Fedora has been shipping with a system that does not have a unified concept of what’s on the screen for years. It’s called GNOME 3. Ever tried to interact with the modal thingy that asks for a WiFi password as though it were a dialog box? It doesn’t work well, because it’s a figment of gnome-shell’s imagination and not actually a dialog box. (Or at least this was the case the last time I tried to figure out what was going on, which was a while ago.) I know very little about how A11y is plumbed under the hood, but I’m not surprised that it struggles with gnome-shell.
I suspect there’s a functioning middle ground between Windows XP-style or X11-style “everything is a window, even security sensitive overlays like the lock screen” and GNOME-style “everything is either a surface with no particular semantics or something produced directly by the shell”.
The thing is that they still allowed X11, which has a working screen reader. Just they'll stop shipping X11 with F41, so this time it should really be a blocker.
So Aral does have a point. now.
I've vouched this, and am shocked that it was flagged. Since there are no comments, I don't know why it was flagged, but if you're trying to disagree that we live in an ableist culture, flagging this is only proof that you're wrong.
I think the years without a screen reader is proof of an ableist culture, but I think this article is more about some dumb mastadon spat than about ableism.
The guidelines suggest that on-topic submissions include “anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity” — a discussion of why various things on Wayland interacted poorly with screen readers would be in this category.
The guidelines suggest that “Most stories about politics” are off-topic. This submission spent a whole lot more time ranting about the ableist world and, for some reason, about the difference between “white” and “white-presenting” than discussing anything intellectually interesting about A11y. One might reasonably consider that rant to be “politics”.
Aral still does not miss a chance to look like an a-hole I see. Guess there's no profit for him to fix the screen reader himself, so he's blaming the volunteers.
I've already filtered him from mastodon, sad I can't do this here...
Then what of the others, like Kingett, who commented:
"I think we are all well aware of the issues caused by big tech but I never seen such irony as The open source community. Well, if your system isn’t working, you could use the system that you can’t use to contribute code on the system that you can’t use."
What of the people who, because of Microsoft's increasingly user-hostile system, decide to check out some Linux-based OS only to find it doesn't have a screen reader, preventing them from that transition? (That's Prater's point.) Only a fraction of them will be skilled enough to fix the screen reader - assuming they are not blocked by the lack of a broken screen reader.
Is this statement from 2006 still true?: "Red Hat retains legal liability for the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is not a separate legal entity or organization. The Fedora Project receives a tremendous amount of resources (people, money, infrastructure, etc.) from Red Hat."
If you are paid to work on a project, you are not a volunteer.
Guess there's no profit for IBM to fix things either? In any case, why should profit be the primary motive to support accessibility on a FOSS system?
I don't understand the point you're trying to make in the first three paragraphs.
> Is this statement from 2006 still true
AFAIK Fedora is primarily volunteer-developed. At the same time RH has some decision-making power and pours some resources in it.
> If you are paid to work on a project, you are not a volunteer.
what does the above have to do with anything?
> why should profit be the primary motive to support accessibility on a FOSS system
IDK ask Aral why is he calling volunteers ableist while at the same time not providing patches. Maybe do a little experiment -- go fund his foundation and see whether he would fix the issue then.
I'm pointing out that even if you dismiss his comments entirely, there are others making similar claims, and you have not addressed their (what seems to me) entirely valid criticisms.
> what does the above have to do with anything?
You said he blamed volunteers. Even if volunteers are blameless, he is also blaming IBM. Does IBM get to use volunteers as shields?
Can you quantify what "volunteer" means? Like, when I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Linux I see "Red Hat engineers, along with independent free software contributors have built most of the pieces for [Silverblue] over the last few years". Those engineers are clearly not volunteers.
Can you quantify how much of the development is done as a paid job, vs. that done by volunteers? We know that when people say that FOSS developers need funding, apologists immediately point out that most FOSS developers are actually paid by companies to work on FOSS. These people surely cannot be described as "volunteer" any more than an pro-football player can be called an amateur.
Can you quantify how much influence those volunteers have on, for example, being able to block a release until certain accessibility requirements are met? Can any of these volunteers can tell IBM staff that there won't be a new Fedora release until the screen reader works?
While on the other hand, can any of the paid IBM employees make that decision?
> go fund his foundation
How would my paltry ability to fund such work compare to the corporate influence of IBM?
If this issue were so simple that a few people, or $100,000 could fix it, why hasn't it been done already? $100K is peanuts to IBM.
I don't know either side, but between a non-profit who calls for a11y testing of their product and then replies "patches welcome" to a report of a critical bug, and a dude who's complaining about said bug I feel like the non-profit is being a jerk.
Fedora has been shipping with a system that does not have a unified concept of what’s on the screen for years. It’s called GNOME 3. Ever tried to interact with the modal thingy that asks for a WiFi password as though it were a dialog box? It doesn’t work well, because it’s a figment of gnome-shell’s imagination and not actually a dialog box. (Or at least this was the case the last time I tried to figure out what was going on, which was a while ago.) I know very little about how A11y is plumbed under the hood, but I’m not surprised that it struggles with gnome-shell.
