Tech Over Tea - Linux Accessibility Needs Some Work | Fireborn

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

You may have seen this series of accessibility posts floating around the FOSS world and today have the author it on the show. A very long time Linux user who happens to be blind, relies on a screen reader and even has a braille display to show off.==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Blog: https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/Mastodon: https://dragonscave.space/@fireborn==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm Ezra's your host, Brody Robertson. And today we are here to talk about all things accessibility. Now you may have seen a post going around the Fediverse the other day that got quite a bit of attention, we'll say. And we have the author of that post on today. Welcome Aaron or Fireborn or whatever name you want to use online. I know you have Aaron on Discord, but it's Fireborn in your blog.

I don't know which one you prefer to use. So Fireborn is just a screen name that I used in a couple of places. I actually don't mind people knowing my real name, and there's a reason behind that. The reasoning behind that is just because I'm proud of what I do and I'm proud of the things that I write, and I think that hiding behind a screen name when you're calling out something is... It's fine if that's what you need to do to keep yourself safe but I don't feel like this is an industry where I'm unsafe to do that and so I call it out

with my name because I want people to know this is a real person with a real problem. Right. No, that's understandable. And I get why people do it for a lot of things but like you're not doing anything dangerous right like talking about the the the state of accessibility the state of like the Linux audio stack things like that like that's I Feel like being a person there really does make it more sort of Approachable as a problem, right? It's not just some my it's not like, you know, some some faceless voice arguing on the internet. It's somebody who is an actual person who has an actual problem that you can put a name directly to. And you can reach out to me too, right? Like it's not the re- again another

thing is it's going to be approachable. I want to start conversations. I want people to reach out and say I want to start conversations. I want people to reach out and say Explain more about this or I learned this other thing that like we could do how do you feel about this or whatever whatever it is, you know, I want people to reach out and Talk to me about these things right, right Okay before we get like way too sidetracked on whatever we get sidetracked on, as like a brief introduction, I guess, why did you want to write this series? Right now there's only two parts. I don't know if you have any of the other parts like in progress or not? They're all done. Right. I have people, there's a couple of people who want to work with me on translating them into different

languages. Okay. Hence why I'm holding them at the moment because I don't feel like it's fair to publish the English versions first and then follow up with the other language ones later because language is also accessibility. Right, right. And so I'm waiting on to get in contact with them a little bit more and iron things out. Okay, fair enough. I guess, yeah, so why did you want to write a series on the state of accessibility? Like what what prompted you to sit down and not just write one but is it a seven part series? It's um well it's seven originally but then there was like a thank you post that I wrote

to some people who had really reached out so it's now eight. Okay. That one is published. So there are three currently, so then the rest are coming. But yeah, so I guess the reason, I guess we should start from the beginning, right? To kind of explain where I came from in the Linux world of things. So I like to say I started using Linux before using Linux was cool. Right. I started with an old Samsung NC 10 netbook back in 2009. Okay, okay. You've been doing this for a while then.

I've been doing this for a bit, yeah. And it was kind of by accident, so my parents bought me this netbook that I could use, because they were quite ahead of the curve. They understood that technology was going to be essentially the future for people who were visually impaired or otherwise disabled in some way to interact with the world. So they were quite forward thinking about that and they got this netbook and they didn't really know too much about technology and so they just assumed it would come with Windows like everything else did. It didn't.

It was supposed to, but it came with Debian 8, I think? No, it wouldn't have been 8. No, no, 8 was a little- It would have been 5. Okay, okay, okay, yeah, something in that range. Something in that range. Yeah. Deviant 5 released in... Initially it's 2009. Yeah, February 2009. It was four or five. And so I was slightly in the darkest to what to do because everything that people were telling me was Windows stuff and I had a bash prompt with no way to read it because obviously the other person didn't think to enable speech

so I started looking around and I sat down with my dad and we looked up, we didn't really know what Debian was, so we looked up Debian first. What is this thing? What is Debian GNU slash Linux? What is this? What does this do? What is this thing? So we looked it up and we found out about SpeakUp and getting software speech output and all this stuff. And we eventually got it enabled. But I still didn't have a graphical environment for a while. I was doing everything from bash, like from a bash shell. So I learned the command line there. And then there was a product, a project called Vinex that existed for a while, which was a distribution made just for the blind. How do you spell that?

V-I-N-U-X. The website still exists. V-I-N-U-X, okay, let's see if we can find it. Let's see if we can find that. Vinex. I found the Wikipedia page for it, that's good enough. There you go, that's good enough. There you go, that'll do. It's a distribution made for the blind, essentially, and it was

based originally on Ubuntu... no, it wasn't originally based on Ubuntu, I can't remember what it was originally based on, but eventually it became based on Ubuntu 1204. And then eventually 14.04. And it was designed to be as accessible as it was possible for Linux to be at the time right and It got the job done right I could do stuff I could look at the internet I could write my I could do my you know a homework on it it was fine And It actually came up with an installer that spoke and everything

and it was fine. And then I kept using Linux. I eventually did have to learn Windows, but I kept using Linux myself because I was used to it and I liked it. And there was always this thing even then of what updates are going to break something next. Right. What's going to be broken? What am I not going to be able to do this time? What am I not going to be able to do this week? And a lot of that was based on... a lot of that came from the fact that... Uh, what was that? I can hear something in the background. Sorry, my... Hold on.

My sister has decided that now is the perfect time to play really loud music. Hahaha! Uh, great. Uh, see if I can make it go away. Sorry. I know, it's so good. So I thought maybe it was like your phone or something. No.

There we go. I think it might be fixed now. I think that might have helped. Yep. Okay, that should be better. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Horrible rap music too. Yep, okay, that should be better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah

Horrible rap music too, but not I'm not into it Anyway, um, where was I? Oh, yeah, it was there was always this thing They would prominently say on the VINX website don't update anything because it will just explode in your face. I see But you know you get what you've had to and so it was like what is gonna face. I see. Um, but, you know, you get to the point where you've had to. And so I was like, what is gonna break when I do this this time? And then, uh, and then I learned about a project called Talking Arch. Okay. Which was literally just an accessible Arch Linux ISO. So it was nothing special,

it would just boot into an accessible ISO, which would have speech on boot. And so I installed Arch. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Which went about as well as you expected it. For anyone who is kind of curious, that project appears to have now been folded into the main Arch Linux. It has. But it wasn't then. And even now, it's kind of... They broke it in the latest ISOs.

Of course they did. Yeah, now if you have multiple sound cards, I hope you enjoy rebooting until Ulsa finds the right one. Ah, I see. Okay, okay. Yeah, that's one of those. So, I think we'll get onto that. Yeah. But yeah, so I carried on using Linux and I carried on using it and I switched distros

a lot. I have a lot of different machines running different distributions. I have a Fedora machine, I have an Arch machine, I have a Debian machine, you know, Debian. I have a Bedrock machine. And what I found was while there was talk about accessibility. That seemed to kind of peter off around 2015-2016. And it all just seemed to kind of degrade over time from there. But not in massive ways. Something would break and you have to find a workaround. And then Chromium and ElectronApp started becoming a thing and they weren't accessible unless you added a force render accessibility flag to their launches.

And even then that wouldn't work sometimes and you'd need to set an environment variable that wasn't documented anywhere and you'd only find by looking in that... I think LKML was where I found a couple of them. Right. Because someone had just happened to write it down as like, having this enabled does this thing. And I was like, oh, this is debuss related. So maybe it will fix this other thing. So yeah, I've also been lurking on the LKML for ages.

Which is great for reasons. Hey, well at least the LKML is like the archives are just a wall of text. So yeah, exactly. It's really easy to find stuff. You need to find a patch set from 15 years ago because someone didn't add preempt flags for audio and you need them, go find that patch set and revert the patch for yourself. I'm being slightly sarcastic. You shouldn't actually have to do that, but it does happen.

You shouldn't have to. You're right, you shouldn't have to. But it does happen sometimes. Mm-hmm. Um, so I kept using it and things kept breaking and the discussion was there. Mm-hmm. But it was more about how do we make workarounds for this brokenness. Right. And what really happened to set me off, what really got me mad, um, was I was trying to install Ubuntu for someone else who was switching to Linux. Do you remember what version this was? 2004, this was recent.

Okay, oh, okay. Yeah, this is what tipped me over the edge from, oh, I guess this is just where we are to, no, this is unacceptable. I'm really mad now. Right really mad now and I wanted to start them on Ubuntu and there's a lot of people gonna say oh canonical evil snaps evil okay I might agree with you in fact I definitely agree with you but it's it's a very beginner friendly thing. If they need to Google something, they can Google it and don't have to call me every five minutes. So that's kind of why I defaulted to it. It took me a while to get it installed for a start because the installer just is horrible.

Basically almost impossible to navigate. You can do it, but you've got to remember where you are. If you want to do anything custom with any partitions at all, like put slash home on a different partition, no. Not accessible, can't do it. Unless you do it with GDISC first. Am I remembering correctly that they recently have changed out the installer with the newer one?

They did. They switched to a Flutter-based installer. Right. And Flutter, Google should be publicly shamed for Flutter every day. OK. OK. OK.

Like, you should put up banners saying that Flutter is garbage every day. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Because it is. OK. It is. Okay. It is horrendous. It is the least accessible UI kit I've ever seen.

Do you want to expand on that? So it's basically it makes everything so obscure. Right. It's basically it makes everything so obscure, right? And just doesn't does not have like decent documentation. At least not that I could find. There are some people that have somehow magically made it work kind of ish. I don't know how those people are just geniuses.

Okay. I don't, that is really clever people that have managed to work around the fact that there's just no... There's really very little support for keyboard navigation. If you want to label buttons in a dynamic way, there's no real way to do that that I know of. And again, I kind of looked at it when I'm never using this, so then never looked at it again.

Right, that's fair. That's fair. Right. So again, that could be incorrect. I want to just also quickly, I should have said this at the start, everything I say here is my own opinion and my own experiences. Like, there are things that could be incorrect, because I just haven't found the magic incantation yet. Sure. Sure, sure, sure. Totally fair.

So I have to be fair and I could get things wrong because I just haven't tried hard enough. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. That's fair. But I wouldn't realise if some of these things just didn't require as much trying and were just kind of nicely nicely working exactly but no flutter is terrible they switch their installer to it and so it kind of rendered it unusable radio buttons are reported as checkboxes why what they aren't they are completely different element types what is going on I I have seen this.

This is a really annoying. I don't know how things get reported, but there is a really annoying UI trend that I see where people will use the radio button design for a checkbox or like they'll come up with like new shapes for them, where I just, I don't, there's nothing wrong with how they were clearly different things before and it like these are very clearly different UI

elements do not mix them up stop it like this is a problem this is not just a problem for like for anyone who might be blind like this is a problem for everybody else as well it's UI incons inconsistency hell yeah yeah yeah um and it's really bad stop doing it fully agree um so i was installing it for them and i got it installed and that was fine and i was like oh i can then press alt super s i got the drum beat and i was like oh cool they added that back nice that's nice that means i can i now know I'm at the login screen. So I can press, I can press alt super S and get speech on login and select the session type and whatever.

No, didn't work. Didn't do anything. So I logged in with the password that we'd set and I enabled speech again. And I was like, okay, maybe that's what you need to do. Kind of, kind of, kind of club and kind of kludgy but Whatever. Hmm, I guess And I you know installed the stuff that they wanted I gave them the computer and I went away I went to do my own

thing, uh-huh They called me Within like an hour. Uh-huh and said I have I had to restart because updates and I Whatever because they I don't remember what it was. They were doing they're doing something and they were like I had to restart my computer Mm-hmm, and I was like, okay Basically why are you calling me about this? Because I didn't know I was confused. I was like, why are you calling me about this? Because I didn't know, I was confused. I was like, why are you calling me about this?

They were like, well, I got this drum beat noise, but no kind of speech. I was like, but I enabled it. Oh. What? I turned the toggle on for user-assistive technologies in the settings. What? Why? I was like, okay, can you log in and you should get speech then?

Like just type your password, it's fine, whatever. It might just, I can fix it later for you. So please type, just type your password and, and you'll get speech. And they type the password and they got nothing. Of course. So I was like, okay, press these keys. And then they did. And then they got speech. And I was like, but I can reboot my Debian system that I have been like minor version bumping for four years and this just works. What? How? What is happening here? And so. So I googled it. And I found a script that was meant to fix this. Random script on GitHub. This is going to be one of many of these.

Random script on GitHub that is meant to patch around this. And so I looked at how it worked. And I was like, oh, it adds these lines to the lightdm greeter config file. OK. I can do that. That's fine. I won't run this random script because no thank you.

Fair. Yeah. I can see what it does. I can see what it changes. I will change it myself. So I changed it. Didn't work. I installed a different greeter.

