Accessibility Nightmare (Linux): A rant after a several year long research

Accessibility is important for everyone. At the very least, I accept my own body has increasing challenges as I age. Other people are born with or develop challenges across the spectra, and we’re all in this together.

I love that text-to-speech exists, and I used it for ebooks years before a blind friend explained VoiceOver on iOS (whoah, fast taking!), even though I needed TTS even less back then. With numerous family members with sensory challenges I’m increasingly looking for ways to help them, and I prefer Linux and FOSS software. I’m working towards contributing. For those of you who make anything, please consider the spectrum of abilities.

If you have any influence over the size of UI elements in music streaming services, for example, please help make them bigger. Even putting boxes around the buttons would help limit miss-taps-—frustrating to interrupt a current song by playing the one I want to queue, for example.

but community driven FOSS is made mostly by people building something they themselves want...

Exactly. That is how FOSS solutions appear. If you want something specifically produced, you have exactly two choices: a) you and your mates produce it yourselves at no charge or b)pay somebody to do it for you.

If you're paying somebody to do it for you, you're in effect purchasing commercial software that is made for profit. So you might as well lobby/pay/blackmail Microsoft for that 'extra something' to appear in the next version of Windows.

Using Linux is a personal choice. Nobody is ever forced to use Linux. So it's pointless ranting about Linux. If you don't like something, fix it yourself. Or use Windows like those others happily do.