[NFB-Science] For Those Interested in Linux Accessibility: Red Hat Hires Visually Impaired Software Developer to Improve Accessibility of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Workstation: -- Accessibility in Fedora Workstation

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Accessibility in Fedora Workstation


Posted by  <https://fedoramagazine.org/author/uraeus/> Christian Fredrik
Schaller on
<https://fedoramagazine.org/accessibility-in-fedora-workstation/> June 27,
2022
<https://fedoramagazine.org/accessibility-in-fedora-workstation/#comments> 4
Comments



Photo by
<https://unsplash.com/@elizabeth_woolner?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=refe
rral&utm_content=creditCopyText> Elizabeth Woolner on
<https://unsplash.com/s/photos/accessibility?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=
referral&utm_content=creditCopyText> Unsplash

The first concerted effort to support accessibility under Linux was
undertaken by Sun Microsystems when they decided to use GNOME for Solaris.
Sun put together a team focused on building the pieces to make GNOME 2 fully
accessible and worked with hardware makers to make sure things like Braille
devices worked well. I even heard claims that GNOME and Linux had the best
accessibility of any operating system for a while due to this effort. As Sun
started struggling and got acquired by Oracle this accessibility effort
eventually trailed off with the community trying to pick up the slack
afterwards. Especially engineers from Igalia were quite active for a while
trying to keep the accessibility support working well.

But over the years we definitely lost a bit of focus on this and we know
that various parts of GNOME 3 for instance aren't great in terms of
accessibility. So at Red Hat we have had a lot of focus over the last few
years trying to ensure we are mindful about diversity and inclusion when
hiring, trying to ensure that we don't accidentally pre-select against
underrepresented groups based on for instance gender or ethnicity. But one
area we realized we hadn't given so much focus recently was around
technologies that allowed people with various disabilities to make use of
our software. Thus I am very happy to announce that Red Hat has just hired
Lukas Tyrychtr, who is a blind software engineer, to lead our effort in
making sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Workstation has excellent
accessibility support!

Anyone who has ever worked for a large company knows that getting funding
for new initiatives is often hard and can take a lot of time, but I want to
highlight how I was extremely positively surprised at how quick and easy it
was to get support for hiring Lukas to work on accessibility. When Jiri
Eischmann and I sent the request to my manager, Stef Walter, he agreed to
champion the same day, and when we then sent it up to Mike McGrath who is
the Vice President of Linux Engineering he immediately responded that he
would bring this to Tim Cramer who is our Senior Vice President of Software
Engineering. Within a few days we had the go ahead to hire Lukas. The fact
that everyone just instantly agreed that accessibility is important and
something we as a company should do made me incredibly proud to be a Red
Hatter.

What we hope to get from this is not only a better experience for our users,
but also to allow even more talented engineers like Lukas to work on Linux
and open source software at Red Hat. I thought it would be a good idea here
to do a quick interview with Lukas Tyrychtr about the state of accessibility
under Linux and what his focus will be.

Christian: Hi Lukas, first of all welcome as a full time engineer to the
team! Can you tell us a little about yourself?

Lukas: Hi, Christian. For sure. I am a completely blind person who can see
some light, but that's basically it. I started to be interested in computers
around 2009 or so, around my 15th or 16th birthday. First, because of
circumstances, I started tinkering with Windows, but Linux came shortly
after, mainly because of some pretty good friends. Then, after four years
the university came and the Linux knowledge paid off, because going through
all the theoretical and practical Linux courses there was pretty
straightforward (yes, there was no GUI involved, so it was pretty okay,
including some custom kernel configuration tinkering). During that time, I
was contacted by Red Hat associates whether I'd be willing to help with some
accessibility related presentation at our faculty, and that's how the
collaboration began. And, yes, the hire is its current end, but that's
actually, I hope, only the beginning of a long and productive journey.

Christian: So as a blind person you have first hand experience with the
state of accessibility support under Linux. What can you tell us about what
works and what doesn't work?

Lukas: Generally, things are in pretty good shape. Braille support on
text-only consoles basically just always works (except for some SELinux
related issues which cropped up). Having speech there is somewhat more
challenging, the needed kernel module (
<http://www.linux-speakup.org/speakup.html> Speakup for the curious among
the readers) is not included by all distributions, unfortunately it is not
included by Fedora, for example, but Arch Linux has it. When we look at the
desktop state of affairs, there is basically only a single screen reader (an
application which reads the screen content), called
<https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Projects/Orca?action=show&redirect=Orca>
Orca, which might not be the best position in terms of competition, but on
the other hand, stealing Orca developers would not be good either.
Generally, the desktop is usable, at least with GTK, Qt and major web
browsers and all recent Electron based applications. Yes, accessibility
support receives much less testing than I would like, so for example, a
segmentation fault with a running screen reader can still unfortunately slip
through a GTK release. But, generally, the foundation works well enough.
Having more and naturally sounding voices for speech synthesis might help
attract more blind users, but convincing all the players is no easy work.
And then there's the issue of developer awareness. Yes, everything is in
some guidelines like the GNOME ones, however I saw much more often than I'd
like to for example a button without any accessibility labels, so I'd like
to help all the developers to fix their apps so accessibility regressions
don't get to the users, but this will have to improve slowly, I guess.

Christian: So you mention Orca, are there other applications being widely
used providing accessibility?

Lukas: Honestly, only a few. There's Speakup - a kernel module which can
read text consoles using speech synthesis, e.g. a screen reader for these,
however without something like Espeakup (an Espeak to Speakup bridge) the
thing is basically useless, as it by default supports hardware synthesizers,
however this piece of hardware is basically a think of the past, e.g. I have
never seen one myself. Then, there's  <https://brltty.app/> BRLTTY. This
piece of software provides braille output for screen consoles and an API for
applications which want to output braille, so the drivers can be implemented
only once. And that's basically it, except for some efforts to create an
Orca alternative in Rust, but that's a really long way off. Of course,
utilities for other accessibility needs exist as well, but I don't know much
about these.

Christian: What is your current focus for things you want to work on both
yourself and with the larger team to address?

Lukas: For now, my focus is to go through the applications which were ported
to GTK 4 as a part of the GNOME development cycle and ensure that they work
well. It includes adding a lot of missing labels, but in some cases, it will
involve bigger changes, for example, GNOME Calendar seems to need much more
work. During all that, educating developers should not be forgotten either.
With these things out of the way, making sure that no regressions slip to
the applications should be addressed by extending the quality assurance and
automated continuous integration checks, but that's a more distant goal.

Christian: Thank you so much for talking with us Lukas, if there are other
people interested in helping out with accessibility in Fedora Workstation
what is the best place to reach you?

Actually for now the easiest way to reach me is by email at
<mailto:ltyrycht at redhat.com> ltyrycht at redhat.com. Be happy to talk to anyone
wanting to help with making Workstation great for accessibility.

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 <https://fedoramagazine.org/author/uraeus/> Christian Fredrik Schaller


About the author: Christian F.K. Schaller is the Director for the Desktop,
Graphics, i18n and Infotainment at Red Hat. He has been an active member of
the open source community for years, especially around the GStreamer and
GNOME Project and more recently PipeWire. You can follow Christian on
twitter  <https://twitter.com/cfkschaller> @cfkschaller for more news and
updates on the Linux desktop.