Everything exploded. Of course. And I was like, what? How did installing a different greeter break this? I just lost. greeter break this and I was like you know what I'm really annoyed about this now mm-hmm and so it was the day after that that I posted my first blog post mm-hmm which is a kind of some of the reason that a lot of that was focused so heavily on Ubuntu right because that's what was fresh on my mind because I'd

just been dealing with it. And eventually what I ended up doing was I just ended up installing, I ended up installing Debbie in for them. They've been very happy with that. I enabled tracking of backports so they could get more recent versions of some stuff, so they could get the more recent accessibility APIs and all that stuff. Which isn't... it still breaks sometimes because the dependencies are weird. But overall they're happy with that. That's good. And, and, and, and, Pannonical, if you're listening to this, just fix it.

It's actually not that hard. Look at how Debian... you're based off Debian, okay? You already have the base. Just do that. It's actually not that hard. Look at how Debian, you're based off Debian, okay? You already have the base. Just do that. I know for a fact there are some canonical engineers that do watch this, so, you know, if uh- Please, just follow, look at how they do it.

And do that. I understand you want your pretty graphical installer. I don't care. I want a thing where I can type numbers. The Debian installer is amazing. It's like select a language and then gives you a list of numbers and you type the number and then it's like select this other thing and you type the number of the thing you want.

Mm-hmm. Do it that way. Let's see. I've never actually installed Debian. I mean, the graphical install for Debian does exist, but if you boot the Debian... Oh, install for Debian does exist but if you if you boot the Debian. Oh the Intel console installer? Yeah if you if you boot any Debian image actually even the ones with the graphical installers if you boot it and press S at the boot prompt it will speak and it will drop back to the old console installer. Oh yeah okay so

when you boot into it it gives you like a I assume at the start, I don't know if this is an old one or not. Okay, this is from like eight years ago, but it's showing where you can like press different letters and it'll take you into different parts. You can press I to go to your install. Okay, so still the same installer. Okay. Pretty much. Not exactly. It's more like you like guide you through it right right right maybe I'll demo it at some point to show people kind of what it what it does but it's really really straightforward and really easy and it enables the biggest thing for me is it enables speech on login right right

which no other installer actually does fedora doesn't do this ubuntu doesn't do this uh-huh um arch does if you configure it cool well yeah arch does a lot of things if you can figure it yeah which i mean it goes without saying but i have to say it because someone's going to turn and go well what about arch because people do that a lot oh no Oh, no, what I get is what I get is Nick's OS fixes that every time Do you know how many times I've dealt with the Nick's OS fixes that people just from this post alone I'm sure Nick's OS fans. You did say this now. I know it can fix that. Maybe read the rest of my post and you'll understand why it doesn't.

Right, right. Like the reason why they bring it up with your post is because you talked about not updating things. So the NixOS people are pinning versions? That's what NixOS is, this is exactly what NixOS is for. Yeah, but clearly, it's like you clearly didn't read the rest of it, did you? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I don't know. That's all.

Yes, yes, go on. Sorry. No, no, it's okay. So yeah, I installed that for them and they're very happy with it. And we have a Linux convert because I had the patience to sit down for, I think it took about three hours in total, and that sounds like not a lot of time.

But I can install Windows in 20 minutes. Well, it's three hours for Ubuntu. Like... Yeah, yeah. yeah like because it was just so It was configured in such a backwards way my point with that is like Ubuntu is Like generally considered a really easy thing to install a really easy thing to get into but it took you three hours to do it Like that's that's a problem but it took you three hours to do it. Like that's, that's a problem.

The install, like it's a, like I said, the install was bad, but like it was the post-install thing is just not working. Right, right. Because they've transitioned Snap, like Thunderbird and Firefox to Snaps. Firefox works, great. Okay, I can use the Snap version of Firefox. Don't want to, can.

Snap version of Thunderbird doesn't because they don't enable the same D-Bus accessibility accessibility whatever it is that they- whatever magic they do. I don't know because it's not documented. Of course. Of course they don't. Why would they? So they enabled this for Firefox. Okay.

But they didn't kind of go, hey, maybe this other thing that's basically Firefox is an email app. Maybe we should do the same thing? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Jesus Christ. So if I want to use Ubuntu, I have to replace the... I have to rip out Snap anyway.

Yeah. So like, why? Why don't I use it? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Since you were talking about the Flutter installer, you did mention... Did you... Wait, I think you... You mentioned Marte, but did you mention the old installer in your first post?

I don't remember. I didn't. OK, well, actually, I said yes. Ubuntu Marte 1204 had a work, navigable, workable, accessible installer. Yes, yes, I did. Yes, I may or may not be looking at the post at the same time. If you don't reference your own post, that's totally fine.

This is why I make some of my videos so I can go back and reference them. Yeah I did. I did mention it. And it was fine. Did that sort of continue up until they did the installer swap? It was a very much slow boil of the frog. I see. So the installer always worked up until they did this. But other stuff would break over time. Like the login screen on I think it was 2210 and okay everyone's gonna say oh you shouldn't use point releases. Point releases have newer

accessibility software. Ubuntu doesn't do back porting properly. If I want to use an up-to-date accessibility stack, I'm using the intemmable releases. So like, it just wouldn't work. And like, again, these random scripts would pop up on GitHub to fix it. But now we're at the point where these people who've been driving Ubuntu for years and know how to work around it every time they break it, the newest script literally says, I don't know why this doesn't work anymore. It has a comment in it that says, this doesn't work. Right, right. I don't know why. Oh my god. It's not a good look. No, no, definitely not. It's not.

But you know what's even more stupid about this whole thing? And I found this out afterwards. Linux Mint, the Mate version of Linux Mint, still uses the old installer and then goes above and beyond with that. And if I enable speech at the login screen, which I can do by the way Because it works It will carry into the user session. Wow, what a crazy

innovation that is Right you change the setting and it remembers the setting Wow incredible amazing But that version I think that the latest version of mint 22.1 is based on Ubuntu 24.04. Right. So, how did they not break this? Like who at Mint, whoever at Mint checked this and then decided, because I'm guessing

that's what happened here. Whoever at Mint checked this and went, we can't ship that. Well done. No, you can't. But like, thank you. My assumption, it's, it, I could be completely off base here, but my guess is it's kind of like, like the people that tend to use Mint are the same kind of people that tend to use Debian, minus the people who are very new to Linux who just read some posts. But like, the people who are on Mint who've been on Linux for, you know, 10 years,

they don't want to go anywhere because Mint is comfortable. Mint is very like conservative in changes. They will, they're very slow moving. So my guess is probably more people who are on there because they know things aren't really going to change that drastically. So they might have more people who would bring that up during early testing. That's just like my initial guess there. I don't know. I've never been part of the Mint community. Maybe that has to change. Maybe I need to engage with them more just to make sure that change that Canonical pushed or whoever the Ubuntu Mate maintainers

are, I don't know if it's directly Canonical or not, but whoever maintained that, make sure that that change does not get pushed to Mint until something drastically changes with it being terrible. Another project I want to call out, I want to call out the Fedora project. Okay. The Fedora Mate Spin has an inaccessible installer. Please fix that. It runs as root and just doesn't speak.

There used to be a workaround for this. Do you want to know what the workaround for this used to be? I don't know if I want to know. This is going to be something dumb, isn't it? It's really dumb. Okay, sure. What is it? Open a terminal.

Right. Set a password for the live session user. Aha. Log out and log back in. Right? That used to fix it. Is there an explanation to why this fixes it, or is it just... It fixes it, so I did it.

Um... I think it prevents it from running as sudo, because then sudo requires a password. Right. And so the installer just doesn't know what to do with that. I'm guessing that that what to do with that. I'm guessing that that's why it does that. Okay. Okay. But I've seen other applications fall back in a similar way, especially when there's no graphical pseudo implementation. I see. Because it's the installer, and so you don't want to just have it fail. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that fixes it. Which... Kind of wild. Yeah. But there we are. That doesn't work anymore. Okay. Okay. Can't do that now. The workstation installer, though. Absolutely beautiful. Basically perfect.

Okay, well, that's good. That's good. Yeah, love it. I haven't tried doing anything fancy with like fancy partitioning setups with it. I'm too old for that. Okay. I don't need slash var on a different partition anymore. It's not that fragile. Yeah, no. I have my root and home separate just because it makes things easier for me But that I do as well. That's that and like, you know, I'll set up additional ones I have a I have a game petition, but like my setup is pretty pretty simple nowadays

I don't really dig too deeply into that Yeah, I don't I don't either I used to have it where slash usr was separate slash bar was separate slash home was separate Oh good, you went slash boot was separate, slash home was separate, uh, slash boot was separate. You went real hard with it, okay. But the reason was because everything would just explode at one point and I didn't want to keep losing stuff when things decided they would break. So what I did was I separated everything out.

I think even slash etc was separate. And then like, fs tab was like somehow linked to not explode. I don't entirely remember how I did that. Right. I think fstab was mounted by the kernel at boot time, rather than be handled by the init. Right, okay. I think that's how I worked around it. I don't remember And so I think FS tab was in boot and then it was just sim linked into etc when other applications would look for it Right, right, right, right, right Don't don't quit don't quote me on that because it's been many many years. Mm-hmm But yeah, so

Like I didn't try that with the fedora installer. I just like accepted the defaults. I did the Windows thing of next, next, next, next install. Because I just wanted to get a system up and running with it because I wanted to test out the new whale and changes. So, so yeah, I did that. And that was great. That was amazing. There's a bug at the moment where you can't select a time zone. What? Because you type into the box to select the time zone. And the list box that appears for the cities, you can't reach it with keyboard focus.

My workaround for this was just click randomly on the screen until the next button showed up and then set the time zone later Fair Literally just click randomly with a mouse until the next button appeared and I was like, okay, I've clicked on something I know click next and I see Random things that we do I guess

Yeah, I mean, it's fine's fine it's okay it's not fine no please do I'm on the internet I've already connected to the internet by this point mm-hmm just detect it mm-hmm like well yeah no that's a good point. Yeah, no if you're on the incident, why do you have to select it? Yeah, no, okay. Okay. That's actually Can't focus it with the keyboard. Okay, please fix that you can't focus it with the keyboard. But first If you just detected it. Mm-hmm and selected it automatically and then I could just click next this wouldn't be an issue Yeah, yeah for sure And again, I'm not trying to hate on the Fedora projects. They had an inaccessible installer for ages and then someone fixed it with the

new web installer. That is good. I appreciate it very much. What was the problem with these? The old installer they had? It was the same Anaconda installer that the Fedora Mate spin is still using. Ah, okay. Again, that work around work, right? Mm-hmm. It was possible to make it accessible. There was another bug with Fedora by default, sorry, tangent, where it will randomly change the screen reader pitch mid-sentence. I don't understand why.

Like, it's still- But it doesn't. You can still understand, it's not like too obituous. Oh yeah, it doesn't make it understandable, but it will go chipmoke on you and you're like, what's happening here? Right. And it's because of the default synthesizer they're using. They're using something called eSpeak NG with, is it Umbrella or M-Embrella or something

like that, where it has this problem but but normal these speak ng doesn't and I don't entirely know why they would use that Maybe there's a language reason Maybe it supports more languages. I don't know I speak English and so I don't ever change it from English. Mm-hmm And it has that it has that weird pitch bug But it's fine. Sorry, give me one sec. Anyway. You just started raining really loudly outside. Oh wow, yeah.

Okay, we're good now. Sorry, I feel like I went a bit of a tangent there. No, no, it's all good. But I had to call out someone, I had to call out them doing good. Another project that's doing great is elementary. And while it's not fully accessible yet, there's still a lot of work to be done. They did actually engage with me and want to make changes. Awesome.

The shortcuts overlay is now almost accessible. There's now actual feedback for desktop notifications. It now tells you at install time how to enable speech. Like without, if you sit there for a minute, it will tell you. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, that's a thing now. Like their installer is actually fully accessible

and just works. So it's like onboarding. So yeah, there's still some stuff that needs to be done obviously. But I like what they're doing and they're engaging and they let me spam their GitHub with issues. So. So a bit ago you mentioned Electron apps like early on having really bad accessibility issues. Right now we're doing this on discord

What is like? You can't obviously speak for every single electron app because different devs gonna do different things But what is the state of things like discord today? Um that they're actually really good now It's something I was gonna kind of get to is that over the last two years I've seen more change in the last two years than I have in the last eight before. Okay. And so just go, it is fine.

VS code is possibly the best example I can give for an accessible electron app. Okay. Like, I know it's Microsoft and some people are going to be like, oh, but Microsoft, no, no, no, they may. I use Visual Studio Code sometimes. I'm not going to say I like it. It's not my code editor of choice. But like, if I need to use a code editor with like built-in version control and debugging and all this stuff, it's going to be VS Code. Right. Because it's a really good example of an Electron app. Discord had a rough start.

