A great writeup on the experience of blind users navigating GNU/Linux and the many pitfalls that prevent them from being able to use their machine.
Linux “just works”—if you can see.
If you’re blind? You boot into a live image and get nothing. No speech. No braille. No login prompt feedback. Maybe Orca starts, maybe not. Maybe you know the shortcut (Alt+Super+S?) but does that even work in this session type? Is it Wayland? Is it X11? Is the screen reader bound to a key combo that doesn’t exist on your keyboard?
You open the installer?
“Next. Button. Button. Button. Button.” That’s all Orca says.
Ubuntu MATE 12.04 had a working, labeled, navigable installer. Ubuntu MATE 24.04? It’s garbage.
No headings. No structure. No sense of where you are. Just unlabeled buttons and blank space.
This isn’t a bug. This is neglect.
I think a great takeaway from this is that a11y finds itself at the end of the pipeline, as the last thing that needs to be done.
Yeah at least there’s a command window/tool in Bluetoothctl with comprehensive commands to troubleshoot and turn it on and off again when it stops working. So there is always a fix, it just may take some time to figure out, with pairing, unpairing, trusted device, authorising services, etc. I’ve given up on using the UI based stuff like the standard GNOME and Blueman UIs for Bluetooth, the way it interacts with what’s actually going on under the hood is flaky, unexplained, or just straight up random.
But for Bluetooth audio devices, bluez + pulse audios Bluetooth audio implementation is a match made in hell. A word of advice: don’t manually enable pulse audios Bluetooth auto connect via the config file or any UI that can edit the config file. It will break Bluetooth scanning and discovery in modern Linux, it’s disabled for a reason nowadays.
WiFi seems to be mostly fine nowdays, the odd drop here and there, but I experience the same on my phone or when I boot into Windows. And the UIs have been updated to accurately reflect what’s happening under the hood.