Some of the issues with accessibility in Linux seem to come down to FOSS developers not willing to take an extra mile complying with accessibility standards, others have to do with how the big corporations have much more resources for it. Sadly, that seems to be the situation - I am surprised myself to learn there’s much to be improved in this department.
The thing with accessibility, not only when it comes to software development but for nearly every aspect of life, is, if you’re not handicapped or dependent on accessibility in another way, it isn’t really in scope of your thinking. And in some way you can’t blame people. I am not blind, but my SO is. And before I met my partner I didn’t think about or cared for accessibility either. Only now that I am affected by the huge lack of accessibility in our world, because some things are just impossible to do or use for my SO without help of someone able to see, it became part of my thought processes. And adding to this is the fact that integrating accessibility is firstly a cost factor, sadly.
For non-health reasons, I have used in the past now and then the magnifier and the text-to-speech assistant in Windows and had noticed they did not always work with all sites and apps and also the apps themselves had a significant negative impact on the OS performance. I haven’t tried these things on Mint Linux yet, but I would’ve thought hard to believe Linux is somehow even worse than Windows when it comes to accessibility. Also, that makes me feel like even this limited accessibility only exists for the sake of legal compliance… Ableism is a huge problem and, yeah, able people should be more woke about it.
Some of the issues with accessibility in Linux seem to come down to FOSS developers not willing to take an extra mile complying with accessibility standards, others have to do with how the big corporations have much more resources for it. Sadly, that seems to be the situation - I am surprised myself to learn there’s much to be improved in this department.
The thing with accessibility, not only when it comes to software development but for nearly every aspect of life, is, if you’re not handicapped or dependent on accessibility in another way, it isn’t really in scope of your thinking. And in some way you can’t blame people. I am not blind, but my SO is. And before I met my partner I didn’t think about or cared for accessibility either. Only now that I am affected by the huge lack of accessibility in our world, because some things are just impossible to do or use for my SO without help of someone able to see, it became part of my thought processes. And adding to this is the fact that integrating accessibility is firstly a cost factor, sadly.
For non-health reasons, I have used in the past now and then the magnifier and the text-to-speech assistant in Windows and had noticed they did not always work with all sites and apps and also the apps themselves had a significant negative impact on the OS performance. I haven’t tried these things on Mint Linux yet, but I would’ve thought hard to believe Linux is somehow even worse than Windows when it comes to accessibility. Also, that makes me feel like even this limited accessibility only exists for the sake of legal compliance… Ableism is a huge problem and, yeah, able people should be more woke about it.