You shouldn’t have to defend your existence let alone what computing you do, this blog and its author is doing more for modern computing than anything else I’ve read this year. Keep it up, stay hopeful that things eventually improve.

This is just two people misunderstanding and talking past eachother.

The blogger wants to outsource living his life to other people, the commenter is getting hung up on pedantry too much to communicate what he actually wants to.

I couldn't read this in full. Too frustrating.

I feel like we should be able to strive for things to be better while also appreciating what has been done so far.

The truth is, big tech corporations could probably skimp on accessibility as well, but they want their government contracts very much, and software used in governments, as far as at least the proverbial first world is concerned, has an accessibility bar it must meet. And it just so happens that these corporations have large chunks of money to invest in that.

If requirements for being in such lucrative markets loosen up, I'm willing to bet accessibility in Apple/Microsoft offerings will get defunded and rot away.

Of course you can question Red Hat and Canonical for not doing enough in the space, but truth be told, the grassroot open source efforts to make everything in open source more accessible amount to afterthoughts at best. How many GUI toolkit have appeared recently? How many of them are accessible? How many terminal applications gain TrueColor support and draw fancy stuff in the terminal? How many of them are of any use to someone who can't see your efforts in repurposing Unicode symbols to draw pictures in the console?

Linux is just a base that people stack other software on top of. Audio crash? Pulse or Pipe wire?

Then the dozens of desktop environments, each doing things differently, split between X11 and Wayland.

I feel like blind devs should get together and make a distro that, out of the box, has as many accessibility features as possible, because it seems a lost cause to wait for some other distro to pick the right combination of tools.

This argument ports really well onto a lot of other things tech demographics touch if you just change the subject specific nouns.

So many quotable parts in the post, a must read for anyone, not just those working on software.

Internalizing the plight of someone with different needs and life circumstances (and this is not just about different abilities, such as sight) is how you actually support, work on, and provide more freedom to others. Took me a while to check my own privilege, but I believe I'm a better person for it.

I believe it's actually called GNU/Burn

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