What do virtue-signalers and privileged people without disabilities who share content about accessibility on Linux being trash without contributing anything to the software have in common? They don’t actually really care about the group they’re defending; they just exploit these victims’ unfortunate situation to fuel hate against groups and projects actually trying to make the world a better place.
...
Number 5 [making sure that all the accessibility-related work is in the public, and stays in the public.] is especially important to me. I personally go as far as to refuse to contribute to projects under a permissive license, and/or that utilize a contributor license agreement, and/or that utilize anything riskily similar to these two, because I am of the opinion that no amount of code for accessibility should either be put under a paywall or be obscured and proprietary.
...
KDE hired a legally blind contractor to work on accessibility throughout the KDE ecosystem, including complying with the EU Directive to allow selling hardware with Plasma.GNOME’s new executive director, Steven Deobald, is partially blind.
The GNOME Foundation has been investing a lot of money to improve accessibility on Linux, for example funding Newton, a Wayland accessibility project and AccessKit integration into GNOME technologies. Around 250,000€ (1/4) of the STF budget was spent solely on accessibility. And get this: literally everybody managing these contracts and communication with funders are volunteers; they’re ensuring people with disabilities earn a living, but aren’t receiving anything in return. These are the real heroes who deserve endless praise.
...
To summarize the table: those three merge requests that I worked on for free were worth 9,393.60$ CAD (6,921.36$ USD) in total at a minimum.
...
Any content related to accessibility that doesn’t dunk on GNOME doesn’t foresee as many engagement, activity, and reaction as content that actively attacks GNOME, regardless of whether the criticism is fair. Many of these people don’t even use these accessibility features; they’re just looking for every opportunity to say “GNOME bad” and will 🪄 magically 🪄 start caring about accessibility.
In short, stop making your shitty "rice" [sic] and suckless-style gadgets and then go on to slander organizations like GNOME and KDE. What we need in freedesktop are people who care deeply about solving problems and raising up others.
Even if you're not a programmer with the required expertise, keep the conversation around accessibility going. Fund development by word of mouth or direct monetary support. Keep following these developments and be informed rather than spreading vague folk wisdom.
And speaking personally here (rant), if you don't use KDE, GNOME or intended-equivalent (cinnamon, mate, etc) on up-to-date, widely-used distributions, you don't inhabit the same community as us who do.
There's a tendency to name drop "Linux" community as if it's a catch all. Well RMS's writing was right, not in the pedantic way that people interpreted it to be (or that RMS may have intended), but in the fact that the all-consuming "Linux OS" does not exist. Android is not "Linux," WSL is not "Linux," they are Android and WSL. Fedora is not Linux, Ubuntu is not Linux, they are Fedora and Ubuntu.
The thing that holds this thing together is GNU or in other words, libre computing and copyleft, a way to use computers that stands against coercive control, malware, abandonment, waste and of course, capitalism which is the root cause of these issues.
The fact that there are people using "Linux" who are uninformed about GNU's history, free software, or who say that GNOME looks like a MacOS clone or that KDE is like a "Linux windows" will frustrate me to no end.
(end-rant)