Developers don't intentionally set out to build applications that aren't accessible. The problem is that they usually don't know how to test them. There aren't many blind Linux users, so there aren't many people testing the accessibility of applications and providing feedback. Therefore, developers don't produce accessible applications, and they don't get many users. And so the cycle continues.
This is one thing we hope to tackle with the Fegora project. We want to create a Fedora remix that's user-friendly for visually impaired and blind users. We hope it will attract more users, and that those users start discovering issues to report, which will hopefully be solved by other developers in the open source community.
So why are we doing this? Well, it's important to point out that Fedora is not an inaccessible distribution by design. It does have many accessibility tools available in the form of packages. But these aren't always present from the beginning, and there are a lot of small things which need to be configured before it can be proficiently used. This is something that can be discouraging to a beginner Fedora user.
We want Fegora to be as friendly and predictable for a blind user as possible. When a user launches a live image, the screen immediately starts being read as soon as a graphical user interface appears. All environment variables needed for accessibility are loaded and configured correctly.
See
Remixing Linux for blind and visually impaired users#
technology #
Linux #
opensource #
accessibility #
Fegora
Fegora, a Fedora project, is an unofficial Linux distribution aimed at visually impaired users.
