Orca & Cosmic

[a11yChief]

Hey all,

Opening this as something of a discussion area because screen reader accessibility of cosmic is currently in a pretty dire state. There is limited to no feedback from any basic interactions with the system, including opening a terminal, using the app launcher by pressing super key, typing after using the super key, navigating to the desktop, opening the files app, arrowing through an icon view of files, and probably a bunch of other stuff I can't test due to the lack of voice feedback on all of the above.

I caught Brodie Robertson's video recap of the launch call, and noted the team has made efforts to accommodate accessibility. Currently, I'm unable to test any part of the system for more useful feedback around this welcome announcement, besides noting the above.

What are the best next steps from here, to figure out exactly what the issues are and how they can be addressed?

I appreciate this is an Alpha, but sorting it now will make it a lot cheaper to maintain accessibility down the road. It would also make cosmic the ONLY accessible tiling window option for blind / visually impaired people, as far as I know. I've been waiting for this day for about twenty years.

Looking forward to helping where I can :D

P.S: I'm using arch BTW

[ids1024]

Good screen reader support is challenging, but the situation is at least less dire than it appears. Since there's been work but it hasn't been merged yet.

There's currently no accepted way to pass keyboard input to screen readers on Wayland. So Orca's key bindings don't currently work with GTK4 on Gnome Wayland (GTK3 used a legacy mechanism, and the new one is annoyingly X11 only currently). In pop-os/cosmic-comp#759 I've been working on a protocol for this. There are still a few things to fix there but it seems doable enough.

That requires a patched version of libat-spi2-core for Orca to use the protocol, so use on other distros will depend on packaging of that.

I'm not sure if other Wayland compositors will favor this particular way of solving the problem, but I'll probably propose it upstream. Hopefully this at least shows more clearly what is needed. Previous discussion of Wayland protocols or DBus portals for this seems to have stalled without getting as far as a working prototype like this.

For our clients to have accessibility support, Iced needs to integrate it. We've done some work on that a while ago in iced-rs/iced#1849, using the Accesskit library. We hope to update that work soon and try to get that merged upstream in Iced. Though getting all widgets and all apps to provide good accessibility metadata is not a small task either.