need to care about it anymore.
Accessibility really only works when it's an ongoing, first-class process within an app/platform's design, and we can absolutely do that; the standards and guidelines have existed for decades. People working in cybersecurity, localization, general UX should recognize this song and dance, which is amusing because a lot of the tools of those trades have atrocious accessibility and require all sorts of workarounds, ask me how I know.
People just ... aren't including it in this way, which means people like myself (screen reader user and accessibility professional) essentially have to keep reminding people that we exist and that it's kinda shitty to keep forgetting about that fact or to decide the least amount of effort possible (LLM, unpaid volunteer, send in a PR LMAO) is enough to cater to people who have very real, very annoying and very constant UX issues we either crash into or crash through on literally an hourly basis.
It's because adding new shiny features is fun and adding accessibility is boring, and most people in the free software world are there to have fun. That's also why bugs are always forgotten while people keep piling new features.
I also think it's partly because adding accessibile interfaces is hard.
If you are not visually impaired then designing then when designing a visual interface for an application you are more-or-less designing for yourself. You know how to use visual interfaces, so it is relatively easy for you to evaluate whether you've done a good job.
Most people do not know how to use a screenreader, so if you're designing for a screenreader then it's going to be much harder for you to test the interface and evaluate whether it's actually usable by it's target audience.
I'd also love to see more educational resources on this topic. Not just "use this attribute/role for this use case", but "this is how using a screenreader works. This is an example of a good workflow . this is an example of bad workflow". There's tons of material out there for visual design, but I haven't come accross nearly so much for other interfaces.
It’s not a free and open source issue, it’s a general issue in product development.
Whereas in free software, people develop apps to have fun, in business product development, teams always try to ship a feature that is the highest leverage, and making the app work well with screen readers is usually not the highest leverage item, unfortunately.
Here's an interview (in Czech) with Vojta, the main (only) developer. There might be follow up articles discussing specific issues he's facing as user and as a developer.
I'm glad to see things like this get built. I hate to admit it but I rarely consider impaired usecases when building things. I wonder how technology is changing this usecase lately both on the user end and the design end. (I know, AI) I imagine an LLM could help discover inadequate UI and build alternative workflows into products more easily.
Whispir is a much better TTS than almost anything else. However, when it gets it wrong, oh boy does it get it wrong.
For everything else? Not really. JS thrashing the DOM is as much a pain as ever. Using ico files instead of either emoji or... Text... Makes UIs painful and inconsistent.
Everyone using Electron and its broken [0] accessibility, including core Windows features...
These aren't things that can be reasoned away with an LLM. An interface is not just text - its a reasoned nodegraph. And when I'm blind (comes and goes), I need the nodegraph. Not an image of the screen reinterpreted.
I find it very hard to know what to do to follow best practice. For example the biggest UK charity for blind people make social media posts about the importance of text descriptions and alt tags that break what I thought was good practice (they duplicate text in post and alt tag) and they seem to encourage this.
I don't recall where, but I've heard that before in the past. Perhaps in the kind of slop that makes the rounds on LinkedIn.
There is sort of a good reason for it, in the past. Before the overhaul, Microsoft Speech used to skip Facebook posts, and read the alt text instead. It is now, however, more sane. Facebook was pretty darn bad at accessibility in its early days. A lot of intermingled broken spans for text, causing stuttering and other issues.
However, today, most reading systems prefer the "title" attribute, to the "alt" one. If title exists, it'll read that and skip alt. Some always skip alt, regardless of it exists or not.
Figure and figcaption are about the only way to get good and consistent behaviour, but you don't really control how those happen on most social media platforms. You throw everything you can at the wall, and see what happens. And it might change tomorrow.
Today, I'd say the above is bad advice. An image description is a good practice. Repeating yourself, isn't.
What are you basing that on? Screen readers tend to not pick those up at least on interactive elements by default, you need to do a bit of "wiggling" to get those to be announced.
Disclaimer: screen reader user
JAWS user, here. It will read both aria-label and title, on a button, which is an interactive element. [0]
It does depend on the verbosity, if you dial that down, you'll probably lose the title element. But for images, which is what I was mentioning, it should pretty much always be read out.
