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Accessibility In Linux Is Good (But Could Be Much Better)
An anonymous reader sends this report from opensource.com: GNU/Linux distributions provide great advantages over proprietary alternatives for people with disabilities. All the accessibility tools included in Linux are open source, meaning their code is readily available if you want to examine or improve it, and cost nothing. Hardware devices, of course, are still going to cost money. Additionally, accessibility software on other platforms generally contain licensing constraints on the user. ... When it comes to accessibility, Linux is not without issues. ... The number of developers who specifically work on accessibility tools is quite small. For example, there is only one Orca developer, two AT-SPI developers, and a single GTK developer. ... Developers who do not depend on assistive technologies tend to forget—or don't know—that a disabled person might want to use their application, read their web page, and so on. ... The problem is not necessarily that developers do not care. Rather, it's is that accessibility is highly specialized and requires someone with knowledge in the area, regardless of platform.
Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's great. I'd classify accessibility for blind/less sighted users to be non-existent (with the exception of a few applications). Every iteration of X Windows since X11 has been worse and worse with its implementation, and if things go wrong it is nearly impossible to get around. A few applications that implement the full GTK stack /properly/ are passable, but those that use Gnome's or KDE's tools don't pass text back to a speech engine at all.
Console is fine, but as soon as you try and use a tool that uses ncurses or any other menuing application you are SOL.
Firefox hasn't worked well with a screen reader in about 5 years. Never was able to get Chrome fully installed.