Notices by aaron (fireborn@dragonscave.space)

I didn’t plan to write about Wayland yet. But Xorg is dying — not eventually, but now. GNOME’s dropping X11 support. RHEL already removed it. Ubuntu and Fedora are next. And if you rely on accessibility, you don’t get to wait this one out.
So here’s Post 4 of I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back.
I’m using Wayland now. Primarily. Not because I love it. Because the fallback is disappearing, and I want to be there helping fix what comes next. GNOME with Orca actually works. KDE and COSMIC are making progress. I’ve talked to the people involved. They care.
But a lot is broken.
MATE — the desktop most blind users preferred — isn’t on Wayland.
ocrdesktop doesn’t work. xdotool is gone.
wlroots compositors still don’t reliably support Orca’s keybindings, especially on laptops.
This isn’t GNOME’s fault. They’re the only reason accessibility on Wayland works at all.
But the old excuses are gone. “Just use Xorg” isn’t going to be an option much longer.
So yeah. I’m a Wayland shill now. Because I’m using it. Because I have to.
And I want to make sure we’re not excluded from what comes next.
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-4-wayland-is-growing-up-and-now-we-dont-have-a-choice/
#Linux #Wayland #Accessibility #Orca #GNOME #KDE #COSMIC #FOSS #a11y #BlindTech #xorg

Steam just dropped screen reader support in the latest Big Picture Mode beta. On the Deck. On SteamOS. On Linux.
Not hacked in. Not community-patched. Built-in. From Valve.
There's an accessibility tab. There's a screen reader. There's high-contrast mode, UI scaling, color filters, reduced motion, and more.
I can’t believe I’m saying this but: I need a Steam Deck now.
Accessibility isn’t just coming to gaming — it’s here, and it’s official.
Let’s make some noise so they keep going.
🔗 https://www.theverge.com/games/689922/steam-is-adding-screen-reader-support-and-other-accessibility-tools
#Accessibility #Gaming #SteamDeck #ScreenReader #Linux #valve

@BrodieOnLinux @davetaylor2112 They haven't. It's a third-party service patching the cleints working on reviving MSN/aIM/AOL/ICQ/Yahoo and others.

Whelp, guess I'm adding msn messenger to my list of available contact methods

@BrodieOnLinux There's a project called the oneCore API to get modern windows applications to run on Windows xp. Unfortunately, every app running under app compat is inaccessible to screen reader users. I had to solve this oh-so-critical problem.

This is my first, and probably only, post from Windows XP.

The fact that Enafore can load at all is surprising.

I highly recommend *never* doing this. Don't connect xp to the internet. Don't open a browser, and certainly don't log into an account.

@J3317 @BrodieOnLinux I totally agree. Speech-to-text with things like Open AI's whisper modal is really good now. Even as someone who doesn't need this tool I use it to transcribe audio messages I'd rather read than listen to.

GrapheneOS: Where Licenses Matter More Than People

I chose to write this.

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/grapheneos-where-licenses-matter-more-than-people/

#GrapheneOS #Accessibility #FOSS #Blind #DisabilityTech #Inclusion #GPLv3 #espeak #a11y #Security #FreeSoftware #DisabilityRights #Android #Rant #TechShame

**update**: If you are using this post as some kind of call-to-action to harass and attack the GOS developers, please don't.

That damages everyone. You, them, and myself. It's not helpful.

**Update two**. I have made the decision to pull this post. It is not a good starting-point for a discussion, and just encourages defensiveness on both sides – when there really aren't sides here at all.

As a FOSS contributor, I am deeply ashamed at the way I approached this out of frustration.

@alexchapman @BrodieOnLinux This is wild. I had no idea that this would actually get any traction. It hasn't before. Amazing.

@BrodieOnLinux This honestly makes me worry for the future of software development, not because programmers will lose their jobs -- that isn't happening -- but these AI generated bug reports are going to make actual reports and actual issues take longer to fix. Triage is already a nightmare. A bad actor could weaponise this to keep a security hole open for longer by just flooding slop reports.