They weren't very accessible for years. And that wasn't just because of Electron. That was just because Discord wasn't accessible on mobile, on desktop, on anything. And then they somehow decided to listen from somewhere, and now it is. That's good. Somehow decided to listen from somewhere and now it is That's good Sometimes they have regressions like when they change to the new new UI Aha. Yeah. Yeah that inbox button Please get that out of my way. There's already a keyboard shortcut for it. I don't need a button there. I

Know I actually have a different problem with it. I click the inbox button and I have notifications. There's never anything in it. It doesn't work for me. I don't know why. You need to click on the tabs. There are tabs at the top, like unread and all and stuff. There's tabs? And if, yeah.

If you click on one of those tabs, you'll actually see what's in it. Like if you get a notification, it won't show as unread properly. Wait. Oh my God, there are tabs. Like, tabs. Oh my god, there are tabs!

Yeah, there are tabs at the top. I've never noticed that. Okay. There you go, you learned something. I did learn something. You know, maybe the stream reader does help, because you can't miss an element if it reads it to you. Oh, you can. No, no, no. You absolutely can miss something. If you tab past it, if that thing doesn't have a keyboard focusable tag, or use something stupid like aria hidden,

even when it's a button because you haven't accepted some terms and conditions yet and so you can't even find that. Okay, that makes sense. Stop. Right, right, right. Stop abusing Aria to make me agree to cookies. You won't win this. Actually, one of the things I did want to bring up before we sort of move on to something different. When you're talking about your experience moving into Linux, you mentioned it was like 2009 or so, yes, when you first started?

So as the web has sort of gotten more complex and more of a nightmare to use even if you can see Has it been that like websites have gotten Generally more difficult to use with just how many different things there are to focus on How they lay out like how they like handle the page structuring all of that Okay, so before I I lost my power which is great Let's hope that one doesn't happen again. This is why I record with MKV files MP4 MP4 sucks because if they don't have a proper endpoint the file is dead MKV I think I'm obvious the same right? Oh

Dead MKV. I think MOV is the same right? I don't know. I'm not sure. I think so I think I think OBS explicitly warns you not to use MP4 just because it is it has this problem Anyway, yes, I was saying before we we we we lost My I lost sound too. So like whatever took your power out, lost my sound out. That's what we're saying. Wait, yeah. So you thought that the Discord broke or something? Because you should have heard the Discord like coal leaving sound. But I had no sound at all. Right. It's something just like completely took down my... I think you leaving the call caused Discord's pipewire node to ephemera go away and then for some reason it decided... I mean I didn't look at the nodes in the graph, in the audio graph, I didn't do like pwdump or anything, but I'm guessing that's what happened

because everything else went away with it and if you remember when we started this call before we started recording, I had the call active when I had to restart everything. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I see. Okay what I was saying before everything died is the The Vim line so it's Ed x Vi Vim and now Neo Vim that's that's that's what I was saying before Canonical wanted to ruin me or something. I don't know. I'm sorry, are you actually going with that?

Yeah, that's what we're going with. That's the story we're going with. That's canon. Yep, absolutely. So yes, Edbrowse. Yeah, Edbrowse. So I was using Edbrowse for a while because the web didn't really require JS or anything Right, really? Okay. You had some flash pages YouTube I'm like, but I didn't really care about that too much. I would use my phone for that I'd look I'd go on the internet because I need to look up something on Wikipedia for homework or something

Yeah, if you're watching this young people don't use Wikipedia for your homework If you're watching this, young people, don't use Wikipedia for your homework. But that's what I did. So I would go, because Wikipedia was accessible because everything was navigable by headings. That was it. So I would use Edbrowse. And then I switched to Firefox when I switched to Vinex. And that was fine for a while. Bear in mind I've always been a big proponent

of ad block. So I've used ad block extensions for as long as I can remember. And I also use ad blocking DNS. Because I don't like ads. Ads are like the bane of my existence. I'll get onto this in a second. In fact, you know what? I'll get onto it now because it's relevant to web stuff. Live regions. ARIA live regions. Those live regions that do this thing where this ad will stop in x seconds. They are usually programmed as assertive live regions. So they will interrupt whatever else is speaking to give you that info. Oh Stop I'm looking at the UM the MDN docs right now

There's a note right near the top assistive technologies will generally only announce dynamic changes in the content of a live region including aria live attribute in the content of a live region, including an ARIA live attribute. Start with an empty live region, then in a separate step, change the content inside the region. When explicitly documented the specification, browser slash assistive technologies do include special handling for role alert. In most cases, the content inside role alert regions is announced even when the region which already contains the notification of this message is present in the initial markup of the page or injected dynamically into the page.

However, note that role alert region are depending on the specific browser slash assistive technology combination automatically prefixed with alert when they are announced. Yes, stop putting your ads, your dynamically loading, dynamically changing ads in alert regions. Uh huh. Uh huh. You are user hostile. You actually make the web suck. Stop doing it. I feel like this episode has been a lot of me just yelling at people to stop doing this. I think, look, I think that's fair to be honest. Like if you want to know what this is like have someone shout hello in your face every five seconds when you're trying to read. Right right right okay okay. You'll you'll

really hate them for doing it. Well not only hello, don't you want to hear about whoppers? You want to hear about Big Macs? You want to hear about Big Macs and you want to hear about whoppers? Very important. Ignore whatever you're actually focused on. Ignore the reason why you're actually on the page. No. You gotta consume the ads. The worst ones are like, I don't know if I should really go into this, but I'm going to anyway and I guess you can edit it out.

But when you're on a website and it's one of those websites that really doesn't care what ads they serve and you're trying to give a presentation about something and you're on one of these websites because it happens to be like the, like whatever it is that they're doing like this article or whatever happens to come up in your presentation Mm-hmm, and you've met you're not screen sharing because you're just reading it yourself, but you have your audio Routed through so that like people can hear whatever it is You're trying to show them. Hmm, and you get an ad for inappropriate content that has an alert tag. Oh, shut up! Okay, okay, yeah.

That's a problem. Maybe don't do that. And when they send them as push notifications. Also bad. I'm so glad that browsers let you block push notifications now. Like, that's good. They used to not do that. Anyway, kind of irrelevant, but funny anecdote for you though. This has happened.

I have had this happen at serious talks more often. Oh, that's fun. So, um. Back to the web question. Yes. You asked if it's gotten worse. It's gotten worse. Um, yes.

But it's not just gotten worse because the web has gotten worse being handled in orca and ATSPI was not very good at handling really big pages. That's no fault of anyone's it's just how it was right? Like it just wasn't very good at handling massive pages and so you'd end up with slowdown as your page got bigger Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That is now fixed. I can browse really big pages now and I don't have a problem And a big part of that our we see wig ads again, hmm But I because I use an ad blocker and everything I found that I can mostly deal with the internet. I see. Okay. Okay.

Apps that implement keyboard shortcuts properly are great. Gmail is an amazing example of this. Mastodon is another one. They have their own keyboard shortcuts. And while you need to turn off your navigation keys function of a screen reader right right to use them They are good. Mm-hmm. I love that Twitter was the first place I knew did it. Okay Then I left Twitter for reasons sure But yeah, so I think the web has gotten harder in some cases and better in others. With improvements in web accessibility, because everything is going web based, there's

massive improvements in web accessibility coming. When web apps were just starting to really be a thing, they were really bad. And it was really awful to use them. That's starting to improve. So kind of as kind of as companies sort of ditch the idea of desktop applications and do everything on the web, I guess their accessibility teams kind of move over to that as well. Yeah, it has to improve because everything's going now. Sometimes I'll still take browsing on a phone over a computer. Because mobile sites tend to be better. I don't know why that is.

I guess because there's less space for them to clutter things. Very possible. Like, there used to be a website called basic.facebook.com. Okay. And then they took it away for some unknown reason. And I think they brought it back, but maybe not. be a website called basic.facebook.com. Okay. And then they took it away for some unknown reason. And I think they brought it back, but maybe not. I don't know.

But Facebook have about a hundred different ways of accessing their website and all of them are not great. Mm hmm. Like they're all kind of bad for one reason or another. I'm seeing references to something called M- mbasic a couple of years ago. Yeah that's it. That's it. Ah okay okay. mbasic. We used it on like Symbian phones and whatever. Okay. But yeah so I think the web has gone, the web went backwards from when everything was just static text. The web went backwards from there into like embedded flash, which was not accessible at all

to now HTML 5 which is Has its issues, but it's significantly better and things are being done to make it better still. I Still don't like web apps really, I Don't mind if I like discord or whatever sure but I still don't like web apps. Really? I don't mind it for like Discord or whatever. But like my spreadsheets, not a web app. My text editor is not a web app. I'm not saying my code editor, cause Visual Studio code,

but like my plain text, I'm editing Markdown or something. Not a web app. What do you go to for that? Nano? Vim? Emacs? You joke, but I used to. Emacs is a good one because EmacsSpeak exists,

and speech EL exists, which are both enable speech in Emacs. EmacsSpeak was really good because it allowed indicating font and attribute changes by changing the voice and the voice profile. Okay. Which was like a really nice way of getting that kind of info, but Emacs is super complicated. No, I just use Pluma. Pluma? The Mate text editor.

Oh, okay. I just use that. Because you can install it independently of the desktop because they don't make it depend on the rest of the desktop. So I just install that on basically everything. This is the thing, everyone's like, oh, you should try this new software. And I'm like, but I've had this setup that works for me. Right.

Please leave me alone. I did see- I know it looks like I'm stuck in 1995 but like it works. Yeah yeah. Don't worry if it was on the post itself or it was in my comment section but I know I did see some people be like hey here's my emacs he's like all these crazy different things you can do in emacs emacs is amazing emacs people are kind of like the Knicks people, where they will take any chance they can possibly get to show how amazing their software is and why you should use it. It's great. It was one of the first fully accessible experiences of like

stuff that I actually use. Like I did use Emacs for a while. I used Emacs with Emacs Speak and it had an email app and had a web browser and everything. I wanted to use an actual desktop that everyone else used. It was really what it came down to. Because like, Googling, why does this page not load in Emacs? Yeah. Good luck finding anything. And I think that's one of the things I want to do is self-help I don't want to have to Email the maintainer of a thing and go hey, can you test this really specific thing? Mm-hmm because it's broken I want to be able to look it up and go. Oh, it's because It's because they're doing this thing.

And then I can report it straight to the project, right? Rather than ask the maintainer of whatever specialized piece of software I'm using to first try it and make sure it's not something that is broken in that software before then I can go upstream and go, this is broken. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Because there's nothing worse than being an upstream maintainer and then having someone come to you and go this doesn't work and then you're going yeah because you're you're using it in this really obscure way that I've never

heard of or like yes because you're 19 years out of date right right report that Report that to somebody else because I can't fix it. And that's the worst thing to say to someone. I hate saying that to people. I hate turning around to someone and going, I can't fix your problem. Go somewhere else to get that solved. Yeah. But you know, you can't solve every problem. No. I don't know if you saw, but like my whole thing about desktops someone turned around and said well make your own then and So I kind of went fine. I will I Did you see that no, but I saw other comments being like why are you complaining fix the code yourself? It's just like hold on. Let me let me send you something in chat. Oh, okay If you don't mind go right ahead

But it's just like it's not it's not inappropriate. Okay, sure but it's just like yeah, if if you have problems with it and like your screen reader breaks like you know like I Think people are they're unable to think of how you approach a problem unless, like, outside of themselves. It's like, they think that everybody else is capable of, like, doing the same things they can do. Yeah, exactly.

Like, I sent you the link. Dinner is not aesthetics. Strip down Accessibility Fork of DWM, tailored for blind users and screen reader workflows. Okay. Someone said make it yourself. All right then, sure. I got so annoyed at the do it yourself people. It's just like fine. I got so annoyed at the do it yourself people. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

It's just like fine. I will. This is cool. The commit history is awful. Oh no. Okay. Look at the... Well, you can't tell me that now.

I must... It looks fine to me. The way I write commits people are always like stop writing your commits like this. Oh the commits themselves. No one does that anymore. What do you mean no one does that anymore? People are like people don't write commits like long form commit messages anymore. Stop doing it. Long form commit messages anymore. Oh.

Wait, they're complaining that you're doing the thing you're supposed to do. That... Yeah, there's a couple of people who have been like, no one writes git commits like that. Oh my god. There was one person who sent me a DM that basically said, who are you, Linus? I don't know, look at like the GNOME project. They do fairly long commit messages.

Look at it. No, I just feel like, and I don't remember where this message was, but literally someone was like, who are you Linus? It was in one of the Discord servers because someone asked me, like, I'm in a couple of Discord servers and my posts gained traction in one of them. And someone looked at my Discord profile and like found that I was like linked to this and they're

like, so what are you doing about it? And I sent that. Like here's what I'm doing about it. Like I'm just making my own experience because. That reminds me of something. So I did see a comment on my video where someone was like, oh, why is he just whining about, like why is he just complaining about not fixing it? Is this when I was fixing the out of memory bug? Yes, it was literally the moment you sent me that message. And he was also like, oh, so I have a friend of mine who now works for the KDEV doing accessibility stuff.

