Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Thursday, 30-May-2024 23:06:17 JST Aral Balkan

   I love that a multi-billion-dollar corporation like RedHat/IBM can ship an operating system with a broken screen reader in 2024 (it’s not just them, it’s true for basically every major Linux distribution today) and, when you point it out, the response is “it’s no one’s fault… it’s all free labour… it’s FOSS, man”. And then: oh, and this charity is paying for one person to work on accessibility support to be implemented now… Anyone else see how fucked up that is?

   #accessibility #foss #linux

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Thursday, 30-May-2024 23:08:27 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Sovereign Tech Agency

     Why should it take @sovtechfund to fund accessibility work on the Linux distribution of a multi-billion-dollar corporation like IBM. Why the fuck isn’t IBM paying for it?

     #accessibility #linux #foss #corporations #BigTech

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Thursday, 30-May-2024 23:16:13 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • lebout2canap ⏚

     @lebout2canap Oh ffs!

   • Embed this notice
     lebout2canap ⏚ (lebout2canap@mastodon.tedomum.net)'s status on Thursday, 30-May-2024 23:16:15 JST lebout2canap ⏚

     in reply to

     @aral
     > And then: oh, and this charity is
     > paying for one person to work
     >on accessibility support to be
     >implemented now

     Assuming it doesn’t fall through…

     “We’re currently facing a major issue from the GNOME Foundation side. We hope it will be resolved before it impacts the coordination of the STF project, but if not, the future of parts of the project is uncertain.” https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2024/05/twig-149/

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Thursday, 30-May-2024 23:31:25 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Sovereign Tech Agency
     • Miroslav Kravec

     @kravemir @sovtechfund Wow.

   • Embed this notice
     Miroslav Kravec (kravemir@hometech.social)'s status on Thursday, 30-May-2024 23:31:26 JST Miroslav Kravec

     in reply to

     • Sovereign Tech Agency

     @aral @sovtechfund because corporations don't deliver Linux as a desktop OS as a product / don't provide it to consumers.

     Corporations use Linux mostly for servers, or for their internal tools loaded with specific software to do a specific task.

     Often, the tasks, for which they use Linux loaded gadgets, require people to not be visually impaired due to nature of work itself and tools just enhance it, and therefore accessibility is irrelevant in their context of use.

   • Embed this notice
     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Thursday, 30-May-2024 23:31:31 JST 翠星石

     in reply to
     @aral I don't get the association between OS's, Linux and "FOSS", as Linux is a proprietary kernel that's not even an operating system either.
     
     Yes, currently implemented free screen readers are developed by volunteers due to a lack of funding - such kind of issue is best dealt with by getting it done yourself or paying someone else to do so rather than complaining.
     
     Yes, regulators should probably order IBM to implement a non-broken screen reader for the general purpose OS's they publish.
     
     
     The Emacs OS does indeed have a screen reader emacspeak, with lots of development (27,000+ commits), too bad the Gentoo ebuild doesn't compile, as the maintainers are busy adding proprietary software instead.
   • Embed this notice
     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Friday, 31-May-2024 00:41:45 JST 翠星石

     in reply to

     • lp0 on fire :unverified:
     @lp0_on_fire https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/arch/powerpc/platforms/8xx/micropatch.c#n43
     That is proprietary software disguised as an array of numbers and the GPLv2 header is *not* the license (I checked the git log and that was rather added by a script).
     
     Before you say; "That's only a small amount", that's like saying; "This well isn't poisoned, it's 99.95% water and only 0.05% proprietary poison".
     
     Any amount of proprietary software in a kernel make the whole thing proprietary, as you cannot exercise the 4 freedoms with all of the kernel.
     
     There are many more cases of such disguised proprietary software in Linux still remaining despite a process starting many years ago to move such proprietary software to a lockstep software release known as "linux-firmware" - although of course such package doesn't contain a single file of actual firmware (that is, a dump of a socketed ROM chip (popular in 90s computers)) - rather it contains immense amount of proprietary peripheral software, alongside just a few free peripheral software programs.
     
     Considering that many drivers in Linux are totally reliant on loading proprietary software from "linux-firmware" to function, I don't buy the idea that "linux-firmware" is separate project and doesn't create massive derivative works.
     
     
     Thankfully, our GNU/Bros have blessed up with a 100% free version of Linux - GNU Linux-libre; https://www.fsfla.org/ikiwiki/selibre/linux-libre/
   • Embed this notice
     lp0 on fire :unverified: (lp0_on_fire@social.linux.pizza)'s status on Friday, 31-May-2024 00:41:47 JST lp0 on fire :unverified:

     in reply to

     > Linux is a proprietary kernel

     [citation needed]

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Friday, 31-May-2024 15:17:48 JST Aral Balkan

     • papai comuna :tux: :comunista:

     @joojmachine You can’t control it. Keyboard control is broken.

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Friday, 31-May-2024 15:18:30 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • papai comuna :tux: :comunista:

     @joojmachine (I appreciate your looking into it.)

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Friday, 31-May-2024 16:05:21 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Adrian Roselli

     @aardrian Hadn’t; thanks.

   • Embed this notice
     Adrian Roselli (aardrian@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 31-May-2024 16:05:22 JST Adrian Roselli

     in reply to

     @aral No idea if you saw this passibly-related thread about piping output to NVDA in a WINE setup: https://dragonscave.space/@meatbag/112528902037585952

   • Embed this notice
     Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Friday, 31-May-2024 19:57:46 JST Aral Balkan

     • papai comuna :tux: :comunista:

     @joojmachine I mean you can’t control the screen reader. In other words, the major Linux distributions do not have a functional screen reader at the moment and haven’t had one since they started shipping Wayland by default.

   • Embed this notice
     翠星石 (suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com)'s status on Friday, 31-May-2024 23:50:35 JST 翠星石

     in reply to

     • 𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙
     @jihadjimmy There's much less directly included now than in the past, but there's still a bunch of stuff left despite it being more than a decade since the move of things to "linux-firmware".
     
     For AMD64 they appear to have moved almost everything, but freedom wise there's no real difference.
     
     I didn't look very hard, but I see some questionable stuff here; https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/platform/x86/touchscreen_dmi.c#n100
     
     As for Aarch64, there doesn't appear to be anything under arch/arm64, but there's many .dts and .dtsi files that include proprietary software.
     
     
     Everyone is welcome to check things themselves; https://www.fsfla.org/svn/fsfla/software/linux-libre/scripts/deblob-6.9
   • Embed this notice
     𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙 (jihadjimmy@the.asbestos.cafe)'s status on Friday, 31-May-2024 23:50:38 JST 𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙𝅙

     in reply to

     • 翠星石
     • lp0 on fire :unverified:
     @Suiseiseki
     @lp0_on_fire
     
     That's for PowerPC, go one step further and show examples for amd64 and aarch64, I'm sure there's plenty.