I am ... relatively sure JAWS reads out title attributes of images because people kept erroneously sticking important info there decades ago, I wouldn't say that's a generally accepted recommendation. Not entirely sure what NVDA would do with an image that has only a title but no alt set.
ARIA and the web group define title to be used. [0][1] It's just that many agents just don't use it correctly. JAWS and NVDA do. Microsoft Speech used to ignore it, but I think they fixed that around Windows 11 release. I'm not sure about VoiceOver. Most braille readers I've used... Well, you'll be lucky if they read anything correctly.
With the three big ones, JAWS, NVDA and Speech using it correctly, I'm pretty happy guiding people to use it today.
> The title attribute represents advisory information for the element, such as would be appropriate for a tooltip. On a link, this could be the title or a description of the target resource; on an image, it could be the image credit or a description of the image; on a paragraph, it could be a footnote or commentary on the text; on a citation, it could be further information about the source; on interactive content, it could be a label for, or instructions for, use of the element; and so forth. The value is text.
> Most host languages provide an attribute that could be used to name the element (e.g., the title attribute in HTML), yet this could present a browser tooltip. In the cases where DOM content or a tooltip is undesirable, authors MAY set the accessible name of the element using aria-label, if the element does not prohibit use of the attribute.
I imagine this is where LLMs could really help actually. LLMs are natively surfing the web now so I suspect LLM descriptions of sites or even having them re-render a site in a more usable way is becoming much more possible.
Visually impaired people are more than willing to tell everyone what they need as far as accessible UIs, myself included. Barely anyone listens. Let’s not let LLMs be the next thing that people that don’t understand the actual problem try shoving in as a solution.
Wheelchair users / people with mobility impairments rightfully scoff at the myriad “concepts” you see now and again of mech suits, wheelchairs that can climb stairs, etc. “Just give us a ramp! This is a solved problem. Your alternative is just sci-fi fetishism!” Still, it keeps happening. LLMs are increasingly becoming the same thing for people with visual impairments.
I don't need the text of the page. Thats easy, and I already have it.
But information has a hierarchy, usually visual, and that hierarchy needs to be reflected. LLMs are famously bad at structure, especially any tree with significant depth. RAG is not enough - hallucinations become common at depth.
My response now, to you, is in a semi-structured node graph. I know a reply has happened, because of the dangling children. I know who made it, and what they said, by cell attributes in the spans, surrounding it.
Don't worry - AI is being shoved down accessibility's throat, like everywhere else. FSCompanion for JAWS, NVDA has an OpenAI plugin, and VoiceOver has it builtin.
Why do I hate it? Because when it _doesn't work_, you can't tell. You don't know if it is hallucinating data, and cannot verify the response. If it is the mode of communication, it is all you have, making every failure a catastrophic failure.
'Honestly this is a people problem more than a tech problem. We have the tech. We're just not using it.
I'd say LLMs COULD make it easier to implement accessibility, it also couldn't, always a coinflip with those, but I'd say LLMs actually succeeding is probably unlikely given how much shitty code is probably in its training data :P
The tricky thing with these "unofficial" distros is that they are generally maintained by either a single individual or a small group of people.
This is true for many accessibility projects actually (game mods, third-party UIs for inaccessible services/platforms, etc.). These are generally really meant as short-term patches while the problem gets fixed, except ... the problem often doesn't get fixed because the platforms in question figure it's been solved now and they don't need to care about it anymore.
Accessibility really only works when it's an ongoing, first-class process within an app/platform's design, and we can absolutely do that; the standards and guidelines have existed for decades. People working in cybersecurity, localization, general UX should recognize this song and dance, which is amusing because a lot of the tools of those trades have atrocious accessibility and require all sorts of workarounds, ask me how I know.
People just ... aren't including it in this way, which means people like myself (screen reader user and accessibility professional) essentially have to keep reminding people that we exist and that it's kinda shitty to keep forgetting about that fact or to decide the least amount of effort possible (LLM, unpaid volunteer, send in a PR LMAO) is enough to cater to people who have very real, very annoying and very constant UX issues we either crash into or crash through on literally an hourly basis.