I saw your podcast on that. Yeah, yeah. Cause I gotta be honest with you, who now works for the KDEV doing accessibility stuff. It was like, oh. I saw your podcast on that. Yeah, yeah. Cause I gotta be honest with you, I followed your channel and your podcasts for like ages. Anyway, and I did not expect you to actually make a video about like my stuff. I just kind of went, oh, this is coincidental.

Cause like I didn't click on your video right away. I was like, huh, this is a weird title. Right, right, right. And then I clicked on it and was like, what? I do a video on part two as well coming out. Oh, do you? Cool. Soon. I forgot. I was going to do it last week and then I got sidetracked

and I didn't do it last week. And you haven't released part three yet. So it's still the it's still the latest one of the numbered series. So I'm still I'm not late. Yeah, no. Well yet, so it's still the latest one of the numbered series, so I'm still, I'm not late. Yeah, no. Well, no, it's not. The interlude is the latest one. Okay, but like the interlude is not numbered, so.

Yeah, okay, okay. I'll take his win. Fair enough. Take the W, alright. But yeah, he was like, oh, why is this like, cause he's like, you've watched the episode, for anyone who hasn't, he's a game dev, does indie stuff. He's like, oh, why is this whiny game dev complaining about, like, oh, the thing is so special that he does, like, he works on a game while blind.

And it's just like, he's literally employed by the KDEV now to work on this problem. Like, he's not just complaining about the problem that exists. The stuff that he has done is amazing, by the way. I'm one of those terrifying people. I run my desktop environments from Git. Because, especially if I'm reporting issues, right? Sure. I'm gonna specify this right now.

If I'm reporting issues to a project, I'm running the Git version of the project. Yeah, when I mess around with Cosmic, I do the specify this right now. If I'm reporting issues to a project, I'm running the git version of the project Yeah, when I mess around with cosmic I do the same thing Yeah, I run the git version of whatever it is the changes that has been made to like KWin and some of the KDE applications Great stuff. It's still not perfect yet. Mm-hmm, but I am so happy they hired someone to do this. Mm-hmm You have someone like like, I think the... I think the problem that you have with any sort of approach to this problem is most of the people working on the problem

are not... well, they might be dogfooding it for the purpose of testing, but they're not people who directly rely on it. So, you know, if like I... say if I was writing a screen reader, like if a screen reader breaks, I can fix that fairly easily. But if you're in a situation where you require it, like that's a whole like different level of ensuring that things don't break. And sure, people can like you say like, oh, use OCR to help you fix it. Sure.

But not all situations lend themselves to that. Yeah assuming there's an error message. Yeah and also assuming you have a screen because this is what my primary computer is. What is that? Okay. This is what I use. What is that? This is what I use. It has no screen at all. Oh, it's like a keyboard attached to a keyboard?

No, it's literally the computer is in the keyboard. Oh, what is that? It's called the Luna. It was a Kickstarter project and I backed it because I was like, this is the coolest thing. And I was like, I wanna know if this runs Linux. And it basically is exactly what I need in a computer. It has a keyboard, and it has ports, and it has a battery. And it goes really tiny so I can put it in my pocket.

I don't want anything else. That is really cool. Oh my god, they have a tiny goal. And they... Wow! Yeah, they smashed it. There's some controversy at the moment because some backers didn't get their units. I've never seen a Kickstarter where that doesn't happen. I got both of mine.

So yeah, I feel bad for the people who didn't get, but also this is such a cool project. Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully they get all their stuff sorted out. I had to get at least one and then I had to get two because I was like, I'm going to probably rely on one of these things, and then I'm going to want to do dev work on another one. Well, clearly they made a product, right? It's not like, there's been plenty of Kickstarter's where, like, they don't finish things, they don't get production ready, things don't get shipped out.

Like, there's clearly a real thing here. So hopefully they can get all those issues sorted out with people not getting the stuff when they're supposed to get them. It's designed for like VR use cases where like someone's plugging in VR glasses. Oh, that makes sense. Like it's not designed for blind users. It's designed for people who wanna plug in VR glasses

and whatever. And I kinda went, yeah, but what if... That's a... You know, that actually makes a lot of sense, but no, that... Huh. That's re- that is a really cool device. Because this is like taking the mini PC to the like as extreme as you can go. Yeah, it is. Before that I used a MacBook and I've always had this thing with laptops. I've always had this thing with minimalism. The more minimal thing I can carry, the better. Right. That

does what I needed to do. Now, if something is really small, but like I can't, you know, I can't run full Linux on it. No, doesn't work for me. Sorry. Like I wouldn't, I would say a Raspberry Pi is usable. I've done it. There's a project for the blind that is a Raspberry Pi with a braille keyboard, essentially. It's a CM4 with a braille keyboard on it. And I've used that, and I like that, and I've contributed code to that. But sometimes I want to compile something that doesn't take six hours. Fair enough. I want to compile the kernel in less than a day.

Come on. Right. I can understand that. So yeah, but this isn't me trying to show the products or anything, I promise. It's me saying, this is what I use. And so OCR doesn't help me because I don't already have a screen.

Right. And so while it works most of the time, like if I have a screen, I can take a picture of it and I can go, oh, well, there is no error, but like, what if I do, what if I press Alt F2? Okay, that's brought up a box. Maybe I can type orca dash dash replace dash dash debug. And even if it crashes, there'll be a debug out file on desktop. So then I can drop to a console and read the debug file. One thing I hadn't really thought of until I had like read your posts. So you know how like back in the early 2000s it was quite common for Linux desktops, like how Windows

has to just have noises just happen. It's like you click something, a noise happens, you log in, a noise happens you log in a noise happens I still have it like that right but it's not it's not like the standard no and like knowing when something has become disconnected is really help like this is like all of my like sorry no go on go on I was just gonna um all of my login and log out sounds and like my device connect disconnect sounds go through also only also. Because then I at least know when something is happening right. My speech doesn't because also and speech don't play nice sometimes.

There's a few different reasons for that. Maybe it's, I had a lot of people in the comments of the second post and in my DMs like, yeah, you know you can use also with DMix and add hot plugging support by adding a dozen UDEV rules. And I was like, I was like, yeah, I know.

But, that's, I was like, yeah, I know. But... That's... I'm too old for that. Right. When I use my computer to get work done, I value my time. Right, right. So, yeah, no. I mean, so I have my speech go through pipeline,

but I have my, like... What I call emergency sounds right I've like our things starting properly Am I able to still switch windows? I have a sound for when I switch windows, which people would be like, oh my god That'd be so horrible, but I need to at least know if my screen is changing Right if I press alt F2 and I hear a bleep I know that my screen changed to something else. Right, like if there is a sound at the bare minimum, you know you haven't kernel panicked

yet. Yes, it's the like, big thing there is yet. Like you can you can put your foot near your PC, you can tell that it's turned on. Like that's not an issue. You can hear that. But like, Well, like if the biggest annoyance is like boot prompts, like UEFI not an issue you can hear that but like well like the biggest annoyance is like boot prompts like uefi shells when you drop into a uefi shell because something broke

because there's no way a lot of these laptops especially are really quiet when they turn on apple do one thing very much right macbooks are really obnoxious when they turn on very much right. Macbooks are really obnoxious when they turn on. Well, get a gaming laptop. Thank you Apple for making your laptops obnoxious. No, like, they make like this whole, this whole like really bassy chime noise at like basically close to full volume. So like if you reboot in the middle of the night you're gonna wake everybody up but at the same time I know when it's turning on. Right, right. They took it away for like four years and people complained so much. Like from 2016 to 2019 you didn't have the chime and everyone was like but why?

have the chime and everyone was like, but why? That's why actually my M1 Mac is one of my favorite Linux machines. Because it's, Asahi is so specifically built. Asahi, how would you say it? I don't know. Asahi, that's, Asahi. Asahi, whatever. It's a Japanese word, you're not pronouncing itcing it correctly anywhere doesn't matter. Just say it however. Someone did tell me how to pronounce it right once and I like was like okay I'm never remembering this ever. Which I feel bad about but hey yo. That is so tailored for those machines that it basically never fails.

I never lost audio on Asahi since they added it. Before they added it and like speaker support was experimental and like they were all like, yeah, you might blow your speakers up. I was like, yeah, but I want it anyway. I do remember this. Yeah. Yeah. They're like using this might blow your speakers up. And then I was like. Yeah, but, they're like using this might blow your speakers up and then I was like Yeah, but what if? The projects come a really long way I I am like genuinely impressed like how so am I much has been done here I

Was using it before they had soundsport or just the headphone jack they used to have headphone audio, but they also did have USB C audio Okay, because they had USB C ports working and so so USB-C sound like, kind of ish. There were some problems. But since they had sound working, I've never had it break. That's good. It's just stable and just works. I don't know if that's because of them because of the fact that they decide what sound configuration is and they don't have all the baggage of like another distribution having made that choice 10 years ago and then sticking to it. Well, also has the advantage of being a much smaller set of hardware. So you can like make sure like it's the Apple device.

There's like a few versions of them. You just need to make sure things it's it's the Apple device there's like a few versions of them you just need to make sure things work on them. So that's been an amazing experience using that. I've really enjoyed using it. I can't use it primarily as my primary setup because some stuff just isn't ARM64. Yeah that's fair. DistroBox helps with this a lot because you can run x64 DistroBoxes and that helps, but emulation. Right, right, right, right. It's not great. So, oh yeah, sorry.

Sorry, that's how I tried. No, no, it's all good. I was going to take us down a different path if I was going to do you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's all good. I was gonna, I was gonna take us down a different path if I have to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine. Okay, so, um, as we're moving into this sort of direction of Wayland, what is like the, because, you know, you'll definitely see a lot of people talk about like how, how, you know, X11 is perfect for their setup, X11 is amazing, it's for a bunch of different reasons. But from your perspective, where is X11, how does it generally feel?

And how is the state of things on the big desktops on Wayland right now? I have one option for a desktop on Wayland and that's GNOME. Okay. Everything else broken in some fundamental way. Okay. If I had a number pad it would be less of a problem because Orca's desktop layout is kind of more supported somehow, I don't know. But I don't. I use a laptop. My orca key is the capslock key. Every time I try and do an orca command, first of all, my capslock toggles. Okay.

So, figuring out what state my capslock key is in is great, because it doesn't say capslock on or capslock off, it just says capslock. Thanks. Really helpful. Love that. And if I use like the flat review keys to like review text in a window that isn't scrollable by default, like, you know, I can't just use the flat review keys to review text in a window that isn't scrollable by default, I can't just use the arrow keys to scroll. Like a terminal output, for example, you press your arrow keys and it scrolls you through your command history.

But I need to review five lines ago. I've got to press caps lock U a few times. What happens every time I press U? It'll navigate me up a line, but then it'll insert a U in the terminal. And every time you insert a letter in the terminal, it dumps you back to the bottom. Right, it does, doesn't it? Yeah. So it's like I can just hit it five times and be like, okay, entered five U's in different

states of caps lock. Maybe maybe KD is better now. I don't honestly know. It's been a while since I tested it. But I will cosmic has this problem. Anything based on WL roots has this problem. I like I was really excited. When the project that I use there's a project called I 38 that makes I three accessible And it like generates an accessible config I Was really excited when that project got sway support. Mm-hmm. So I was like I can use this now cool Let me go do that. I was like, oh wait. No, no, I can use this now. Cool. Let me go do that. And I was like, oh wait, no, no, I can't. Nevermind. I'm not able to find this. You said I38, yes?

Yeah, here I can link you. Yeah. If you could do that, that would be awesome. Cause my search engine is just trying to correct me to i3, which is not helpful. It's probably not very easy to find. It's not exactly the best name for SEO. Oh, and it's not on GitHub. Okay, that makes... Yeah, no, it's not on GitHub. It used to be on GitLab.

That took me to a 404 page. Oh, because I... That was my fault. Hold on. Okay. GitLab that took me to a 404 page or Because I I that was my fault. Hold on. Okay, I'll link you to the audio URL. Oh Okay, that'll do it That one, ah Okay, thank you. Awesome. This is the project. Okay.

It generates accessible i3 conflicts. Amazing project, also amazing maintainer. They made audio games, like accessible games for the blind, also work on Linux through like an audio game manager thing, like sets up sandboxed wine installs, which is awesome. Basically like Proton, but for accessible games, it's great. I love it. Okay, that's cool. Different problem entirely, different thing, but it's great. So yeah, that's what I used.

And then they got Sway support, and I was like, I can use this now? I can switch to Sway. I can stop having this window-focused, grabbed problem that I've been having forever. After anyone who hasn't read the post, can you just briefly explain that? So, in Orca 47, there was a massive rewrite to how events were handled.

