 So yeah, my name is Wydjik Blasek, I'm currently working at Red Hat as a software engineer, in particular in a security compliance team. And I've been Linux user for 12 years, but I've used Windows before, so I think I can kind of compare. I started with Windows 95 up to XP and I switched to Linux. Yeah, I have also experienced with various Linux distributions. I'm using Arch Linux and Fedora mainly, but I have also experienced with other distributions as you can see, but mainly from an administrator point of view. And I'm maintaining a Fegora project, which we will talk briefly about later. So basically, the goal of this talk is to introduce you very briefly the situation for blind users if they want to use Linux desktop, what are the problems, but also what things are working quite well right now. And then we will move to Fegora, which is a project which tries to improve this. And then in the end, I would like to sum up what you can do about that, because this is basically aimed at you as developers, as QAs, but also as users documentation and stuff like that. So let's move forward. So a little bit of terminology at start so that we know what we are talking about. So the screen reader screen reader is a piece of software which is crucial for visually impaired and especially blind users of any computer. Maybe you've heard that maybe for example on Android you stumbled into accessibility settings and you turned on something and the phone started speaking at you and gesture stop working. And so that's a screen reader. Basically what it does is that it tries to collect information from the screen which are relevant for us. The examples are mentioned here on the slides. So I would stop at the first one. What element has focus? What is focus? Focus is basically, I don't know if you've tried, but if you for example open any web browser and you start pressing tap, you will move around the website and the tap will move you around links and the form fields, and they will become a bit highlighted. And that means that they have focus. And basically you can start interacting with them through keyboard or other input devices. So that's what screen reader does. It reads notifications. It allows us to explore the screen up to some point. The part about the hair color on the slides, this is something which I would like to mention as well especially for content creators. I believe you heard about alt text or alternative texts, which is an element which you can put next to the image or is a part of the image definition. I don't know if you've been putting photos on Facebook or Instagram, there is an offer to accompany the picture with alt text. That's something which is presented to us by a screen reader when we explore the image. Because if you do not put there any alt text, we will just hear image. And I'm like, yeah, thanks image. But if you put there alt text, it helps a lot I must say. The Linux screen reader is Orca. And really so far the only mature screen reader which can be used in a graphical environment. There are more of them, which can be used in a text console. Basically one of them is essentially part of kernel. It's called speak up, but that's not something we're going to talk about today. Voice synthesis is a piece of software which basically takes text and outputs it as a sound. It can sound, for example, like this. Speak enabled. Leaving list period. Black small square. Voice synthesis, a piece of software which reads text aloud. Yeah, so that's what I'm listening to basically all day at work at home and stuff like that. Unfortunately, if you are Czech, which is my case, you don't have much choice on Linux currently. If you speak English or, for example, Russian, you have more choices. And this is basically the output which most users are consuming because it doesn't require anything else except for speakers. Then we have a Braille display, which is a piece of hardware, quite special. And this piece of hardware has a special mechanical part which can convert text input into Braille output. And it converts one line at a time. The line is usually 40 or 80 characters long. And I'm using it right now so that I can read the slides without you listening to the speech, basically. And it's also good when you do code review and you want to keep track of indentation and stuff like that. So that's another important thing to consider. Quite a lot of users use that. ATSPI is more for developers and engineers. It's basically something which you might encounter when reading documentation. And it's a piece of software which basically provides a bus for graphical toolkits to send the accessibility-related events. And these events are then picked up by the screen reader. So, enough of terminology. Let's move forward. So, what is now possible on Linux? Well, that's quite a lot of that. Working with a console application. That's actually one thing I really like about Linux that it uses a console a lot. I mean, you can accomplish a lot of things on the console because it's just text. And text is very easy to interpret by the screen reader if the emulator works as expected. So I use it a lot, but it's not a silver bullet because of course if you are learning or if you are teaching, I want to say if you are teaching beginners about Linux, you don't want always to start teaching them how to work with Bash. And at the same time, not all things can be accomplished in the console. For example, Midnight Commander or VI improved text editors are unfortunately not accessible in the console. We can do web browsing. I will show you. Okay, I will show you now actually how it works. So if I turn on the speech, I open the new tab. I hope you can see that. And I will not be very inventive. Can you maybe can someone just write in the chat if it's understandable, at least a bit? Because if not, it doesn't make sense. And if you can, then tell me. Yep, it is understandable. Cool. So now like I'm on the website, I can use my arrows. About, link, conference scenes, link, news, link, schedule, link. And now I can use the tab key and you should be able to see how the focus changes over the links. Conference scenes, news, link, schedule, link, blog, link. But