I was helping an open-source app become more #accessible yesterday and we ran into the problem that it looks like #screenReader Orca has a bit of a tendency to crash when exposed to webkitGTK applications.
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The consensus seems to be that yes, this is broken, and no, there's not really any way around it for the moment. Also no, nobody's really fixing it.
i want to, #Linux enthusiasts, I really, really do. But it's exactly this kind of thing that make me entirely unable to consider any Linux flavor as an OS I could be productive in, heck ... that I could get light usage out of. When it comes to #accessibility stuff either breaks and stays broken for years or even longer, or never worked well to begin with. I know there's efforts on their way to fix that, and all the respect, gratitude and solidarity with the people doing that no doubt thankless, against-the-current work, but as of right now there's just not enough here for me to warrant the gigantic effort and investment to get anything usable out of it that actually stays usable longterm.@zersiax true that
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@zersiax what exactly is wrong and where? You are declaring generalities where specifics are required to help correct.
I have 3 hours after work. I can fix one thing today. What one thing do you want fixed?
@ghostrunner I couldn't really begin to tell you. What I know is that several webkitGTK apps, when ran in conjunction with the Orca screen reader, misbehave, or crash outright. This is particularly prevalent in apps using Tauri as their runtime. I don't know why this happens, I myself don't have debug logs or crash dumps, I just know that users, like myself, were trying to run an app they made only to have it either crash the app, the screen reader, or both.
I am generalizing because in my 25+ years of being a computer user, this kind of thing is not anomalous. We're seeing it in Calamares installer accessibility issues that remained open for almost a decade, we're seeing it in the Wayland adoption where accessibility was clearly an afterthought some very talented people are now saddled with fixing, and that's just the examples I can think of by thinking for 10 seconds.
Like I said, I know people are fixing things, I just think right now, there's more people that aren't -
@ghostrunner I couldn't really begin to tell you. What I know is that several webkitGTK apps, when ran in conjunction with the Orca screen reader, misbehave, or crash outright. This is particularly prevalent in apps using Tauri as their runtime. I don't know why this happens, I myself don't have debug logs or crash dumps, I just know that users, like myself, were trying to run an app they made only to have it either crash the app, the screen reader, or both.
I am generalizing because in my 25+ years of being a computer user, this kind of thing is not anomalous. We're seeing it in Calamares installer accessibility issues that remained open for almost a decade, we're seeing it in the Wayland adoption where accessibility was clearly an afterthought some very talented people are now saddled with fixing, and that's just the examples I can think of by thinking for 10 seconds.
Like I said, I know people are fixing things, I just think right now, there's more people that aren't@zersiax I feel for you. One trick I have seen in the industry is to have docker images of hundreds of installation 'profiles' which are then tested using generalized testing tools like selenium as run through cucumber.
The problem is that with cucumber, you are either verifying a location, which is buggy and hard to maintain, or you are verifying a 'rendered object name' which sometimes isnt even visible. its... better? but not ideal.
Anyway, we could create a generalized accessibility profile that can be applied and extended to various docker profiles of people's installations. it is probably better than nothing. then folks can submit to the test suite to get a badge or some silly gamification method to ensure actual use and adoption.
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@zersiax what exactly is wrong and where? You are declaring generalities where specifics are required to help correct.
I have 3 hours after work. I can fix one thing today. What one thing do you want fixed?
@ghostrunner I don't have enough knowledge on what exactly has to be done in order to fix it as a whole, however one long standing webkit issue that would be helpfull to move forward is: bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?i…
@zersiax It would be nice to get more details about crashes you are experiencing.
Is orca crashing in a way so it's no longer running after performing certain steps?
Or is it running and no longer reporting what's happening?Could you either file an issue or try to describe on how I might be able to reproduce that orca crashing and file it on your behalf?
Orca issues are best filed at: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/…
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@ghostrunner I don't have enough knowledge on what exactly has to be done in order to fix it as a whole, however one long standing webkit issue that would be helpfull to move forward is: bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?i…
@zersiax It would be nice to get more details about crashes you are experiencing.
Is orca crashing in a way so it's no longer running after performing certain steps?