The readme addresses this problem comprehensively. "The ultimate vision of Vojtux is "NO VOJTUX NEEDED!" because Fedora will be fully accessible."
It's not really a distro in the usual sense, more a minimal customisation of Fedora.
It's because adding new shiny features is fun and adding accessibility is boring, and most people in the free software world are there to have fun. That's also why bugs are always forgotten while people keep piling new features.
> adding accessibility is boring
I also think it's partly because adding accessibile interfaces is hard.
If you are not visually impaired then designing then when designing a visual interface for an application you are more-or-less designing for yourself. You know how to use visual interfaces, so it is relatively easy for you to evaluate whether you've done a good job.
Most people do not know how to use a screenreader, so if you're designing for a screenreader then it's going to be much harder for you to test the interface and evaluate whether it's actually usable by it's target audience.
I'd also love to see more educational resources on this topic. Not just "use this attribute/role for this use case", but "this is how using a screenreader works. This is an example of a good workflow . this is an example of bad workflow". There's tons of material out there for visual design, but I haven't come accross nearly so much for other interfaces.
It’s not a free and open source issue, it’s a general issue in product development.
Whereas in free software, people develop apps to have fun, in business product development, teams always try to ship a feature that is the highest leverage, and making the app work well with screen readers is usually not the highest leverage item, unfortunately.
seems like the real places to make durable changes would be in the desktop environment software packages (kde, gnome, etc)?
although it also seems useful to figure out which third party packages and default settings make sense.
Are there "official" Linux distributions?
Maybe "unofficial Fedora version" would have been more deserving of the "unofficial" specification.
GUIX is the official GNU Linux Distribution
That is not an answer to the question. There are no "official linux distros".
Does GNU know about that?
https://www.gnu.org/distros/distros.html
Here's an interview (in Czech) with Vojta, the main (only) developer. There might be follow up articles discussing specific issues he's facing as user and as a developer.
https://www.root.cz/clanky/pristupnost-se-musi-stat-obcanem-...
I'm glad to see things like this get built. I hate to admit it but I rarely consider impaired usecases when building things. I wonder how technology is changing this usecase lately both on the user end and the design end. (I know, AI) I imagine an LLM could help discover inadequate UI and build alternative workflows into products more easily.
Whispir is a much better TTS than almost anything else. However, when it gets it wrong, oh boy does it get it wrong.
For everything else? Not really. JS thrashing the DOM is as much a pain as ever. Using ico files instead of either emoji or... Text... Makes UIs painful and inconsistent.
Everyone using Electron and its broken [0] accessibility, including core Windows features...
These aren't things that can be reasoned away with an LLM. An interface is not just text - its a reasoned nodegraph. And when I'm blind (comes and goes), I need the nodegraph. Not an image of the screen reinterpreted.
[0] https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/45856
I find it very hard to know what to do to follow best practice. For example the biggest UK charity for blind people make social media posts about the importance of text descriptions and alt tags that break what I thought was good practice (they duplicate text in post and alt tag) and they seem to encourage this.
I don't recall where, but I've heard that before in the past. Perhaps in the kind of slop that makes the rounds on LinkedIn.
There is sort of a good reason for it, in the past. Before the overhaul, Microsoft Speech used to skip Facebook posts, and read the alt text instead. It is now, however, more sane. Facebook was pretty darn bad at accessibility in its early days. A lot of intermingled broken spans for text, causing stuttering and other issues.
However, today, most reading systems prefer the "title" attribute, to the "alt" one. If title exists, it'll read that and skip alt. Some always skip alt, regardless of it exists or not.
Figure and figcaption are about the only way to get good and consistent behaviour, but you don't really control how those happen on most social media platforms. You throw everything you can at the wall, and see what happens. And it might change tomorrow.
Today, I'd say the above is bad advice. An image description is a good practice. Repeating yourself, isn't.
Thank you, that is quite informative.
The specific posts I see are from the Royal National Institute of Blind People who really ought to know.
