I’ve published Part 3 of “I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back.”

This one’s about the so-called universal interface: the console. The raw, non-GUI, text-mode TTY. The place where sighted Linux users fall back when the desktop breaks, and where blind users are supposed to do the same. Except — we can’t. Not reliably. Not safely. Not without building the entire stack ourselves.

This post covers Speakup, BRLTTY, Fenrir, and the audio subsystem hell that makes screen reading in the console a game of chance. It dives into why session-locked audio breaks espeakup, why BRLTTY fails silently and eats USB ports, why the console can be a full environment — and why it’s still unusable out of the box. And yes, it calls out the fact that if you’re deafblind, and BRLTTY doesn’t start, you’re just locked out of the machine entirely. No speech. No visuals. Just a dead black box.

There are workarounds. Scripts. Hacks. Weird client.conf magic that you run once as root, once as a user, and pray to PipeWire that it sticks. Some of this I learned from a reader of post 1. None of it is documented. None of it is standard. And none of it should be required.

This is a long one. Technical, and very real. Because the console should be the one place Linux accessibility never breaks. And it’s the one place that’s been left to rot.

Link to the post: https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-3-speakup-brltty-and-the-forgotten-infrastructure-of-console-access/

#Linux #Accessibility #BlindTech #BRLTTY #Speakup #Fenrir #TTY #PipeWire #ScreenReader #DisabilityTech #ConsoleComputing #LinuxAccessibility #FOSS

@matt I disagree. Even in the years of fancy guis, I'll still take a console application over a graphical one if one exists. What should happen is the console should just… not be locked out. Making an xdg portal for accessibility processes to always have access to audio doesn't sound impossible.

@fireborn I also think it will help to use a tightly integrated system, that's delivered as an immutable image, like GNOME OS (as @AdrianVovk has discussed before). The kit-car approach of conventional distros, where you can swap out components at a granular level by installing and removing packages that can all have a global effect on the system, is too fragile IMO.

@matt @fireborn Indeed, the VT subsystem is not long for this world. Distros are actively working on removing it, and the various uses of VT are disappearing little by little

@AdrianVovk @matt I still need it at least once a week. Because when I can access it, when it's set up, it rarely ever fails. I'll probably just end up on Gentoo eventually, unless they remove it too. At that point… BSD maybe.

@fireborn @matt Note that removing VT does not mean removing the console. It's removing the console _from the kernel_, and passing those responsibilities into userspace. The benefit is that things like session-bound Pipewire will work correctly, because your console session will be a real session, using the desktop accessibility stack

In other words: instead of having 2+ screen readers installed for different contexts, you can have 1 for the whole system. One stack = one place to focus effort

@AdrianVovk @matt oh! In this case, I can see the benefit to this. Never mind; is there a standard approach being taken to this or is it purely theoretical at this point?

@AdrianVovk @matt As it currently stands, though, I do like that speakup doesn't rely on speech-dispatcher, because it gives a recovery path when speech-dispatcher crashes.

@fireborn @matt Still a bit theoretical, but moving towards concrete solutions. The most energy right now is going into solutions that spin up a kiosk Wayland session and then a Wayland terminal. Still an area of active experimentation and development at the moment

@AdrianVovk @matt how would this address the case where speech-dispatcher is totally gone, because it's either crashed or hooking the wrong output?

@fireborn @AdrianVovk For Orca at least, there has been some work on replacing speech-dispatcher with a new TTS framework called Spiel (https://project-spiel.org/)

@matt @AdrianVovk I checked this out some time ago and found it less responsive overall. maybe when it's not experimental It'll be better. I should probably just switch to it on a test machine and stick with it.

@fireborn @matt @AdrianVovk aaron, have you looked into some of the Illumos distros? They tend to come with Mate as the default desktop and are for the most part free of the Linux fuckery that you've documented. not entirely, but there's not a thousand audio servers all fighting for your sound card, so we suspect it would work considerably better. we aren't exactly sure about the status of speech on the VT, but... it's at least something to consider

@freya @matt @AdrianVovk I haven't. Do you know of any that can be installed accessibly (on the hardware — I can't serial console into the machine I usually testt things on)

@fireborn @matt @AdrianVovk yes, actually. OpenIndianna, though you may need to try an older (2023) live install image as for some reason the most recent one has a non-working login? that's not an accessibility issue, that's just outright brokenness. You know what Illumos is we're assuming?

@freya @matt @AdrianVovk I do, yeah. I just can't say I've ever thought of daily driving it. One of those "What I use might be broken, but at least I can fix it when it breaks" situations. I'LL try OI when I'm back on a computer Sunday

@freya I wasn't able to get working boot on any of my machines, so sad times. I got to a console log in on the live images but not a graphical desktop.

@fireborn @matt @AdrianVovk absolutely. the advantage of only having one thing getting in your bloody way, and not updating every 9.27 milliseconds.

@freya @matt @AdrianVovk hm. I don't see anything in the OI hcl about NVME drives. I guess I'll find out.

@fireborn @matt @AdrianVovk it definitely supports it, Illumos Gate has supported NVMe drives for ages. Tribblix we know for a fucking fact supports them, as does OmniOS

@fireborn @matt @AdrianVovk one of these days when we have some downtime, we're gonna hook up a monitor and a keyboard and some audio to our Sun Blade 150 SPARC workstation and enable gnome2 and see whether Solaris 10 (from 2005) on ahrdware from 2002 is more consistently accessible than modern Linux. How much you wanna bet that it will be

@matt @AdrianVovk You aren't going to convert anyone who likes the freedom of Linux to such a system. To me, chasing the fantasy that everyone will use a distro with an immutable root just seems like a waste of time. I can see how for some people that would be a benefit, but for me, at the point I can't do make install, the distribution is in my way. I don't want to have to make a package or a flake or an image with whatever custom thing I need included this week.

@matt @AdrianVovk That said, If I could have immutable rot while still being able to build on top of it with a quick revert feature, that I could see the appeal of.