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splondike
wayland-accessibility-notes
Systems & Infrastructure2023–2025
splondike / wayland-accessibility-notes

wayland-accessibility-notes

Research on accessibility in the Wayland based Linux desktop

4Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
58GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Research on accessibility in the Wayland based Linux desktop

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2023-12-14 14:34:08 UTC to 2025-05-14 21:02:20 UTC.

01232023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 commentsDec 20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsAug 20242024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsMay 2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Dec 20232023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
Jan 20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20242024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20242024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20242024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20242024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20242024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20242024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20242024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20242024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20242024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20242024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20242024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20252025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20252025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20252025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20252025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

4 sources
Great to read - where are we up to with regards to the long laundry list that voice control software like Talon needs? It's interesting - if you're going to allow third-party a11y software to control your PC, you need a 'make my wayland compositor do stuff' API. However, Wayland's intention to explicitly avoid baking specific desktop concepts onto its core protocols make this somewhat of a conflicting design req. Ref: https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blo...
In An accessibility update – GTK Development Blog
> This entire thread started off by someone saying untrue rumors about Wayland and DE's regarding accessibility I'm going to tentatively push back on this, my (very limited) understanding of the at-spi protocol is that it exposes application-specific controls and that it's not relevant to conversations about how to control a DE, and that current DEs do not in fact expose a common shared protocol across all of them for the kinds of controls that Talon needs. I'm not an expert on this stuff by any means, but from what I can tell, OP is correct and is not spouting untrue rumors. I'd welcome correction in the form of some kind of accessible documentation for integrating with those window managers that uses a universal common protocol for all of them, but getting back to something I've pointed out multiple times above: > so excuse everyone who
Read the rest
thinks the complaints are likely misguided. [...] This is not rocket science... This kind of response isn't particularly convincing given that I note you still haven't linked over some novice-accessible documentation about how to work with this stuff or test it, likely because that novice-accessible documentation is difficult to find if it exists at all. I would love some easy ways to verify what at-spi controls, how to integrate with it in different languages, and how different DEs handle exposing it for their own interfaces. The absence of approachable documentation is a big reason why people are confused about Wayland (and about other good projects like Flatpak that get commonly maligned on HN, but that's a longer conversation). The absence of easy, clear information about how all of this stuff works might at least partially explain why application developers aren't quickly modernizing. If you think that Talon developers are lying about how DEs work, then education efforts using clear, user-and-developer facing documentation about the protocols involved would be a pretty good way of combating FUD. ---- > Right now XWayland works as it should. So provide some specifics or get off the pot... First, as others have mentioned, XWayland is insufficient for the kinds of needs that Talon has; operations like enumerating windows or handling focus can not (and should not) be handled via XWayland unless you plan to run your entire desktop environment in XWayland. Secondly, XWayland is not the future. It is also a dead end. I'm glad that it exists for now, it is absolutely critical for early adoption of Wayland and is critical for supporting some apps. But XWayland is not a permanent solution to accessibility problems and it's wild to hear people simultaneously say that X11 is a walking zombie and to tell people that accessibility is fine because if there are any problems with Wayland you can always just tie your applications to a walking zombie. The goal here is to get rid of X11, or at least that's what I think the goal should be, because I do think that X11 is a walking zombie and I resent the fact that I'm still using it. ---- My concern is not that Wayland can't be accessible or that there aren't ways to make it accessible. My concern is that regardless of whether or not universal protocols exist right now, it doesn't look like they're being used and it doesn't look like Wayland is going to be accessible for a lot of people in reality. And I don't care who's fault that is; it's still the case that calling developers lazy and accusing people who are sharing real accessibility problems that they have right now of spreading "untrue rumors" does not seem to be helping to improve the situation. This isn't a situation like NVIDIA where there's one specific company we can all shame; if a bunch of disparate developers aren't taking the necessary steps to update their applications, then something is going wrong in the communication process or the steps aren't clear enough, or the incentives aren't aligned. Again, I would welcome clear and accessible documentation that average developers could use that demonstrates how Talon could be made to work with Wayland and how the concerns its developers have (https://github.com/splondike/wayland-accessibility-notes/blo...) could be handled.
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