Accessibility in fedora

Hello

Slightly off topic:

I’m a resonably new Fedora user and also a certified specialist in web accessibility and inclusive design. I came across this thread because I was curious about accessibility features in Fedora, but didn’t find any settings or documentation.

I saw some mention of a team dedicated to accessibility, but the page has gone 404. So anyway, where do I learn more about the team and how do I follow or join?

Thanks!

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Get in touch here … Invite to the Day of Accessibility (Space Telescope Science Institute - in person and streaming)

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Hi @lmsoren and welcome :wave:

Here is an active thread discussing Accessibility in Fedora, your input would certainly be very much appreciated: Fedora Strategy 2028: Focus area review (Accessibility)

As I understand it, there is an Accessibility Working Group that is part of the Fedora dei-team - I am not sure what they are up to these days, but you can most likely find them in the DEI team chat room on Element/Matrix. Feel free to introduce yourself in the chat :hugs:

I decided to start things off by trying the newest Fedora Linux in a virtual machine. The physical machine is an Intel NUC with 16 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD, so it will be perfect for virtual machines. Here are my notes I took while completing the process of trying to install Fedora Linux as a blind person with some experience with the process. I did not use a spin or any other edition, wanting to simulate what a blind person, new to Fedora and Linux, would experience when simply downloading Fedora. I used VmWare Workstation Player, downloaded today, since it’s the most accessible.

I downloaded Fedora Linux, version 37. The ISO file was called “Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-37-1.7.iso”. I created a virtual machine with 6 GB RAM and 4 processor cores. I had to use OCR to find out that, to boot the OS, press Enter. A media check still occurred. Using OCR, I found that I could “press ESC to abort check.” Doing so put me in what seems to be an unrecoverable state. So I restarted the VM. This time, I pressed Down arrow, to what I hope would be start Fedora. Then Enter. Now, “start fedora” appeared in the OCR results, so I pressed Enter again, hoping the cursor was on that item. I could not get into the installer that way. So I restarted the VM and decided to wait and see if it would just start up on its own. So I waited a while and came back to the VM, and there was lots of “0K0K0K” in the OCR output. So I pressed Enter, thinking maybe it had locked. The OCR showed nothing on the screen. I tried pressing Alt + Windows + S to hopefully start up Orca. Nothing happened. I then pressed Alt + F2 to open the run command box, typed “orca” and pressed Enter. Nothing happened. Unable to get speech going, I quit the VM.

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I think it’s safe to say we’ve got work to do!

At this point I’m just kind of rooting for the work to be done because I can’t help much. I wonder what the process will be like to go from gathering raw feedback on the current state of Fedora to implementing the most important things first and seeing change. Or maybe we need to hear about all of the ways we’re struggling to meet the needs of disabled users first before we start trying to fix things. For me, I’d like to see a structure to grow with, even if we are iterating on that structure as we go along, but I guess that will come later as part of the five year plan. I’m just excited to have heard from so many people who are blind or have other disabilities. It’s such a great start.

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