And I3 has this bug where it doesn't set window focus properly. And so every time you issue a keyboard command, the window that is supposed to be in focus issues a grabbed event. And in order to improve accessibility to some other systems, they made it so that when window grabbed events are issued, Orca will announce them. And it will announce that you're in that application and where you are in that application. Like for example, it will say Thunderbird inbox.

Right. If I'm arrowing through my email messages, every time I hit an arrow key to go to the next email message, I don't hear my email message. I get Thunderbird inbox. Oh. Because it window-grapped. And then I get my email. Oh, okay.

And it's a longer announcement than Thunderbird inbox. It's like Thunderbird inbox tab, internal frame, something, something, something, ready, verbose. Okay. Right. I couldn't remember exactly what it is off my head because i kind of just block it out at this point um like i did i just block it out because i don't want to deal with it

fair understandable but that's that's an issue and i was like i can finally switch to Sway which doesn't have this problem. Amazing. And I tried it and my dreams were shattered. Oh. Because I couldn't use it. What is the problem on Sway? The same thing as with everything else is that there's no global shortcuts handling. There's no debuss API for handling global keybinds.

This is why this is a fundamental flaw with Wayland. With every compositor being built from protocols, why is there no protocol for this? Why is this not a protocol in Wayland already? I understand that it was proposed a dozen times, global shortcut portal, and this and that. Global shortcut portal doesn't solve my problem. I don't want to have to click allow every time I need to issue a command. That's not helpful. Doesn't help me.

So yeah, this is a fundamental... I fully agree with you here. Like this is a, this is, this is just a problem. Um, this is a fundamental issue with the approach that's been taken to Wayland development, Wayland, Wayland has put at least traditionally things have changed for a lot of things, not for this yet, um, put the idea of security ahead of everything else. And that's sort of the situation that's caused this because they, a lot of the core Weyland people do not want anything like this to exist

without there to be access controls on it. Which- Which is fine. Sure. controls on it which which is fine sure I don't mind access controls look even if I have to go in and change a decon setting mmm that's like all dot free desktop dot I don't care about your security right. I don't care what the path to the setting is. Give me a setting H. Yeah. Yeah.

Let me, let me. Linux is all about freedom. Right? Linux is all about the user is free to decide what the user wants to do. Everyone agrees on that, right? Where's my freedom to just say, you know what? I don't care. Yeah Yeah, it's

Look at the bare minimum at least there is this thing on KDE and Cosmic Hazard as well now where for X11 applications You can just ignore that and let it listen in on your keyboard. But it doesn't help the Wayland apps. If you try and run the screen, I've tried this, I've tried running Orca under X Wayland because obviously I was like, well, wonder if I can just do this. To try it, there's a library and I'm not going to say what the library name is, I'm going to spell it out because I have no idea how you would say it without being rude.

Okay. It's one of those named libraries that I don't think anyone really thought about why it was named this way or maybe they did and just didn't care. There's a library that it uses for capturing flat review and it is a used to be or might still be a hard dependency and it doesn't work in Wayland at all. It's called LIBWNK3. I think you see the problem here, right? Yeah, what? Wait, L-I-B.

I think that's how you spell it. W-N-K-3, did I hear you correctly? Yes. Okay. For some reason, I'm not finding it. I think that's how you spell it. Yeah, it's not sure. It might have another letter in it.

Okay, okay. Oh, I found it. Oh. Lib WNCK. I'm just seeing. WNCK. It's still problematic naming. Okay, okay, okay. Oh no. But it was a hard dependency of Orca for a while and it's required for XOR, doesn't

work in Wayland. Oh, it's the Window Navigator construction kit ah yes for sure for sure. It got a specific nickname between me and my partner when it was really broken and like I was trying to get Orca to launch even without flat review and it was like need this dependency install that dependency can't launch because this doesn't work. Yeah. So we gave it a nickname. I'm sure you use your imagination as to what we called it. But it was a dependency.

Then it was made a soft dependency. So then it was like a recommended. Cool, that meant I could launch it under Wayland mm-hmm awesome love that and but I still couldn't launch it under X Wayland right because it needs to read every window and yeah X Wayland stuff still can't see other applications that are running in Wayland-only mode. And if I'm going to run everything under xWayland, I may as well just not bother. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's actually...

Like, at that point, I may as well just use xorg, right? Right, right, right, right. And so this is a problem with Wayland, because every single compositor has to implement this debuss API. Mm-hmm. Or, like, whatever patching was done initor has to implement this debuss API or like whatever patching was done in mutter to make this work. And I raised an issue, there was an accessibility issue on the cosmic GitHub and I raised, I like messaged in a couple days ago and was like, so what's the progress with this? And they like pointed me to a pull request where

they're working on it and all this stuff. Awesome. Thank you. Okay. That's awesome. I love that. But I think that I don't think that WL routes is and maybe that's a maybe that's like people are going to say, well, why didn't you report it or whatever? And I guess I am going to provide a reason for that right now. Burnout. Fair. Like, how many bugs do I have to report? Yeah, no, I get it. To just use my system.

I'm just going to go back to the thing that works because it works. I'm genuinely worried that Xorg is going to get removed from repositories. I... It's going to happen and I don't like it. I'm not ready for it. It will be in repositories. It will be removed. It is a hundred percent being removed from Fedora soon.

Um, that's fine. Fedora have Fedora use GNOME primarily. I can use that. I'm happy with that. That's fine. Well, okay. Fedora is a weird, I say soon fedora is a weird case um i know a bunch there are definitely some people that have talked about it um but it's always like

it's always going to be in the on arch right like it's always going to be on gen 2 it's always going to be like it maybe the thing is moved to linux from scratch build everything yourself and then no one has to tell you to change oh Oh, like, like Debian, right? Like, it's gonna take Debian a real, like, Debian has some window managers from the 90s that haven't been updated in 27 years. So they're gonna hold it basically until it stops compiling. Yeah, which, great, I love that. But also, I don't like being on the back foot of hardware.

Right. I like new hardware. I like to play games. Sometimes I have to boot into Windows to make those games accessible. Sorry, Linux people have to. Flight simulation is a good example of that. I have to boot. I have to use Windows for that. So I don't like being on the back foot of hardware. And so eventually, X-Org is going to stop working on my hardware and I'm just going to have to deal with it. Yeah. I'm not ready yet.

My- Do you know what is kind of funny to me? When Mer was its own thing, it didn't have this problem. Uh-huh. This was not a problem. Alright uh. So I've slugged off Canonical for the past like couple hours. But when they were actively working on that, I mean okay maybe it would have broken down

the line or maybe there was some edge case that like was somehow being enabled or whatever. I don't know. I didn't know as much as I do now about all of this. I was just kind of using it. But it worked. It didn't have this issue. Wayland has this issue for as long as I've known that it existed.

And it's still a problem. Right. Just make an XTG protocol for it. I know I just say just like it's the easy thing in the world. I know it's not. Okay, I followed enough Whalen threats to know how they go. Yeah,? I've spoken to enough maintainers of big projects to know that getting anything implemented takes a long time and will probably result in someone sending you less than stellar messages. Anyone who's watched your videos knows that. But I also know this from just having followed them myself and kind of gone, oh.

Oh my gosh. So yeah, but like, I think there needs to be a compositor agnostic solution to this problem. Every compositor should not have to implement this in their own weird way. Then maybe we'll be supported by some tools, maybe we won't. Another thing I use a lot is xdo tool. Yes, yes, yes. That's never coming to Wayland. Very like.

So I did want to ask you about like, what do you actually do? You just use it for like window management or keyboard inputs. What do you actually use it for? What specifically? Sometimes navigating inaccessible applications. Right. Because XDO tool is really powerful and can do a lot of things including mouse stuff.

Yeah, this is something, this is again, one of those things where I understand why it's like this on Wayland. From a security perspective, it makes sense to not let random non-root software pretend to be a keyboard. At the same time though, not having something to do that is really annoying. Like for example, let's take the OCR one for example,

and this isn't something I released because I'm not comfortable releasing it because it's kind of clunky and broken, and it works with a very specific set of dependencies. If one of them is slightly out of version, it's gonna fall over and we're gonna lose access to your system. But I have an OCR solution that lets me OCR a window, it will extract text content from that window. I can then navigate to any of the text, let's say it's an installer and there's a next button.

I can navigate to where that button is, press enter, and there's a hash table that maps all of the text elements to their mouse coordinates, and the next CO tool will go and click that spot. Oh wow! That's really cool. So then I can get through that. And there's a project that does OCR already called OCR Desktop, which is what I based it off. But it just that just dumps the text into a text window.

And that's great. No no shade to those project maintainers at all. Thank you for making it. It saved me many times when I haven't like been able to see some output. Mm-hmm But I needed something that could send mouse events So I made a thing that like let me do that sometimes when it isn't falling over because some dependency updated But there's no way for me to do that in waitland. So if something's not accessible, what I'm calling

someone for help. Right. No, yeah, like that. This is sort of like, combined, this goes back into a lot of the main issues that exist with the accessibility problem where the people developing the software most of the time are not people who need these things to work and you like I've seen people bring up very valid honestly I think the only valid like the only use case is actually get through to people because I can bring up tons of use cases for things like this and tons of use cases for global hotkeys, but I honestly think the only use case is going to get through to certain people on

certain desktops who will remain unnamed because they cause problems in Wayland discussions quite often. Oh, yeah, I know who you're talking about. They know who they are. Yeah. Honestly, I think the only thing that will actually make a protocol like this happen is the accessibility argument. I don't think it will.

It's the only thing that has a chance. That's me talking very cynically, right? I'd love them to prove me wrong. Mm-hmm. You know what? I would love someone This is the only time I'm gonna I'm gonna actively challenge someone come out and tell me I'm wrong to my face Because This has been brought up in so many different like, and it got to the point where GNOME had to do it themselves. They had to get the sovereign fund, they had to contract a guy to start working on it, and then someone else had to finish that implementation.

Because no one else was interested, I guess, is the only way I can put it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because that's what it looks like. Maybe there was somebody interested. If you were interested, you weren't speaking up about it. Yeah. You weren't saying, hey, I want this to work.

Can we talk about it? Can we talk about it? They said DebConf, you know, can we talk about it? Can we talk about this at DebConf? Can we talk about this somewhere? Even if it's not in a GitHub issue or a GitLab issue, because keyboard warriors are a thing, you know who you are. And they can get pretty nasty. But if you talk to someone face to face and say, this is something I want to propose, here's why I want to propose it. Sure, they can cut you off mid-sentence, but you can just shout louder. So, that's a thing.

But if that was done, I don't know about it, because no one ever publicly said that they'd done that. Be proud of the accessibility work that you do. Maybe I should have saved that phrase for the end, but I'm not going to. I'm going to say it here right now. Be proud of the accessibility work you do. If you're working on accessibility, I want to hear about it. I want to know what you're doing, even if it's not for the blind, even if it's for the hard of hearing, or it's for people with motor issues or it's for people with cognitive issues that have a hard time with focus or remember or memory or whatever it is I want to hear about it. Accessibility work should be

celebrated. Absolutely. Not put on a not put on a shelf somewhere to rot. Yeah, I am glad that we are seeing Desktops take this problem really seriously now and like Even if things aren't in the state you would like them to be in at least they still better than they were a year ago yeah, at least people are discussing the problem now and like exactly people are acknowledging that this is an issue and this is something that needs to be addressed and even if even if things that should be in place are not there this is why i at least have some hope for some of these problems to be addressed even if you are even you might be

cynical about them the the fact i'm only cynical because I've been dealing with this for a while, right? No, I get it I totally get it but like That that's the only reason I I there's a lot of things I don't have hope for but the fact that people are taking accessibility so seriously and We're seeing you know, like the sovereign tech fun stuff Like we're seeing with you know, my friend being hired to do accessibility work like we're actually seeing people try to do something exactly and i think what actually gave me massive hope was the fact was how far this post reached

how many people reached out and were like where are we failing How many people reached out and were like, where are we failing? They didn't reach out and say, oh, we're doing great. What are you talking about? They reached out and said, what doesn't work for you? Where are the problems? That was really big. And to everyone who has reached out, you know who you are. Amazing.

I'm working with you as fast as I can. There were a few. And to anyone who hasn't, I don't think I'm that scary. Yeah, I might rant sometimes. But I feel like I can work with people. So if you want to work on this and you want someone to tell you without sugarcoating it where the problems are, yeah. Do that.

Reach out somewhere. There are plenty of people who have my info that you can ask for it. Maybe you could even link it in the podcast description to my mastodon or something. Oh yeah, I can do that. I was going to say, yeah, linking your mastodon will be fine. I generally avoid linking emails because of, you know, No, no, no. I wasn't saying link my email, but like I check my Macedon DMs.

Okay. Okay. So like maybe something like that. Oh yeah. Yeah, I can do it. Just reach out and like come and ask me stuff. Even if you're not a project maintainer yet, and you're like, even if you're not a project maintainer at all, and you just care about this, and wanna know how you can test against it, right?

