Hopefully I'm mistaken but apparently accessibility has been going down the last few years.
Settings that make sense to change should be exposed more adequately. No one should ever get a visual toggle to eg.: disable SELinux on their systray, but controls to adjust color profiles and screen "temperature" management should be more reachable and clear.

Problems that are mistakenly attributed to Linux but that are actually for manufacturers, sellers and provisioners to take responsibility for and overcome? A good lot.

Sellers have to sell machines with Linux preinstalled. Getting a machine Linux-ready from factory is easy, but it's only the commerces who can actually place them on a, ta know, selling point.
Sellers or manufacturers should actually advertise when their device works with Linux. If people have to guess whether their next buy even boots / plugs in, that's a hindrance to commerce.
Hardware manufacturers are not providing adequate Linux support (FizzyOrange mentions the eternal issue of laptop battery management; Naiboftabr mentions stuff like "audio stops working").
Developers have to get back to developing for Linux natively (rather than eg.: "develop for a trimmed down Windows version that runs on Steam").
Developers of Linux itself need to provide a better "rescue mode" for when things inevitably go wrong. Something that boots up to a "guaranteed working state" that still has workable UI but with most or all customizations disabled.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

accessibility has been going down for the last few years

Quick counterpoint as this gets raised a lot and I consider it disinformation.

In the Xorg -> Wayland transition, accessibility was immature as were a number of other things. And the implementations between x11 and Wayland were different (and so difficult to compare feature by feature).

Because of this, Wayland detractors made accessibility a favourite bugaboo and, even now, it is possible to find examples of things that worked better on X11 than they do on Wayland.

And there is no denying that accessibility was worse on Wayland for a while. You can say that about other things as well.

What the detractors do not tell you is that, for the major desktop environments at least, accessibility on Wayland is now better overall than it ever was on X11. Like a lot of things, whereas the poor security in X11 allows you to do many things, the capabilities have to be explicitly built into Wayland resulting in a period with poor support followed by systems that work excellently (better than they do in X11). This is a Wayland truism overall but particularly true for accessibility.

Latency and security are improved in particular. Assistive tools in X11 are a massive security hole. And accessibility in Flatpak apps is now far better as the tech built to work with Wayland sandboxing helps with Flatpak samdboxing as well.

Finally, accessibility is a greater focus in Wayland and so still improving whereas it was always an afterthought in X11. So regardless of the current state, I would say things are looking up for accessibility.

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