[orca-list] Desktop environment note

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

I discovered this weekend what I should have known all along: it's 
possible to install multiple desktop environments alongside each other 
in a single Linux installation. Gdm (and probably other display managers 
also) allows you to choose what type of session to invoke when you are 
logging in.

Thus, I installed MATE Desktop 1.24.1 and KDE Plasma 5.22 together with 
the already installed GNOME 40.

MATE desktop inherits much, if not all of the accessibility of GNOME 2, 
on which it is based. I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that MATE 
is more accessible than GNOME 2 was; and accessibility is stated as a 
development objective on the MATE Web site. Although I found some 
issues, most of what I tried to do worked and was accessible with Orca, 
as the MATE users on this list would be well aware.

KDE Plasma was partly accessible. For example, I could navigate and 
interact with the menus, but I couldn't find keyboard commands to 
navigate among items on the desktop. The KDE terminal application, 
Konsole, wasn't very accessible - in particular, the terminal widget 
(obviously the most important component) was just identified as 
"terminal" in flat review, and I couldn't read any of the contents.

The basics of starting Orca within the desktop session worked as 
documented, at least. They're making progress - very slowly, admittedly, 
and with a long way to go, but progress it nevertheless is.

I think GNOME 3.x (and hence GNOME 40 and its successors) needs 
substantial work to bring its screen reader accessibility up to 
reasonable standards. GNOME Foundation has been funding important 
development effort concerning GTK 4 accessibility recently, but that 
hasn't yet extended to going back and fixing the accessibility bugs in 
the GNOME code that the project maintains. They may work on it as they 
shift to GTK 4 - at least, that would be a good opportunity to improve 
the completeness and the quality of the implementation. They've also 
documented the GTK 4 accessibility API in a developers' guide - an 
important step in the right direction.

Of course, others may have different opinions. I didn't perform a 
systematic review of the software discussed above.

As always, thanks are owed to all those in the community who are working 
on various aspects of Linux accessibility (with unreasonably limited 
resources to devote to the task). The development expertise in the 
community of contributors to accessibility in the Linux environment is 
excellent.