Cause the more test cases we have, even if people aren't actively, even if it's people that more test cases we have, even if people aren't actively, even if it's people that don't actively use it, sometimes it doesn't take a lot of testing to notice, oh, this is broken. Let me give you an example. The Flatpak Gnome web app, whatever it's called.

Epiphany, I think it's called. Yeah. Is it Epiphany? Yeah, sounds about right. When that man has made a Flatpak, it would have taken all of two seconds for someone to open it and press Tab and go, huh, doesn't work. And that's now fixed. They've updated WebKit GTK, and that now works.

And maybe that was coming for a while. Maybe that rewrite took a bit. Hmm But I didn't read anywhere of anyone going well, that's broken. Hmm Like That's Even if you don't actively use it all the time Just every now and then turn it on in an app that you use. Yeah, and try and use that app With a keyboard like try and tab through the interface or try and use the arrow keys. Do something that you would expect to work. And if it doesn't work, it's probably broken. Right. Right. Like for example, your cosmic streams. I'm not calling you up because you do them or anything.

I'm not like saying, oh, you shouldn't do that. Sure. But like maybe turn on Orca and like, just press the super key and see if you can read the thing. So I actually been running out of, I have been running out of things that are broken that I use in cosmic. Well, this is a good one.

Yeah, like, cause I'm, so in my early cosmic streams. I would I Would drag a window and cosmic would just die which was that great Or I'd my favorite one So I people have pointed out in my streams I Have 48 gigabytes of swap Yeah, welcome to the club of massive swap. Yeah.

So there was a time where I noticed my cursor was lagging a bit and I run NeoFetch. So when I opened up my terminal, I noticed I was using all of my swap and I think 30 gigs of RAM. That's a problem. all of my swap and I think 30 gigs of RAM. Like, hmm, that's a problem. H-top time. So there was some sort of memory allocation issue in Cosmic at the time.

And it was not clearing out old memory that it didn't need anymore. So that became- There's a couple of those bugs in Dina as well. Okay. That was a memory leak that I noticed the other day anymore. So that's a couple of those bugs in Dina as well. There was a memory leak that I noticed the other day that I haven't got around to fixing. Yeah, your memory leaks are fun. My really great, especially when you don't know where they are. But yeah, no, if you like, you know, try the screen reader, try like even things like sticky keys, you know, when you press the modifier and it holds

the modifier and then you press another button. So is that what sticky keys does? Yeah, it doesn't just make your keyboard go sticky. That's not what it does. Well, no, like every on Windows, you know, you press, you press the shift key and it was like, do you want to enable sticky keys? Go away. What is this?

No, that's what that does. So basically if you want to press say like alt and F4, you would press alt, let go, and then press F4 rather than have to hold keys. Oh! Really useful feature if you have like half sized keyboards that don't have any keys on them. Right. People who make like 35% keyboards if you have like half-sized keyboards that don't have any keys on them. Right, that-

People who make like 35% keyboards that don't have number rows or function keys or and like using the arrow keys requires holding FN and using JKL. Yeah. You know the kinds of keyboards I'm talking about, right? Yeah, no, I'm well aware. I use a normal keyboard. It's just a 10 keyless. Nothing that crazy. I just use laptop keyboards. I don't like number pads. My number pad, the one time I had a number pad, I turned it into an exclusive calculator. Last time I had a number pad I used it as a macro bank.

Yeah I just use mine as a calculator. So a funny story. Do you want a funny story? I don't know, I don't know if it's the right place. I was really bad at maths in school. But they let me use my Linux machine for some stuff. Maths was one of them because I had a workflow that I could kind of do and I was not a fan of using Braille on paper because it was really clunky for me and I just liked

my laptop. Let me use my Linux machine for this. My calculator didn't draw anything on screen and just spoke. Okay. With my numpad. So I could use my numpad calculator to do the sums and no one had any idea because it wasn't drawing anything on screen. It was just a background process that like intercepted those keys. Not saying that you should do it but like... Well look people are cheating in school with chat gpt so that would be uh, you know, that would be... I feel like this is pretty tame compared to the other ones. So you brought up um, you brought up braille there. I don't think we can end this without um, talking about the uh,

braille displays because like this is a piece of hardware that I think is really really cool But I have no idea how they work So the way that they commonly work Is you have a little Yeah, this one has a lot more keys than the usual one does and I have arrow keys on It has arrow keys and function keys and all kinds of other stuff. And home and end and everything. Because it's designed to be used with a computer.

Most of them, that's an add-on feature. Like they're designed to be used as like really simple, not taking devices. This one is not. What is your specific one? I'll bring a picture on it. It's called a Qubrail XL. It's the one that I use.

Qubrail. Don't look at the pricing for them. Yeah, I know they're very expensive. It's astronomically bad. Yeah. I used to have one back in the early 2010s and I think it cost about 6 grand at the time. Well they're cheaper now. Ah, not those ones.

Look up, the one I had was the Braille Note. Look up the Braille Note Touch and look at the price on that. Oh, okay. This is running like 10 year old hardware by the way like it runs Android 8. Oh Go look at the price for that Give that website Here we go stall human where I saw that yes Oh, they just they're there. They're doing a special right now. They just lowered the price. It's only it's only

4,800 Only only software device that runs Android 8 It's not even supported by G suite anymore you can't load Google Docs That's and they expect people to buy this That is amazing. It's bad is what that is. Yeah, that should be criminal.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's no reason for it to be funny that. Wait, does... Oh, wait, does the cube touch? The cube around doesn't it has a USB C port Yeah, well, it's it's from the current decade Yeah The previous one I have the focus which is a 14 cell one that I carry around in my pocket. It has microbe But that's an older display in all fairness

Okay, okay. That probably isn't from the current decade. But anyway, the way that these work is you connect them to the computer via USB or Bluetooth and realistically you should just have braille output on the single line of braille. Yes. Linux console has really good support for this. BRLT-2I. It's amazing.

It's kind of old at this point it expects a frame buffer It eats ports, um have a brow display connected plug in anything else Nine times out of ten. You're not going to get it detected, right? Unless you write a udev rule right um That's not their fault. That's just because it enumerates ports alphabetically. And so if you connect it to a port that it's enumerated over

and decided it wants for some reason before it reached the braille display. Yeah. Right. I don't think it binds to the wrong thing. Sometimes it decides like TTY AC0 is close enough to TTY S0 and... Good luck. So with the actual like the braille part of it, does that, does that just like take the current text that's shown? Like how does that work? It takes whatever is in, there's like a thing called the braille focus. And so it takes whatever the current line is in the Braille focus.

So you can navigate between lines very easily. Right. And it's great. And it works great in a console if you're using American English Braille. Oh. Yeah. I didn't know there were different kinds of English Braille. There's a lot of different kinds of Braille.

There's standard English Braille, which actually wasn't standard at all. The Americans just decided to call it standard because they were like, ours? It's normal, right? Right. No. Standard English Braille. Then there was UK English, uncontracted. UK English contracted.

UK English computer six dot. UK English computer 8 dot, UK 2004 which was a different thing entirely. Because for some reason we decided to change it for a year. And right now we're on unified English braille. This sounds very similar to the situation that sign language has where there's like seven different English versions because that's very convenient. Yeah, I do just love that the Americans called that standard English. That's because America is the center of the world. What do you mean?

And then everyone else went, no, we're not using that. Hey at least, at least with sign language they have the honesty to call it American sign language. So there's at least on that side they're not going to be as cocky about it. Yeah, just standard English braille. That's yeah. Thanks, America. A lot of places don't call it that anymore. A lot of places now call it US.

Ah, okay. Because a lot of manufacturers kind of realize this isn't the standard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. So what issues does it have if you're not doing that then? Sometimes the dot mappings can be weird. For example, if I type the dots 1, 4, 5, and 6, I might get 2, 3, and 8 because some translation went wrong somewhere. Oh, okay. And this is especially noticeable when using contracted braille. So contracted braille, if you don't know, because braille is bigger than print and you

only have a certain amount of characters, sometimes it's better to shorten a word right so for example the word can is just the letter C with a space on either side of it okay if you type if you type the word the letter C with a space you're gonna put the word can in a document okay and if those translation tables are not exactly right and don't exactly follow the rules you're gonna have breakage somewhere and that's not not BRLTTY's fault. It's also not even the fault of the people making the translation tables. Making that very clear right now. There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Braille translation tables from Spanish to French, German, Chinese, Korean... Chinese braille is a trip anyway that's a whole other thing in itself I

don't want to touch that but sometimes it will just spit out garbage stuff right well sometimes you'll boot into a graphical session and all you'll see on your Braille display is screen not in text mode. Yes. I know. I want to read the graphical session please. And you need a whole bunch of things installed. You need BRLT-TUI.

You need X-Braille API. I actually don't even know how well it works on Wayland because Wayland annoyed me that much I just never tried it. I'm guessing it would work now because Orca works but like maybe so the Braille displays have these things called routing keys over each of the cells and you can use them to jump the cursor to a certain point in a document. Bet but it doesn't. So... Okay, this isn't... Red Hat has a page in their documentation about it.

How well it works, I don't know, but they at least explain how to get it to work. Yeah, they do. I really appreciate the fact that they actually put the time into making that. Like, I'm specifically calling out that I haven't tested it because I don't want to say it doesn't work. Right, fair. Right? I just, again, I want to use my computer. I don't want to play debug simulator when I don't have to. Yeah, no I don't. I have to do it a lot of the time. I'm not going to introduce problems.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, I get that. I don't want to add more problems to my already really problematic install. Because it already breaks every day. Uh-huh. In some weird way. What was yesterday's problem, for example, was a glorious one. Oh. My alt key didn't work. Oh. At all. That's fun. Why? Everything else worked. My alt key didn't work. I don't know. It was sending some garbage key code that like was just being discarded. So, honest question. When you have a problem,

how often when you know you don't have any work that's unsaved, you just turn your computer off and turn it back on? I like pain, so I try and avoid doing it. I see, okay. I like fixing it. Okay, okay. Like every kernel update is Kexec. Kexec.

Mostly because turning everything off and on again scares me because I wonder what's gonna be broken the next time. Like if it's not a problem I really care about I'm just like I'm gonna deal with this. Right, okay. That makes sense. Um, but no. If, in all seriousness, I will sometimes just... I'll turn it off and on again and that'll fix it. Yeah, yeah.

I probably do that less than I do on Windows. Let's be fair. Windows, that's basically my only recourse because documentation, what's that? Yeah. At least the ArchWiki has a lot of troubleshooting steps that I can try. You mentioned, you were the new post about the audio stacks and there's a I have a very recurring problem with pipe way that I still don't know how to fix and my solution is just reboot the system so when I'm playing I bet you I've dealt with it I don't think you

have so maybe in some other context so I use a capture card for capturing my console gameplay. And when I unplug it, sometimes pipe wire just dies. I reboot pipe wire and it doesn't come back. I've seen that. Okay. Every time I, like I unplug like my HDMI, cause I have a soundbar that I like I unplug like my HDMI. Oh, because I have a sound bar that I like and So sometimes I use that for speaker output on my computer when I'm not using it to watch TV

Because I don't want to have to wear headphones all the time. Sorry to the neighbors, but I don't know I want to say with earbuds in all of them and every now I unplug that HDMI thing. Mmm, hi, boy just dies. Mmm I thing. PipeWire just dies. I don't know what the solution is to it yet. The best way I found to actually solve it is there is a way to run PipeWire in system mode like that was with Pulse. That seems to work around it. Running it in system mode. I don't know whether it's like, I wonder if it's something to do with hotplugging displays? Especially- Oh. You can probably still hear me, but Discord's done this fun thing again.

Give me a second. Discord's done this fun thing again. Give me a second. I can maybe hear you now. Yeah. So discord likes to do this thing where I don't actually disconnect from the coal, but I, yeah, I, it like, oh, it's like, oh, you're at 5,000 milliseconds ping. And the other person can oftentimes still hear me because that's great. Um, I don't know if you could hear.