I can also explore the page by for example moving to next heading. About web content having level one. And now I can continue reading. CC2022 is the 14th annual comma free, comma red hat sponsored community conference for developers, comma. And so on, so on. So this is how web browsing works. Basically, we can use quite a lot of web applications. We can interact with forms and stuff like that. So basically I'm using, for example, Google Docs a lot, Facebook up to some extent, although it's not the most accessible thing I've ever seen and stuff like that. So this is possible quite well. There is, there is even, we can use even multiple browsers since like, I don't know, one year ago. Yeah, so then we can do, we can do email, of course, we can program, especially in VS Code, which is very accessible. We can play music and stuff like that. Text processing, spreadsheet processing, file management. So it looks pretty good. Okay, let's move to the last happy part. Some things which are painful currently just to, just that you know. So sound editing is unfortunately quite problematic, especially when compared to Windows and Mac. The basically the most accessible sound editor on Linux is Audacity, but it has quite significant limitations. You can do a lot, but sometimes you do not get the proper feedback about what you're doing and stuff like that. Unfortunately, there is no like very comfortable OCR solution, like there exist, but they are definitely not that straightforward again as compared to other platforms. It's usually because there is a lack of developers, but let's say it's explained on the slides. It can stop working suddenly because some library changes and it takes quite a long time to fix it. So it's not the greatest. It was worse, but it's still not the greatest. Viewing PDF files is also a bit problematic. Still, unfortunately, as it's on the slides, graphical viewers have problems. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. It's just not reliable. And then there is a way how we can extract basically the text layer from a PDF file and read the resulting file. But again, it's not straightforward. It's not the experience which you can compare with other platforms, unfortunately. Playing games, yeah, like this is here just for fun. I mean, that's quite not surprising because there are not that many Linux users as compared to Windows and other users. So it's quite expected, but again, it can be better. Make coffee, yeah, that makes me really sad because it would be cool if I didn't need to get up to my coffee machine and stuff like that. I can forgive this so far. Yeah, this was really sad. I found this out just basically before the f-con because basically now so that you can, I had to make some audio configuration changes so that you can hear my screen reader. And I found out I cannot do that basically from a Graphic User Interface because wireplumber is just totally inaccessible basically. The screen reader tells me nothing when I open the application. It tells me the window title, but that's it. And viewing PowerPoint presentations, that's something which is probably more important for people who do presentations that it's not straightforward to view these presentations on Linux. It can be done, but again, it's not straightforward. It's probably something which is for a different presentation, it would be quite a long story. So let's move forward. And so that you don't get bored, I have some examples here. So let's go on. Actually now what I'm using is Fedora with mate. One day, I'm not sure if I know that. I call it mate. I'm sorry. And actually here I will show you one very interesting bug. I move to the top panel. And now the focus is on the clock. Can you see that, that it's highlighted a little bit? Or is it covered by slides? I would like some feedback. It's covered by the slides right now? It's covered by slides. So now slides should stop being full screen. Is that the case? Now they are full screen. And now we can see the panel, but I'm not sure which part should be highlighted. Clock. Yeah, they are highlighted only a little. Yeah, so that means that they have focused. And then I move towards the battery. Panel notification area panel. And then I move towards the network. Battery. Network. And I just don't hear anything. It's just like not announcing anything. Either like, if it was, let's say, I guess we all agree it should, right? And this is a long-standing bug in mate. It's even linked in the presentation. So yeah, that's quite nice demo. And I must say it's quite frustrating. Because when we, for example, demo Linux and its accessibility to other people who are interested, they are like, and why doesn't work? Like, come on. It just works everywhere. Why doesn't work here? We're like, you know, we tried and like, we didn't get a response basically. Or we got a response works for me. But when you see the bug, you will understand. And I have a second example, which is more for front-end developers. How it's easy to do inaccessible application. So I will open GNOME to do. I hope so. Computer push button. How to improve. Problems by example. Text to do. GTD window. So do you see the window? Space GTK menu button. I would. Again? Yeah. Right. And now I will press tab and move around the window and just so you know how much information I get. GTD welcome action card push button. Space. Yeah, it's a GTD welcome action card. Whatever it is. No idea. GTD welcome action card push button. Again, GTD welcome action card. What it is? Like, what is it? Is it the same one or is it something different? I don't know. GTD window. GTK menu button push button. OK. It's probably open some menu. GTD welcome action card push button. So I will open the menu. GTK check button check box checked. Lifestyle. GTD window frame. OK. Help. Space. OK, yeah. I got into some menu. There is help. About to do. About to do space. GTK check button check box checked. And there is some check button. OK. But what else? Is this everything? I did the OCR of the window. And I could see that there is some text. But it's just not accessible for us. We cannot get to that. GTD window. And even these welcome cards. It's not labeled