This now makes all current mainstream distros 100% unusable for blind users, as all built-in screen readers are broken on Wayland, and all the main distros now use Wayland, so you cannot even install the OS at all.
I’m not up to speed on this issue, but it seems like the solution is to push forward with making the readers work in Wayland? Is there a technical issue with Wayland’s design that prevents readers from working properly?
Basically, X11/Xorg doesn’t isolate programs from one another. This is horrible for security since malicious software can read every window, as well as all the input from mice and keyboards, just by querying the X server, but it’s also handy for screen reading software, streaming, etc. Meanwhile, Wayland isolates programs in their own sandbox, which prevents, say, a malicious browser tab from reading all of your keyboard inputs and logging your root password, but also breaks those things we like to use. To make matters worse, it looks like everyone’s answer for this and similar dilemmas wasn’t “let’s fix Wayland” but “let’s develop an extension to fix Wayland” and we wound up with that one fucking xkcd standards comic that I won’t bother linking because everyone has seen it a zillion times.
ETA: Basically, my (layman’s) understanding is that fixing this and making screen readers work in Wayland is hard because the core Wayland developers seem to have little appetite for fixing this themselves. Meanwhile, there’s 3-4 implementations of Wayland that do things differently, so fixing it via extensions means either writing multiple backends in your program to do the same damn thing (aka a giant pain in the ass) or getting everyone to agree on the same standard implementation (good fucking luck).
That sounds awful. And a major loss to accessibility. Here’s hoping one of the standards gains traction as the one path everyone can agree on.
Afaik Pop still uses X11
It won’t in 24.04 because Cosmic doesn’t support anything else
I’m not blind, but … there seems to be quite a bit of progress in this area to the point where (at least on the surface) your claim seems outdated.
https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As of this past week the change is now in place for Ubuntu 24.10 daily users that will find Wayland-by-default when using the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.
The proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver has been the hold-out on Ubuntu in sticking to the GNOME X.Org session out-of-the-box rather than Wayland as has been the default for the past several releases when using other GPUs/drivers.
But for Ubuntu 24.10, the plan is to cross that threshold for NVIDIA now that their official driver has much better Wayland support and has matured into great shape.
Particularly with the upcoming NVIDIA R555 driver reaching stable very soon, the Wayland support is in great shape with features like explicit sync ready to use.
Canonical’s Daniel van Vugt of the Ubuntu desktop team made the change last week for the GDM session manager to drop their NVIDIA-prefers-X11 patches so that NVIDIA Linux users will find Wayland being used by default.
Updated Revert-data-Disable-GDM-on-hybrid-graphics-laptops-with-v.patch to ensure Nvidia 5xx drivers always get Wayland as the default unless there’s a stronger reason why it won’t work (like modeset has been disabled on the kernel command line).
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