Or is it running and no longer reporting what's happening?Could you either file an issue or try to describe on how I might be able to reproduce that orca crashing and file it on your behalf?
Orca issues are best filed at: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/…
@pvagner @ghostrunner Unfortunately I don't have a setup to test it reliably. From what I heard, it's not so much Orca that crashes but rather tauri-based web apps themselves
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@pvagner @ghostrunner Unfortunately I don't have a setup to test it reliably. From what I heard, it's not so much Orca that crashes but rather tauri-based web apps themselves
@zersiax If you are working with someone else on this, can you please ask them to comment if it's an orca crashing or a different issue?
As I have said I have experienced when keyboard navigation has stuck in some unlabelled control and the only way to get the keyboard focus handling to work again is to restart the app either gnome web aka epiphany or any other tauri app such as deltachat-tauri. However during this orca is still running and switching into different windows it's responsive.
Severe orca issues like a crash are usually addressed in a timely manner so if we can find a reliable reproducer for an orca crash we can ask politely to get it fixed.
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@zersiax If you are working with someone else on this, can you please ask them to comment if it's an orca crashing or a different issue?
As I have said I have experienced when keyboard navigation has stuck in some unlabelled control and the only way to get the keyboard focus handling to work again is to restart the app either gnome web aka epiphany or any other tauri app such as deltachat-tauri. However during this orca is still running and switching into different windows it's responsive.
Severe orca issues like a crash are usually addressed in a timely manner so if we can find a reliable reproducer for an orca crash we can ask politely to get it fixed.
@pvagner They're telling me essentially the entire UI of the application disappears and only the application background remains visible when scertain parts of the app are interacted with. I passed on that link you gave me asking if they can comment on their experience
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@zersiax what exactly is wrong and where? You are declaring generalities where specifics are required to help correct.
I have 3 hours after work. I can fix one thing today. What one thing do you want fixed?
@ghostrunner @zersiax This is a deficiency in linux desktops as a whole. It would take months of work to fix. It's not just one problem, it's a whole series of problems split across different packages born out of neglect for accessibility
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The consensus seems to be that yes, this is broken, and no, there's not really any way around it for the moment. Also no, nobody's really fixing it.
i want to, #Linux enthusiasts, I really, really do. But it's exactly this kind of thing that make me entirely unable to consider any Linux flavor as an OS I could be productive in, heck ... that I could get light usage out of. When it comes to #accessibility stuff either breaks and stays broken for years or even longer, or never worked well to begin with. I know there's efforts on their way to fix that, and all the respect, gratitude and solidarity with the people doing that no doubt thankless, against-the-current work, but as of right now there's just not enough here for me to warrant the gigantic effort and investment to get anything usable out of it that actually stays usable longterm.@zersiax This is part of the reason that I main Gentoo. I don't want Linux on hard mode, but it's the only way I can make it work how I want it to work
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@ghostrunner @zersiax This is a deficiency in linux desktops as a whole. It would take months of work to fix. It's not just one problem, it's a whole series of problems split across different packages born out of neglect for accessibility
@PepperTheVixen @zersiax yeah, im seeing this.
if we built a service folks could submit their builds to which will test the matrix of setups, we could start building bulwarks against the neglect.
definitely not a 'ill fix this in 3 hours' and more a 'ill think about this nastiness for 3 hours and feel real bad'
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I was helping an open-source app become more #accessible yesterday and we ran into the problem that it looks like #screenReader Orca has a bit of a tendency to crash when exposed to webkitGTK applications. I've not done Desktop #linux for a long time and have no idea what the workarounds for this would be, does anyone know anyone who might know what's happening here? Do we need to set a random environment variable somewhere or update a specific package so this person can do basic screen reader testing on their app? #tech #openSource #screenReaders #linux #GTK #webdev
@zersiax the screenreader doesn't exactly crash when working with webkit-gtk or qtwebengine, but instead, browse mode doesn't work properly because the accessibility code doesn't have support for the object replacement character, which would tell orca where in a given piece of text it should insert a link
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@zersiax the screenreader doesn't exactly crash when working with webkit-gtk or qtwebengine, but instead, browse mode doesn't work properly because the accessibility code doesn't have support for the object replacement character, which would tell orca where in a given piece of text it should insert a link
@esoteric_programmer would that also cause the underlying application to crash/stop rendering? Thats one of the things we're seeing
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@esoteric_programmer would that also cause the underlying application to crash/stop rendering? Thats one of the things we're seeing
@zersiax nope, I've never seen that failure mode. Is this packaged as a flatpak with the gnome runtime or something like that, so I can possibly do debugging? what distro? what orca version? did you change anything from the orca config?