properly. So we don't know. We have actually no idea what it is for. That's the biggest problem. So it's super confusing. I could continue this application. But I will not. Because we don't have that much time. Basically, important thing. I'm not like saying that. I'm not like here to blame and like to just complain all the time. I'm just showing you how it looks for us. How we perceive the applications. And I'm very sure this can be improved. Because then there are other GNOME applications which are very accessible. So it's only about basically the knowledge. And the awareness of the fact that there are blind users. Who are using screen readers. And who would love to use our applications. But they just basically can't. Let's move forward. So Fegora. Very shortly. Basically, as I said. We were demonstrating Linux distributions. And their accessibility on a series of workshops. Which happened in Brno. They were called Agora. And basically the situation with Linux distributions is that. If you try to use mainstream Linux distribution. I don't know. It doesn't matter. Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, Debian, whatever. They are usually not accessible from the beginning. I will get to that later. Or I can talk about it now actually. Basically Fedora. We've hit the 20 minutes mark. So now we should move to the Q&A. Or if you want to finish the idea. Okay. I will skip this slide and this slide. Basically the Fedora information. You can get this from the slides. So the point of this. How about you? What you can do about that? So as I said. Be aware that we exist. And that we want to use the application. If you are doing front-end. Ask us. There is a link to email conference of our customer reader. Which is basically every blind user of Linux is there. And we had a very big success with this. Because we get a cooperation with Microsoft. And I must say the visual studio code is very accessible on Linux. So it works. We have proof. And if you are into volunteering. I would like to have some RPM packages for Fedora. Because Fedora is basically a project. Which tries to create accessible remix of Fedora. And if you. If nothing, just please be aware that we are here. Spread the word about us. So that other developers also know that we are here. And I think this can be nice cooperation. And the more accessible applications we have. The more users we will have for Linux. And I believe that's something we want. So that's everything for me. I'm ready for your questions. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for the great presentation, Vojta. We have already several questions. So I will try to read them. If someone isn't answered. Please write an email to Vojta. I will send his email address into the chat after the Q&A. So the first question is. Vojta, how would you compare Orca to perhaps commercial alternatives? Is it competitive? I would say that it's getting really better. And it's also quite hard to compare. Because there is no commercial screen reader for Linux. So Orca doesn't have competition on Linux. And if I should compare it to, for example, Windows, then the comparison wouldn't be fair. Because the array of applications is not the same. Graphical user interfaces are not the same. But if we, for example, talk about web browsing and stuff like that. So in this case, I think it's pretty comparable. It's lacking some features. For example, automatic language switching and stuff like that. But in general, it's doing very well. Thank you for your answer. Another question. What about the bootloader and the kernel console? Does a screen reader work there? And if not, would it be important to edit? So thank you. This is a great question. So let's split it into two questions. Bootloader. No, there is no screen reader. Of course, if it would be possible, it would be so great. Because this is basically, it's very problematic. We have to do this really, really, if we are, I'm blind, but here I'm super blind because I have totally no idea what I'm doing. If we talk about kernel console, as I said, there is a speak up screen reader, which can be connected to some voice synthesis. And actually yesterday or two days ago, it saved my, my ass because my computer broke during upgrade because I got a power cut. And I had to find out what's going on. And my graphical interface wasn't starting. I ended up in the console. And there I could read what's going on thanks to speak up. So it works. It works in the console, but not in a bootloader, unfortunately. Another question. Thank you for the answer. I guess the 80 characters limit for code is relevant for you. If you are using a Braille reader, or is it okay to review code not limited to 80 characters columns? I think it's okay if lines are longer because like, for example, how I do reviews is that I use both. At the same time, I use voice synthesis and I use Braille display. And if I, like I use mainly, mainly voice synthesis. And if I'm not sure, for example, I don't know how many brackets are there or if the annotation is correct, I use the Braille display. So I wouldn't say that this limit is important personally for me. Thank you for the answer. Another question. Would something like Vimperator also work good in a browser for blind? Pressing a letter on the keyboard to navigate around the web page instead of tabbing around? Well, I guess this is some extension. I think I heard about it. I think it doesn't make much sense because like, I mean, it could work, but I'm not sure if I would use that because if you noticed when I was demoing the web browsing, I can already do this with a screen reader. Yeah, the screen reader can navigate me around the website by heading, by link, by form or stuff like that. So it could work, but I'm not sure if it would actually play well with this screen reader. Thank you for the answer, Vojta. We've hit the total time for this talk. So thank you for all the answers and for the talk. And thank you, everyone, for joining us on this talk. I'm putting the email of Vojta into the chat and I will pass the unanswered questions to Vojta through the email. Thank you, guys. And thank you, Vojta. Thank you very much for your attention.