Back in May, Devin Prater wrote an excellent piece on Medium titled “Linux Accessibility: an unmaintained Mess“. Devin talks about the poor state of accessibility on mainstream Linux distributions. While blind people have certainly used Linux, it’s generally not an easy task. There’s a simple explanation for this: most open source contributors aren’t blind.

There’s no rule that you can’t make accessible software if you don’t need that particular accessibility feature. But for many open source contributors, their contributions are based on “scratching their own itch.” People work on the things that are personally interesting to them or impact them in some way.

That’s a good thing! It means they’re invested in how well the software works. I’m sure you’ve used some applications where you thought “there’s no way the people who made this actually used it.”

The problem comes when we’re excluding potential users and contributors. People with vision problems can’t contribute because they can’t easily use the software. And when they can use it, the tools for contributing add another barrier. I can’t imagine trying to understand a patch or an XML file read aloud, but there are people who have to do that.

In Program Management for Open Source Software, I wrote “software is only useful to the degree that people can use it”. I don’t have a great solution. As a community, we need to figure out how to keep the good part of the selfishness while being more inclusive.