I am quoting the article here with some light editing for clarity and brevity. But please read the whole article, it has some interesting details.
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This isn’t a rant from someone who gave Linux a shot and bounced off. This is from someone who’s used Linux full-time for years as a blind user — someone who knows the system inside out, who has made it work through manual configuration, scripting, rebuilding broken packages, and sheer force of will. And still? I’m exhausted. Because Linux doesn’t fail at the margins. It fails at the very first step. Before you open a terminal. Before you write a line of code.
Linux “just works” — if you can see. If you’re blind? You boot into a live image and get nothing. No speech. No braille. No login prompt feedback. Maybe Orca starts, maybe not. Maybe you know the shortcut (Alt+Super+S?) but does that even work in this session type? Is it Wayland? Is it X11? Is the screen reader bound to a key combo that doesn’t exist on your keyboard?
Let’s say Orca does start. Now the audio stack kicks in. Is it PipeWire? PulseAudio? Is ALSA enabled? Is the correct fallback sink selected? Is the audio device owned by root? Is the socket exposed to your session? Want to debug it? You can’t — because you can’t hear anything. So you grab your phone, take a picture of the screen, feed it to an image captioning AI, and hope it tells you whether the error dialog says “Audio device unavailable” or “Session startup failed.” This is normal now.
And the Worst Part? I Can’t Even Recommend It. My partner wants to switch to Linux. She’s frustrated with Windows. She wants something leaner, faster — something she can actually control. She asked me: should I do it? And I didn’t know what to say. Because if I say yes, I’m lying. If I say no, I’m gatekeeping. And if I tell her the truth — that she’ll need to patch PipeWire configs to get audio on a second TTY, that Orca might not speak after login unless she scripts it, that even emoji might get read as “up up up” if Speech Dispatcher pulls the wrong build — I’ll sound insane.
And let me be clear: This post is not an attack on the people who maintain Linux accessibility. I have huge respect for every single person who’s ever written a patch to Orca, BRLTTY, speech-dispatcher, AT-SPI, or any of the dozens of tools that make it possible to use Linux without sight. They are often doing it for free, in their spare time, while fighting upstream changes, toolkit breakage, and general apathy from distros and desktop makers. They are heroes for making it work despite all that.