I suspect there’s a functioning middle ground between Windows XP-style or X11-style “everything is a window, even security sensitive overlays like the lock screen” and GNOME-style “everything is either a surface with no particular semantics or something produced directly by the shell”.
The thing is that they still allowed X11, which has a working screen reader. Just they'll stop shipping X11 with F41, so this time it should really be a blocker. So Aral does have a point. now.
I've vouched this, and am shocked that it was flagged. Since there are no comments, I don't know why it was flagged, but if you're trying to disagree that we live in an ableist culture, flagging this is only proof that you're wrong.
I think the years without a screen reader is proof of an ableist culture, but I think this article is more about some dumb mastadon spat than about ableism.
The guidelines suggest that on-topic submissions include “anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity” — a discussion of why various things on Wayland interacted poorly with screen readers would be in this category.
The guidelines suggest that “Most stories about politics” are off-topic. This submission spent a whole lot more time ranting about the ableist world and, for some reason, about the difference between “white” and “white-presenting” than discussing anything intellectually interesting about A11y. One might reasonably consider that rant to be “politics”.
The blogpost seems like some drama mashup to me. Linking Fedora to the Holocaust and a couple of paragraphs about the author's racial heritage etc.
Like, it is an inciting post, in the wrong way.
> Linking Fedora to the Holocaust and a couple of paragraphs about the author's racial heritage etc.
I figured this was hyperbole. What an exhausting blog post.
Aral still does not miss a chance to look like an a-hole I see. Guess there's no profit for him to fix the screen reader himself, so he's blaming the volunteers.
I've already filtered him from mastodon, sad I can't do this here...
Then what of the others, like Kingett, who commented:
"I think we are all well aware of the issues caused by big tech but I never seen such irony as The open source community. Well, if your system isn’t working, you could use the system that you can’t use to contribute code on the system that you can’t use."
What of the people who, because of Microsoft's increasingly user-hostile system, decide to check out some Linux-based OS only to find it doesn't have a screen reader, preventing them from that transition? (That's Prater's point.) Only a fraction of them will be skilled enough to fix the screen reader - assuming they are not blocked by the lack of a broken screen reader.
Is this statement from 2006 still true?: "Red Hat retains legal liability for the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is not a separate legal entity or organization. The Fedora Project receives a tremendous amount of resources (people, money, infrastructure, etc.) from Red Hat."
If you are paid to work on a project, you are not a volunteer.
Guess there's no profit for IBM to fix things either? In any case, why should profit be the primary motive to support accessibility on a FOSS system?
I don't understand the point you're trying to make in the first three paragraphs.
> Is this statement from 2006 still true
AFAIK Fedora is primarily volunteer-developed. At the same time RH has some decision-making power and pours some resources in it.
> If you are paid to work on a project, you are not a volunteer.
what does the above have to do with anything?
> why should profit be the primary motive to support accessibility on a FOSS system
IDK ask Aral why is he calling volunteers ableist while at the same time not providing patches. Maybe do a little experiment -- go fund his foundation and see whether he would fix the issue then.
I'm pointing out that even if you dismiss his comments entirely, there are others making similar claims, and you have not addressed their (what seems to me) entirely valid criticisms.
> what does the above have to do with anything?
You said he blamed volunteers. Even if volunteers are blameless, he is also blaming IBM. Does IBM get to use volunteers as shields?
Can you quantify what "volunteer" means? Like, when I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Linux I see "Red Hat engineers, along with independent free software contributors have built most of the pieces for [Silverblue] over the last few years". Those engineers are clearly not volunteers.
Can you quantify how much of the development is done as a paid job, vs. that done by volunteers? We know that when people say that FOSS developers need funding, apologists immediately point out that most FOSS developers are actually paid by companies to work on FOSS. These people surely cannot be described as "volunteer" any more than an pro-football player can be called an amateur.
Can you quantify how much influence those volunteers have on, for example, being able to block a release until certain accessibility requirements are met? Can any of these volunteers can tell IBM staff that there won't be a new Fedora release until the screen reader works?
While on the other hand, can any of the paid IBM employees make that decision?
> go fund his foundation
How would my paltry ability to fund such work compare to the corporate influence of IBM?
If this issue were so simple that a few people, or $100,000 could fix it, why hasn't it been done already? $100K is peanuts to IBM.
I don't see anything wrong with this blog post. Can you elaborate?
It's not that he's wrong, it's that he's kind of a jerk.
I don't know either side, but between a non-profit who calls for a11y testing of their product and then replies "patches welcome" to a report of a critical bug, and a dude who's complaining about said bug I feel like the non-profit is being a jerk.
Aral really comes across as a class-a douche.