this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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How come?
No screen readers for one thing since they can't access other windows. You'll find that most accessibility features require access to other windows in some manner.
Is it that none exist or that none can be made? Because that's like. the main feature about Wayland.
I mean they can be made but it's going to require reinventing a lot of wheels. You need access to other windows to make this (and lots of other stuff) work, period. Wayland has simply moved the burden of exposing that information to other layers. By the time this is accomplished 100% the information is going to be exposed just as much as on X11, just in a different way.
Is it? It has always seemed like a solution looking for a problem to me. When's the last time you heard about anybody having a problem with this under X11?
In theory it can be used to do bad things. In practice it's like wearing a helmet 24/7. It sounds like a good idea and it could help in case you're in a car crash or a flower pot falls on your head... but the inconvenience makes you not seriously consider it.
My main problem with it is that they simply tossed the dead cat over the wall. You can't simply say "fuck you deal with it" and call it a day, then expect all the rest of the stack to spend a decade solving the problem you created, while you get to look shiny for solving an "issue" that nobody cared about.
My other problem is that it should have been a toggle. Let people who really need to tighten security turn this feature on and let everybody else get on with their lives. Every other isolation feature on Linux (firewalls, AppArmor, containers etc.) is fully configurable. How would it be if your firewall was non-optional and set to DENY ALL all the time? It would be crazy unusable. Yet Wayland made that "the main feature"? Ridiculous.
They can, and are being made. E.g. the state of accessibility on Gome.
Am I to understand correctly that if you are running Gtk+ apps in the Gnome compositor, you get this working, but if you are running non-Gnome compositor with Gtk+ apps, it will not work? Or is it independent of the compositor?
There's a new accessibility framework being started by a Gnome developer very recently.
Which means, best case scenario where it's perfect and other desktops buy in, it will roll out to traditional desktop users in half a decade at the earliest.
Then keep using Xorg if you need it.
I think the desktop itself does that. For instance Gnome is working on accessibility
it's opt-in, per app. Meaning unless old apps are patched and recompiled, they will be inaccessible.
Making screenshots does, too, which is why that functionality gets implemented at the compositor level. And so will screenreaders. In fact looking at my settings panel KDE does have support for Orca. Dunno how well it's working but it's not like the issue is being ignored.