Could you hear me? I could. I could. I heard you say, why did you get to? Um, you're talking about, could be related to monitor hot plugging. It could be. Yeah. If you're plugging your HDMI capture card, if you're using an HDMI

capture card or plugging something into your GPU that constantly exposes the ports. This is a problem I've encountered a lot, is like, certain GPUs will constantly expose their HDMI ports as audio devices, and so then trying to get, it will like default to them. But then sometimes those ports are always exposed. And then even if they're not active and then sometimes you hot plug a thing into them and then back out of them and the nodes disappear and reappear and Piper has no idea what to do with it. Okay. Now, again,

I'm not a pipe wire maintainer. I've never touched the pipe wire or wireplumber code base in my life. The only time I've ever done anything with it even remotely like that was because I wanted speech at the console and I had to patch it to make that work. And thanks to my blog post, actually, I learned that there's now a better way of doing that. Oh, nice. So I don't have to keep applying my git diff every time I upgrade pipeline I should just really use Gentoo at this point I really should just use

Gentoo mm-hmm I mean how'd you already doing the whole bedrock thing that is a whole different thing in itself oh my god that breaks okay no shade to the bedrock maintainer passing speech dispatcher config so that I can use a different version of orca without it trying to read the one from the distro was hell on earth because it can't pass directories you have to pass direct config files so I had to go through and figure out what exact config files it was loading. Oh. Yeah. That's fun. And yes, there is an option to pass directories. That option exists and that does work in a lot of cases. Didn't work in this one. Why? Dunno. I think because it doesn't pass the contents of subdirectories. So like maybe I just need to pass all the subdirectories,

but I got it working now and so I don't care anymore. I got it to work. That's all I care about. That seems to be a common trend for you. Doesn't work, don't know. Yeah, well it is. I mean, am I expected to know every level of the stack? Right, right. Like, I shouldn't need to know how config files are read from Fuse file systems to use my computer. Yeah, yeah. Read from fuse file systems to use my computer. Yeah. Yeah And bedrock is awesome, right it works Surprisingly well

For what it does. They let me do some really cool things. I get to use voids run it with arches kernel and For doors genome and Arches orca and I also get to build package with, with emerge and Gentoo for stuff that I have patched because I need to. Amazing. Love that. Stuff just explodes sometimes.

And I'm like, dunno. So you, you mentioned, um So you mentioned also using Windows. Do you still currently use Windows? Is that what you're saying? Very few things. I use Windows because I flight simulate. I play flight sim. There's a blind pilot's way of playing flight sim.

It was made accessible by this volunteer team. Mm-hmm Microsoft did some work but like the aircraft still weren't accessible and I really enjoy flying. I've really enjoyed planes I skydived twice. It was great fun highly recommend doing it if you haven't I've not I think you should do it. It's amazing. Anyway, completely like back on topic. I use Windows for that and Because of my sector of work, I have to use Windows for work. But I hate it. I, every, every day at work, I'm sat there going, this is so inefficient. Why can't I press super three and then super shift F5 to jump to the fifth window on workspace

three? Why can't I do that? Besides the obvious niceties you get from using Linux and being able to like hotkey random things, what is the general Windows experience actually like for you? I mean, Windows is generally more accessible than Linux just because there are more screen reader options. There are like three, Two that are like really big

and then Windows has a built-in one that some people say you can actively use. I don't believe them. I don't think they're actually using it. So what are the actual good ones then? NVDA and JAWS. And JAWS is really expensive. Oh, okay. NVDA is a free open source project. And VDA is a free open source project. And both of them are good. They also they all have add-on communities and script communities to make apps that aren't accessible accessible. They add functionality. They they do all kinds of things.

Like for example, I used a JAWS feature earlier today when I needed to do something else with a webcam that wasn't this. I need to capture a document. I need to send a picture of a passport because I'm going on holiday soon. I need to send a passport photo. So I used JAWS' camera picture smart feature to help me center the document so I could take a picture of the passport and then upload it to the website. Mm. That doesn't exist for Linux. I'd have had to guess, or take the picture on my phone and then email it to myself. Just...

Like that just existed and I could just use it. Right, right, right. Also, generally, if you're looking for accessibility information, you're gonna to find it on Windows first. Right. Well, there's just generally more people on Windows. There's going to be more people that are talking about it.

That kind of just makes sense. Yeah. But I keep using Linux because, I don't know, people have asked me why do you use Linux and my only answer is like... Because I like it. You said you have that M1 Mac. Before you did ask to hear on it, did you try out Mac OS just to see what it was like? Oh, I used... Oh yeah, I've used Mac OS for years. Oh, okay. My music software that I use is Logic.

Ah, okay. I use Logic Pro. What is the Mac the macro like then? VoiceOver has been left to rot On the Mac on the mobile platforms not so much on the Mac. It's been left to rot navigating the web is an actual show Mm-hmm. I have to I I have to disable voiceovers navigation fields Manually to type in text fields

Even Linux doesn't have that problem voiceovers, navigation fields, manually to type in text fields. Even Linux doesn't have that problem. Jesus. I have to go back to like 1995 and tell the screen reader, no, I don't want you to have access to the keyboard right now. Oh God. Oh God. And then sometimes it's like, I don't care, I'm keeping it anyway.

Or like, hey, your up arrow is now your right arrow good luck What Your app arrows know your right arrow Okay, yeah Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah the solution to this every time turn voiceover off and back on again Okay, well there I guess there is some some I guess on other systems You'll turn it off and on again to fix it because on you don't really make So here was a great voiceover bug and I know this is meant to be Linux focus

But I'm gonna point this one out, because it was gloriously dumb. Mm. Find a password field in any browser. Mm-hmm. And try and press down arrow to bring up auto fill. Mm. No voiceover. And it wasn't even just that voiceover would turn off or not speak or anything.

You try and turn it back on... Mm-hmm. ...and it wouldn't turn back on. Oh. and it wouldn't turn back on. Oh. It made core.apple.speechSynthesizeD, the synthesis demon, hang. Not die. Not crash.

Not gracefully exit. Not tell you there was no- Hang. Right. Okay. Right. That's fun. And like, again, navigating the web with a Mac is a chore, because VoiceOver can't view

anything until the whole page is loaded, and so rather than just like, give you some nice loading music or whatever, I don't care, make it elevator music, I'm not bothered, it will sit there and say, not responding. Not responding. Not responding. Not responding. And you can't even navigate out to do something else. That's so dumb!

It's really stupid! Oh my god. Basically, I feel like these are things that I need to demonstrate. Maybe I'll send you some videos at some point and you can you can, uh, like send them to people to laugh at and go oh my god this is terrible yeah no i would love to see that just do your stupid things um now the mac has the best ocr solution that i've ever seen what's good because it has like positional sounds and positional indicators and it doesn't require you do Map your own mouse coordinates with a hash table that maybe will be compressed into an enum because rust yay

Rust is great. I love rust but actually making like Slightly off-topic actually making a fast like code interpreter in Rust. It was really hard. Like actually making a threaded code interpreter is really really hard if you want it to be performant. Someone like asked me on mastodon, I'll post a general question on mastodon asking like how can you do this? And so I went off to try. And I was like, JIT, I guess. That's your option.

Right. We've kind of hit on a lot of, like there's obviously we could probably keep talking forever about this, but I think we've hit on a lot of like general things. We did like go down random tangents a bunch, so there's definitely things to be in. Yeah, we did. Look, I think there's plenty for like another episode if you want to do another one at some point in the future. I am totally up plenty for another episode if you want to do another one at some point in the future.

I am totally up for doing another episode. Maybe because I'm releasing a couple more posts soon about the Braille stuff, about the console. My next one after that is about Grub and bootloaders and dealing with covering a system when it completely goes. And then I think the one after that is about ATSPI and why focus tracking is weird. And then the one after that was going to really annoy a lot of people is about Glib C. Which is going to really wind people up because like, there are so many accessibility projects

written in C. And I'm going to spoil a little bit of it. There's so many accessibility projects written in C and then G lib C updates then everything falls apart, right? Because they fixed a bug that like that's a feature I've been using that since 2012 That's not a bug It's not a bug anymore guys That's a feature Or like the colonel's obsession with don't break user space.

Ah. What if user space is already broken and the only way for me to fix it is to break it? Right. Like for some people, user space is already broken. The only way to fix something like that thing with pulse audio, where there was a patch six times round to mute sound Then unmute it then mute it then cancel the unmute by putting Elsa CTL in another service. Mm-hmm This actually happened. This was a thing

Because someone didn't like the weird crackle that happened when the kernel started up because There was like garbage data written to the sound. Oh, okay. And so they're like, I know how I'll solve this problem. I'll just mute sound. Again, it's one of those things where it makes sense if you're not someone who relies on sound for your system. But.

I'll mute sound. I forget which version of the kernel it was, but I remember upgrading it. It wasn't the kernel, sorry, it was pulse audio. I upgraded pulse audio and then I had no sound because all port volumes were set to zero. That's so dumb. But the system said the speakers were unmuted because they technically were. It just changed all the port volumes. Oh.

Right. Because zero volume. It wasn't even like I would get someone to look at it and they'd go no your sound looks like it's unmuted and they don't know to go and check this like config file that like no one knows exists. Zero and mute being separate states is actually really stupid. Especially when all of your ports are muted surely the graphical interface should be like hey I know that your sound is unmuted here but by the way all your ports are muted so it's still not gonna work Jesus Christ another thing that we don't have is an accessible pipewire graph editor the only way to do anything with pipewire is with pwdump and pwlink and all that stuff.

PwKly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I know that's probably really hard to do, but like, if someone wants to make an accessible pipewire graph editor that like, lets you actually do stuff. Yeah, like, I do everything with QPW graph and it... Tried it. Can't use it. Yeah.

Yeah. I actually thought about asking you the other day for some help. But in January, I thought about dropping you a message on Discord to be like, can you help me with a thing? I was trying to set up audio capture because I was trying to record something for a bug report and it just wasn't happening. And I was like, well, I know he does this in streams. I wonder if he would mind actually logging into my laptop with VNC and just fixing it.

So that's the problem. Because I don't really know many people who use Linux. And I was like, why am I even thinking about doing this? How is this still a problem? What were you actually trying to use for the capture? I was trying to use FFMPG to record the audio. And then I was trying to route the audio of my speech to a virtual sync and also capturing my microphone.

And the reason it wasn't working is because pipewise nodes are ephemeral. virtual sync and also capturing my microphone. And the reason it wasn't working is because pipewise nodes are ephemeral. And so every time the speech would stop, the node would disappear and then get recreated. And so like rerunning the script every time it spoke was not helpful. And putting a sleep in wasn't working because it would like cut off parts of it. And like it was really important that the whole Thing be sent because it was doing some weird stuff with language changing and I didn't understand why So like it was it was like reading something in a different language and I was really confused as to what was happening

And that needed to be very clear So I was like I wonder who would know how to fix this? Because I posted in a couple of Discord servers, like in a couple of like the support forums. Because generally people, Linux people as a whole are really nice people. There's just a really loud minority that are not. But generally there are really nice people that are like willing to help you with stuff. And I posted and everyone was just like... I don't know. I used QPWgraph or Helvam or what was the other one? Sonamix or something and I was like, yeah none of them work. I've tried them all. Yeah, the...

The whole ephemeral node thing has... That's caused me some problems as well trying to link things up. Yeah, yeah, it's... This is like, this is why Jack is still around for all the problems that Jack might cause. Well, I don't know how to use it. I've never used it, so I was using PACMD and PWLink to try and get what I wanted. Eventually, the way I managed to solve it was by creating two virtual syncs, piping audio constantly into one of them, and then just changing my system output to it. Because then there was constant audio playing to the sync, even though it was just silence.

That's so stupid, but I guess it works. But I played the like, staticky noise that I was having to use through a false channel, so then I could put it into the second virtual sync that only had two channels, so then it would only capture the front left and front right and but it would still keep the nodes alive that's how i ended up solving the problem that's such a dumb hack and i love it there was no other way i could find i had no other way of fixing it i might just have to like edit it out in post I have to go and get a mic to edit a recording I made on Linux. That's dumb.

It's really dumb. Yeah. Well, and again, I'm totally happy to do another episode on this. I'm happy to talk about this as many times as you want. Or like just anything else on Linux generally, because like I think there's a lot of things that I probably do I'm totally happy to do another episode on this. I'm happy to talk about this as many times as you want. Or just anything else on Linux generally. Because I think there's a lot of things that I probably do differently that people don't think about.

Just simply because of like, maybe because of how I learned to do it, or maybe because of this is what worked. Because so many people are just like, oh I use the GUI for file management. I don't for copying files and stuff. I have other programs that I wrote that like I Copy files from one directory and they get stored at the paths get stored in an array that's stored in a temp file and then I go and type another command once I've CD to the directory I want it paste all the files there because I don't want to copy every file individually. And sometimes there's files that spread around.

So I'll copy something from my documents, something from videos, something from music, and I want them all to go into one folder. So I get them to be put into a JSON file in my temp folder, and then a different command goes ahead and looks at that file and goes, okay, here's where all the things to copy are, and then copies them. Because touching a graphical file manager is slow. And like all of the like TUI based ones are mostly inaccessible. Huh.

I, yeah, that was definitely interesting to talk about. No, I, I, I would absolutely love to talk about that. Um, I, I, I don't like that it's like this, but I feel like I am the only one in the Linux, like, YouTube space. No one else has reached out to me. No other creator reached out. Yeah. Like, I feel like- I thought like desktop makes and stuff did, but no- no creators did. Yeah. Like, I- I- I look up- like, you know what, let's- let's do it right now. Let's get- let me search- Let's look up Linux accessibility on YouTube. Yeah. Let's see it right now. Let's get, let me search. Let's search up Linux accessibility on YouTube.

