What do concern trolls and privileged people without visible or invisible disabilities who share or make content about accessibility on Linux being trash without contributing anything to projects have in common? They don’t actually really care about the group they’re defending; they just exploit these victims’ unfortunate situation to fuel hate against groups and projects actually trying to make the world a better place. I never thought I’d be this upset to a point I’d be writing an article about something this sensitive with a clickbait-y title. It’s simultaneously demotivating, unproductive, and infuriating. I’m here writing this post fully knowing that I could have been working on accessibility in GNOME, but really, I’m so tired of having my mood ruined because of privileged people spending at most 5 minutes to write erroneous posts and then pretending to be oblivious when confronted while it takes us 5 months of unpaid work to get a quarter of recognition, let alone acknowledgment, without accounting for the time “wasted” addressing these accusations. This is far from the first time, and it will certainly not be the last.

I never thought I’d be this upset to a point I’d be writing an article about something this sensitive with a clickbait-y title. It’s simultaneously demotivating, unproductive, and infuriating. I’m here writing this post fully knowing that I could have been working on accessibility in GNOME, but really, I’m so tired of having my mood ruined because of privileged people spending at most 5 minutes to write erroneous posts and then pretending to be oblivious when confronted while it takes us 5 months of unpaid work to get a quarter of recognition, let alone acknowledgment, without accounting for the time “wasted” addressing these accusations.

I beg you, please keep writing banger posts like fireborn’s I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back series and their interluding post. We need more people with disabilities to keep reminding developers that you exist and your conditions and disabilities are a spectrum and not absolute.

TheEvilSkeleton is a pretty big GNOME developer whom I’m pretty sure I’ve bumped into before.

  • squaresinger@lemmy.world
    62·
    2 days ago

    Two things can be true at the same time:

    • GNOME devs can pour hundreds of hours of free labour specifically into accessibility
    • GNOME accessibility still sucks

    And GNOME is not alone with that problem, it’s prevalent in the large majority of apps and platforms, because accessibility is really hard especially if you don’t have a tester with the specifically accessibility need on staff.

    OOP says they have a legally blind and a semi-blind person on staff, but that’s by far not the only accessibility issue. Accessibility is much more than just screen reader support.

    A big one is learning difficulties, and for that, having an UI that can be used the way the user wants/expects/knows how to is very important. And here, the very concept of an opinionated DE contradicts accessibility.