@Em0nM4stodon I've been using botsplaining for a while now – usually in response to emails where someone has clearly just dumped my email asking a question into an llm. Love the word

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@BrodieOnLinux Bazzite would probably be a better base for them – I wonder if there's something around licensing there they don't want to deal with.

@BrodieOnLinux Manjaro might actually make sense for them_Steam OS is based on Arch, after all, and Manjaro isn't (too) far off. The tooling is already in place. Though why they wouldn't just use Arch in that case I don't know.

Here it is. Post 2 in my series on #Linux #accessibility. This time, I'm digitally screaming about the audio stack.
As always, feedback is encouraged and welcomed, and subscribe via rss or email to receive plane-text versions of what I write, the day after publishing at 10 am EST
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-2-the-audio-stack-is-a-crime-scene/
#a11y #linuxAudio #linuxAccessibility

@aral @razze This just works now. As seemlessly as it does under x11, at least with Gnome. Not with anything else though.

@razze @aral Fedora has improved a lot. The installer now works, but there are still fundamental issues that aren't the fault of the Fedora maintainers; it's just the way the stack is right now.

@razze @aral Okay, the installer works in workstation. Not in any other spins, like the Mate spin that blind users tend to gravitate towards.

@razze @aral I'm not saying you did; sorry if I came across that way. I was just informing you that since that other post about fedora shipping with a broken screen reader was made, it has been fixed. For the gnome version.

QEMU is one of those pieces of software where, on the surface, it looks amazing. It emulates everything. It supports every architecture. You can boot a whole-ass operating system inside a YAML file on a toaster if you want.
But the moment you try to actually use it, it becomes immediately clear that QEMU was not written so much as it emerged, fully formed, from the darkest, deepest corner of an obsolete instruction set manual written in blood and Hungarian notation.
You want to do something simple like “boot an ISO”? Ha. Buckle the fuck up. You're about to write a command line 300 characters long, full of flags that mean nothing, do everything, or secretly contradict each other depending on the phase of the moon.
-enable-kvm -cpu host -smp 4 -m 4096 -nic user -device e1000 -drive file=wtf.img,format=raw,if=virtio,index=0 -boot d -cdrom arch.iso -vga std
That’s just the beginner tier. You want UEFI? You better find the exact OVMF blob hidden deep in some /usr/share/qemu/edk2/OVMF.fd directory that varies per distro and isn’t documented anywhere. Want secure boot? Fuck you. You’re on your own.
Need sound? No you don’t. QEMU’s audio stack is a cryptic abomination wrapped around ancient ALSA, PulseAudio, and maybe JACK if you invoke it while holding a sacrificial chicken. Half the time you get silence, the other half you get full-volume digital screaming because your sample rate was wrong by 1Hz and QEMU doesn't clamp that shit.
Want networking? Okay, now you’re really in trouble. Because QEMU supports ten different networking models and none of them are sane. There’s -nic user, which works but can’t access your LAN. There’s -netdev bridge, which requires root, two shell scripts, and a master's degree in Linux networking internals. And then there's -net tap, which may or may not work depending on what libvirt decided to vomit into /etc/qemu/bridge.conf three years ago.
You want USB passthrough? Cool. Here's how you do it:
1.
Run lsusb
2.
Pray
3.
Try -device usb-host,hostbus=3,hostport=2
4.
Watch the guest kernel panic
5.
Cry
And the documentation? HA. It’s not documentation—it’s a vague whisper of meaning. The man pages are 1,200 lines long and still manage to explain nothing. “Use -device” they say. What devices? What does virtio-scsi-pci mean? What is a ich9-usb-ehci1? No one knows. They’re not listed. They’re not described. The only way to find them is to run qemu-system-x86_64 -device help and scroll through pages of raw output, most of which are undocumented internal components that will cause instant death if you use them wrong.
QEMU is not a virtual machine manager. QEMU is a puzzle box built by cursed engineers, and your prize for solving it is maybe, maybe, getting a VM to boot without errors in the logs. Not cleanly. Not efficiently. Just... booted. That’s your win condition.