What they do is add the image description at the end of each text post, even thought this matches the alt text.
This is the one about using alt text: https://www.facebook.com/rnibuk/posts/pfbid037RmtoSxfAJX82G4...
They do now have a comment on that one that explains their reasoning (I did not see it until just now).
Wait the title attribute?
What are you basing that on? Screen readers tend to not pick those up at least on interactive elements by default, you need to do a bit of "wiggling" to get those to be announced. Disclaimer: screen reader user
JAWS user, here. It will read both aria-label and title, on a button, which is an interactive element. [0]
It does depend on the verbosity, if you dial that down, you'll probably lose the title element. But for images, which is what I was mentioning, it should pretty much always be read out.
[0] https://github.com/FreedomScientific/standards-support/issue...
I am ... relatively sure JAWS reads out title attributes of images because people kept erroneously sticking important info there decades ago, I wouldn't say that's a generally accepted recommendation. Not entirely sure what NVDA would do with an image that has only a title but no alt set.
ARIA and the web group define title to be used. [0][1] It's just that many agents just don't use it correctly. JAWS and NVDA do. Microsoft Speech used to ignore it, but I think they fixed that around Windows 11 release. I'm not sure about VoiceOver. Most braille readers I've used... Well, you'll be lucky if they read anything correctly.
With the three big ones, JAWS, NVDA and Speech using it correctly, I'm pretty happy guiding people to use it today.
> The title attribute represents advisory information for the element, such as would be appropriate for a tooltip. On a link, this could be the title or a description of the target resource; on an image, it could be the image credit or a description of the image; on a paragraph, it could be a footnote or commentary on the text; on a citation, it could be further information about the source; on interactive content, it could be a label for, or instructions for, use of the element; and so forth. The value is text.
[0] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/dom.html#the-title-at...
> Most host languages provide an attribute that could be used to name the element (e.g., the title attribute in HTML), yet this could present a browser tooltip. In the cases where DOM content or a tooltip is undesirable, authors MAY set the accessible name of the element using aria-label, if the element does not prohibit use of the attribute.
[1] https://w3c.github.io/aria/#aria-label
[2] NVDA bug confirming they use it: https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/7841
[3] Sorry for the numbers everywhere. I've got a footnote macro set for the way most HNers use this.
I imagine this is where LLMs could really help actually. LLMs are natively surfing the web now so I suspect LLM descriptions of sites or even having them re-render a site in a more usable way is becoming much more possible.
Visually impaired people are more than willing to tell everyone what they need as far as accessible UIs, myself included. Barely anyone listens. Let’s not let LLMs be the next thing that people that don’t understand the actual problem try shoving in as a solution.
Wheelchair users / people with mobility impairments rightfully scoff at the myriad “concepts” you see now and again of mech suits, wheelchairs that can climb stairs, etc. “Just give us a ramp! This is a solved problem. Your alternative is just sci-fi fetishism!” Still, it keeps happening. LLMs are increasingly becoming the same thing for people with visual impairments.
I don't need the text of the page. Thats easy, and I already have it.
But information has a hierarchy, usually visual, and that hierarchy needs to be reflected. LLMs are famously bad at structure, especially any tree with significant depth. RAG is not enough - hallucinations become common at depth.
My response now, to you, is in a semi-structured node graph. I know a reply has happened, because of the dangling children. I know who made it, and what they said, by cell attributes in the spans, surrounding it.
Don't worry - AI is being shoved down accessibility's throat, like everywhere else. FSCompanion for JAWS, NVDA has an OpenAI plugin, and VoiceOver has it builtin.
Why do I hate it? Because when it _doesn't work_, you can't tell. You don't know if it is hallucinating data, and cannot verify the response. If it is the mode of communication, it is all you have, making every failure a catastrophic failure.
Thanks for helping me, and hopefully others, understand the challenges more!
'Honestly this is a people problem more than a tech problem. We have the tech. We're just not using it.
I'd say LLMs COULD make it easier to implement accessibility, it also couldn't, always a coinflip with those, but I'd say LLMs actually succeeding is probably unlikely given how much shitty code is probably in its training data :P