I get the Apple suspicion, but there's great Zoom functionality on every Apple device I've used. Also color invert, screen reader, and a whole rack of other a11y features. I agree that it's the nicest thing about the company.
It's not your intention, but it is functionally what you suggested.
First, we've had these distros, about 5 of them. They're very hard to maintain and are all abandoned now. SOme of these were long-running projects but scale matters in these enterprises.
Second, you can't always use some custom distro. I work for a security company. For various reasons, it makes sense to use a small set of distros that have some major maintenance / royal road element.If I try running Slackware or some distro only maintained by one guy on my work machine, as a practical matter I'm putting my career in jeopardy when I can't do something basic and I ahve no explanation.
The reality is, this shit needs to get fixed. It's not a problem that's going to go away, blind folks aren't going to go away, though that would be really convenient for many, I guess. Let's just clean up this mess. Blind folks are trying to contribute and help, there have been some major breakthroughs lately, mostly because folks have somewhat less crappy attitudes and it's just gotten too ridiculous, but the attitude of "oh just go do this" has run its course, as has the RTFM and figure it out when you can't even get intital purchase on the system. Let's just grow up and clean up this mess, own it and get on board, no on'es asking you to fix this but at least don't be a pain from the sidelines and just say hey, this needs to happen, I support it.
You're confused if that's what you think about the blogger. I know this guy and he's the most DIY person to almost a farcical degree. You try booting into a distro without your monitor attached and then contribute a patch, still without your monitor attached, see how you do.
I like that this article isn't just a bunch of GNOME hate. But I freely admit to being frustrated that this switch is being forced when they're still developing basic accessibility functionality for GNOME. Once I switch to Wayland, I have to find new ways of:
- Adding hotkeys
- Replacing all my utilities that involve screenshot + OCR
- Making sure Orca works to some extent (low expectations here, but I need some of it to work)
- Reversing the gamma ramp
- Screen magnification
I have mapped out some approaches to most of these, but I full anticipate one or more to be show-stoppers or items I have to attempt to implement from scratch. I'm looking at 100 hours of work, minimum, to make this switch, and am basically just left out in the cold to figure all these workflows out under more hostile circumstances. It's also a chicken and egg, since I need to bootstrap into the new environment without any of my old tools working.
It's great that GNOME is taking some of this seriously, but they're forcing a very difficult transition, and it's frustrating that they think accessibility is in a usable state, or that we're low prioritiy enough to not matter. I'vbe heard the word "edge case" used a lot, it really stinks to be in a category where your entire computer use and professional career are considered an edge case.
Something that's worth noting is that the funding for accessibility went away. Sun did a ton, but they're gone, and Red Hat has scaled back their desktop ambitions, as has Ubuntu.
I was thinking about doing something like this. I write a lot of boilerplate about "ok we need to discuss before you implement, ask clarifying questions" so it doesn't go rushing ahead.
yea this boilerplate is super simple and effective. It's essentially mimicing how I use claude code and cursor, but with low level control.
A very cool thing I'm working on in this space is having an llm code with the codesys sdk, then run the code.
So imagine cursor coding a codesys file instead of doing the task directly so that it instead scripts claude code to do a sequence of actions and allows cursor/the user to simply analyze the results.
this also enables parralel claude code sessions which is super cool!
same but the interaction between me and Claude is too dynamic, and my planning framework is more robust than single files. If anything I could speed my workflow up but writing a bash script that calls gemini for my plans - i feed entire codebases or parts of a large codebase (using Prompt Tower) to gemini for the planning - Claude Code isnt as reliable. But even that is iterative with Gemini.