Yeah. Let's see. Linux accessibility. Okay. There's a, okay. That's, that's, that's a bit different. That's a talk at the Linux, like a Linux foundation. That's different.

Okay. When did that happen? I never heard about this. A year ago. Modernizing accessibility for desktop Linux by Matt Campbell. Oh yeah, I know Matt. Matt's a fantastic individual. Matt is who did the prototyping for the Mata support for the Dbus Cubines. I should bring Matt in here at some point.

He'll be a fun person to talk to. He did a recording in like 2001 of installing Debbie in Blind from Floppy Discs. That's cool. I think I might still have it somewhere. It was glorious. This was before I was born, but like, it was still fun to see. There's a video here from two years ago. there's a video here from eight years ago and there

we go there's me and then the next one is me. Yeah you address this a lot, like I genuinely enjoy watching your videos because I can relate to so many of the things that are issues but like other creators, no shade to them at all, but I watch their videos and they're like, oh my colors are drawing in the wrong shade of pink. And I'm like, okay. That's the complaint today, is it? Like okay, I get that impacts your workflow and I guess if you're colorblind, that's a really big problem.

But like, you don't even, like they don't even say, oh, this could be a really big problem if you're colorblind. They're just like wailing on the like, my display server is doing a dumb thing. Like I said, I'm not trying to throw shade at any creators. If any creator wants to talk to me, I'm happy to talk to them. But I'm kind of surprised considering how many creators and people in the creative space actually all my post and like Boosted it and reposted it and whatever else that they did that no one actually like no one else decided

Hey, maybe we should start a discussion like even if it wasn't to come on that show I'm not expecting people to come and talk about it on my show, but just like Hey, I want to I'm interested. Tell me stuff. Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah, come and talk about it on my show. But just like, Hey, I want to, I'm interested. Tell me stuff. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. That didn't really happen.

Um, and then you come out with a video that I didn't expect to see. Um, cause I literally, I just kind of went, Oh, that's a really coincidental title. Is this like a satire thing of like, haha, Linux is perfect. Like I was kind of like, Oh, this is, this is going to be satire. Like, this is going to be satire. And then someone else was like, hey, your pose was mentioned in a video. And I was like, wait, no, it's, it's one of, it's one of those, it's one of those, those pet issues I have.

Like, it's not something that like personally affects me, but like, it's something I'm genuinely interested in. I think one of the big things that people don't understand is accessibility isn't just for the people that are currently disabled. You could walk into a shelf next week that's at eye level. And like, suddenly like, even if you don't lose your sight forever, you've got to wear a blindfold for like a while while your eyes heal. What do you do then?

I think most people like understand it with like movement based things, right? Like if you're in a car, like most people understand like if you get in a car crash, like you could be in a wheelchair. But I guess like the connection isn't made in the same way. The degenerative conditions too. Yeah, yeah. Like 60% of people lose their sight in later life. Mm, mm.

That's, I think that's the statistic. Mm-hmm. Something like that. Or get worse eyesight. Right, right, right. Now imagine if you didn't have to strain your eyes to look at your screen. Mm-hmm. And could just be like, oh, well, this accessibility tooling exists.

I'll just use that because it's really well documented and I can learn it. Well, even if it's not something you need, just like there are, it makes sense to do it. Like, yeah, there are cases where, like, being able to have something that announces what's happening on your screen can still be useful, like, just in like a general context. You just reminded me of a thing that happened. It was a horror story before the Nvidia drivers existed. Oh?

Someone in the Linux Discord server, one of them, I'm not going to say which one, was trying to install, I think Arch. No. Yeah, it was Arch on a, on a, no, it was Gentoo. Sorry, I'm getting confused because this is happening. It was Gentoo. They wanted to build Gentoo and they had no Nvidia drivers. Right. Right. And so they were booting to a black screen in their, on their install, like their minimal install CD. Hmm because it's trying to use the Nvidia GPU and So someone tagged me in this thread because they're like, I know someone who's done this without a screen before And so I got in a call with them Got them to enable speak up. Uh-huh, and we got through the install that way. Wow.

They had no screen and they were angry. I never even considered it. I don't use Nvidia for good reason. Um, but like good reasons. Don't use Nvidia. Nvidia. Q. But like I hadn't even use Nvidia. Yeah video you

But like I hadn't even considered using it as like I was not sure if I could say that side to like Like I stopped myself. It's fine. It's fine But like I hadn't even considered using it as like I don't have a proper working graphical output I can just use a thing to use my system Yeah, like there you go Like even as someone who thinks about this, that's something that you never thought about. Do you know how many times that saved people just because I happen to be in the

room and I know how it works? Like not even just on like on windows when like someone was projecting to a second screen and the second screen disconnected and the primary monitor didn't come back. And so they were going to reboot because that's all they could do and they had work that they hadn't saved and I'm like, give me the laptop. Yeah, I hope to think more on that. That's actually, yeah. Yeah. Like how many people have you heard say, oh, I tried to install Linux and I got a black screen with a blinking cursor. Bet you Speak Up would have saved you. Speak Up probably would have saved you. Yeah. Like Linus. Linus Tech Tips.

When he uninstalled his desktop, the first thing I thought was, start Speak Up up my guy. To be fair, he was dropped into a TTY. So he had everything. It wasn't a black screen. But I mean, no, but when he had the screen with the cursor, like before he hit the reset button, it was probably a TTY just with no graphical output. It will have dropped to a TTY even without graphical output. Uh, uh. He'd have been able to start like eSpeak up at that point and sort, oh, it's, I have a app process running like PS, like

PSAUC, whatever, you know. Yeah. Oh, I have an app process running. What is the app process running? Let me, let me make that app process my now foreground job and see what the hell is going on. Let me foreground that, like, FG and then whatever. Whatever. Whatever you do. That would have saved him because those packages were still uninstalling when he rebooted.

And so even if he'd done sudo apt install, pop session, xorg, whatever else, he'd have got the DPKG lock, because those packages hadn't finished removing themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, the first thing I thought and then I was like, kind of like going, why did I even think of that? Because he's not going to do that. No. Like, but that was the first thing that came into my head was like stop starters start you speak up it's

installed and you already don't have a graphical session so pipewire isn't gonna be getting in your way of running a sound thingy is root it's gonna be fine yeah there's so many cases I hear of people like installing something and they get into their desktop and like you know know, Nvidia GPUs and just like, oh, we don't have a graphical session. But like, you can like... You probably do. Yes, but like, there's probably a way to work around that. And like, the sound is the way to do that. Turn on the screen reader.

Hmm. It might not be the best way because you're gonna have to navigate with a keyboard because it doesn't work well when you navigate with a mouse. Mm-hmm. There was another Linus Tech Tips video that really annoyed me. They were showing off like meme Linux distributions and they showed VINX as a meme. That really wound me up. Wait, I don't remember this video. I can find it for you.

Let me see. Let's see. Meme. Ah, yeah. 10 weird versions of Linux actually exist? Yes, that one. Yeah, okay. They showed VINEX as a meme. And okay, it wasn't, it's not great now. But back from when it was current, it was a revolution in Linux accessibility. Why are we hating on that guys? Right. Why are we

naming that? And okay people are gonna come out and say oh well that's not what they meant by it but that's how a lot of people took it. Well it was directly following Justin Bieber and Hannah Montana Linux Exactly. Yes, this is it. Like it actually put, I think, a negative spin on Linux accessibility. I think that not a massive impact. I'm not going to say all it destroyed it. But I think it had an impact because now people think, oh, well, no blind person is going to use Linux because it's horrible for accessibility. And this distribution made for the blind.

All it says is window window window first of all you're using it with a mouse mm-hmm saying well that's not current mmm and so I think some people may have looked at that and gone oh well I'm not gonna bother making this accessible because it's not gonna be usable anyway mm-hmm I can't prove that obviously but like that maybe it's because I used it right maybe it upset me because I've actually used it and I was like this helped me get through early school. Maybe that's the reasoning but like come on. I do see that um Gardner Bryant did a, like a react video to that one and he-

I haven't seen that. He titled it reacting to LTD's Linux history video in brackets, disappointed. So I'm assuming- I haven't- He wasn't a fan of something that was said. Yeah, I'll have to watch his reaction videos. His reaction videos generally make me laugh. So I'll have to watch his reaction videos. His reaction videos generally make me laugh.

So I'll have to watch that. Again, I just kind of watched it and I commented on it and I was like, I made a post on their Reddit and it got downvoted massively. Yeah, sorry, this is, we've gone off on a really big tangent. No, no, it's all good. We probably should be ending off at some point as well because it's just gone Was it just past 2 a.m. Here? Oh Wow Yeah for me it's oh Wow, it's five. Okay. Yeah Yeah, we did talk a bit before we actually started and then we've went longer than the episode would normally go anyway

So, you know, it is what it is. Oh, are you gonna have to edit this down then? That's gonna be some stuff cut. If there's anything that you remember you said that you want me to cut I'm happy to do that but like otherwise. I don't think I've said anything I'm not happy to go on record time. Okay cool. If you need my Nvidia bit. But no I the way I usually do it is I upload the entire episode and then I split down the clips. So That'll be fine But yeah, I guess if people want to check out the blog post or anything else you want to direct them to Where can they go?

so you can go to fireborn.mattora.blogs that's fireborn.matora.blog. So that's F-I-R-E-B-O-R-N.M-A-T-A-R-O-A.blog. And my Macedon is fireborn at dragonscave.space. Go ahead and like message me there or whatever you want and check out my stuff. Some of my posts are serious, some of them are not. Right? This isn't all my vlog isn't all about ranting. I mean if you if you look at it right now my top post is not a serious

one. Yeah yeah I did see that. The first Linux... That is a joke. The first dating apps for Linux users because you've already mounted slash dim slash sad. That is a joke. Yeah. There is a reason for the satire piece, but I'll leave that for like, you can come and ask me about it and I'll explain the satire piece to you. Okay. But I wanted to lighten the tone a bit. And so I made a satire piece.

Fair enough. So not everything is serious. Not everything is doom and gloom. I want to post a, I went to see a band a couple of weeks ago, and I want to post a review of that gig that I went to, because it was amazing. So my blog is just for anything and everything. And so if you want specifically Linux stuff, I guess look out for my posts with Linux in the title,

because not all of them are going to be that. I wish that the blogging platform I'm using had a way for me to tag stuff, but they don't. Right. The reason I'm using it incidentally is because it's fully accessible, very minimal, and lets me put Markdown in rather than have to use a weird, horrible HTML editor. I don't want to use. Like, it's just the edit. The page to post a new post is literally like two text boxes. Title, post content.

Well, that works. And I love it. I love it so much. Like, I can set it as a draft. There's a link to set as draft and the publication date, but there's no like, insert formatting blocks or any of that. Ah, right, right, right. It's not a block-based editor. It's literally just two text boxes and a couple of links for me to change some post stuff.

Really? That's not exactly what I want out of a website. Is there anything else you want? I wish it would translate languages. Ah, yes. Like, because when I get my translations, because I have a couple of people translating my posts now, at least the serious ones, maybe not the humorous ones, but the Linux accessibility related ones, I'm going to have to post them as whole new posts

and then spam people who have subscribed to my mailing lists, which I don't want to do. I don't want to do that necessarily, but there's no way for me to say, here's an alternative version of this post in a different language and then if your system locale is set to it. I thought about making my own platform for this and then I was just like, that's something else I have to maintain. I don't want to do it. It probably wouldn't be that difficult to spin something like that up with like Hugo or something like that. Is there anything I should-

You can keep it to them about the languages. Is there anything else you want to direct people to or is that pretty much it? That's really all I've got that's public facing, obviously my Discord. But if you want that, I could have interacted with you first. Don't just randomly start adding me to stuff, please. And yeah, that's it. This is what I do. If you want to check out my Window Manager project, you can do that. Bear in mind, it's probably not for you. It does exactly what I needed to do

and nothing else. Right, right, right, right. But if you want it to work more for you, then like, I guess make PRs. Okay. Cool. So my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes I also stream. I also have a gaming channel, Brody on Games. Right now I'm playing through Ori and the Will of the Wisps and Kazan the First Berserker. If you want to see clips from that channel, I have the broader option reacts. I upload random random react videos from the stream And if you want to see the video version this is on YouTube at tech over tea The audio version is on basically every podcast platform. There is an RSS feed

Spotify has video as well if that's your thing. I don't use Spotify video, but it's easy to set up for me. So it's there. I will give you the final word. What do you want to say? How do you want to sign off the episode? I've been thinking about this a lot, about what my sign off was going to be. Oh, you actually know. That's good.

Yeah. It's a nice change. And I think the only thing I'm going to say is if you're a maintainer of accessibility, please don't break it. And if you're canonical and you are actively breaking it, stop it. Fair enough. I agree.