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@zersiax nope, I've never seen that failure mode. Is this packaged as a flatpak with the gnome runtime or something like that, so I can possibly do debugging? what distro? what orca version? did you change anything from the orca config?
@esoteric_programmer couldn't really say, wasn't the person experiencing it. I know it's a Tauri app, likely default orca settings, not sure about versions
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@esoteric_programmer couldn't really say, wasn't the person experiencing it. I know it's a Tauri app, likely default orca settings, not sure about versions
@zersiax yeah, tauri has issues on linux because of webkit-gtk, and that's not only accessibility related. Anyways, could the person build with electron for the time being, assuming they don't use a lot of tauri specific functions? also, is that a public app? if not, does orca log anything important while that happens?
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@ghostrunner @zersiax This is a deficiency in linux desktops as a whole. It would take months of work to fix. It's not just one problem, it's a whole series of problems split across different packages born out of neglect for accessibility
@PepperTheVixen @zersiax Even as someone who's sighted and (mostly) without disability, and technical, I was floundering on one distro just to get TTS besides espeak working. Thankfully far easier to solve elsedistro, but yeah, I keep seeing it being a problem and then people treating folks who are expressing broad frustration as "you're not being specific enough".
And I feel like half the problem is the people saying that are driven by problem solving only, and not learning about the entire puzzle to create their own problems within it to solve. Making disabled people do the lifting of clearly defining the technicals of their problems is, to me, a pretty crappy approach when the needs are well published already in numerous places and no one wants to learn them because they're not "technical problems".
Can't solve it yourself? Express empathy by doing what you can to put pressure on others to make it more accessible.
Speaking of, I still need to make that PKGBUILD for AUR so folks can install obs-localvocal to put captions on their stream (embed in video and/or standard subtitle closed captions in stream) more easily. Worked great once I built from source.
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@zersiax yeah, tauri has issues on linux because of webkit-gtk, and that's not only accessibility related. Anyways, could the person build with electron for the time being, assuming they don't use a lot of tauri specific functions? also, is that a public app? if not, does orca log anything important while that happens?
@esoteric_programmer I ... sincerely doubt they can, they're pretty invested. The app in question is OpenDeck. I really don't know much about logging etc., this wasn't a programmer tring to make Tauri work with Orca, this was a programmer seeing if they could quickly test a fix they'd made to their app, I don't think they stopped long enough to really figure out tauri internals when things fell over
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@esoteric_programmer I ... sincerely doubt they can, they're pretty invested. The app in question is OpenDeck. I really don't know much about logging etc., this wasn't a programmer tring to make Tauri work with Orca, this was a programmer seeing if they could quickly test a fix they'd made to their app, I don't think they stopped long enough to really figure out tauri internals when things fell over
@zersiax is it this?
https://github.com/nekename/OpenDeck/
and if I don't have the hardware, can I still test the stuff to see why it broke? -
@zersiax is it this?
https://github.com/nekename/OpenDeck/
and if I don't have the hardware, can I still test the stuff to see why it broke?@esoteric_programmer ...potentially. Interacting with the action list seemed to break it for them, but that was a newer version that adds fixes to make that part of it accessible, it isn't in stable yet. You could build it from main but you'd need cargo and deno. Worth just checking with stable to see if it falls over though, don't need the hardware for that
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@esoteric_programmer ...potentially. Interacting with the action list seemed to break it for them, but that was a newer version that adds fixes to make that part of it accessible, it isn't in stable yet. You could build it from main but you'd need cargo and deno. Worth just checking with stable to see if it falls over though, don't need the hardware for that
@zersiax alright! I have cargo because I write rust often, I don't have deno yet :p. But sure, will try stable
