fireborn - Monday, May 12, 2025 at 8:00 PM
I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back: Interlude – A Thank You, Where It’s Due
This blog series has been a lot of yelling.
Rightfully so—because a lot of Linux is broken.
But this post? This one's different.
Because while the failures need to be called out, the people trying to fix it deserve recognition.
And a few teams—despite limited resources, upstream breakage, and years of neglect—are actually doing the work.
Debian: Quietly Keeping the Lights On
First, let me say it again: thank you to the Debian accessibility team.
They don't have the flashiest distro.
They don't have the newest packages.
Speakup doesn't speak at the console by default.
And yes, the desktop stack can lag behind.
But despite that?
- The installer is accessible—and has been for years.
- If you boot with
s, you get speech. - The login screen speaks.
- The desktop starts with Orca running.
- Braille displays are supported out of the box.
That matters.
It's consistent.
It's reliable.
It's one of the only distros where you can install blind and get to a working desktop with speech.
That shouldn’t be rare. But it is.
And Debian makes it possible.
Are the packages old? Sure.
But you can build newer ones.
Install backports. Track testing. But that stable core? That working baseline?
That's Debian.
Elementary OS: Asking the Right Questions
A more recent and very welcome surprise: elementary OS.
The team reached out.
They’re asking about accessibility.
They’re listening.
They want to know what’s broken and what’s needed.
They’re not just responding to a bug report.
They’re starting a conversation.
That’s huge.
Because most projects don’t even do that.
They wait until someone screams—or they don’t wait, because no one bothered to test at all.
But elementary OS?
They’re reaching out before that.
That’s how you fix things.
It’s not perfect yet.
It’s not all working.
But the fact that they’re even asking puts them miles ahead of most.
Blazie Technologies: Getting Linux Into More Hands
Another thank-you goes to Blazie Technologies, the makers of the
BT Speak—a braille input, speech output device designed for blind users, running Linux under the hood.
Why does this matter?
Because it’s putting Linux into the hands of more blind users.
It’s expanding the user base.
It’s growing the pool of people who can test, report, fix, and advocate.
And it’s doing it in the right way.
The system is configured accessibly out of the box—as you’d expect.
And when things go wrong?
There are key combos.
There are simple commands from the traditional mode interface to reset and recover speech, display, and session functionality.
You don’t need a second machine.
You don’t need a script from GitHub.
You just fix it. Blind.