Linux is just a base that people stack other software on top of. Audio crash? Pulse or Pipe wire?
Then the dozens of desktop environments, each doing things differently, split between X11 and Wayland.
I feel like blind devs should get together and make a distro that, out of the box, has as many accessibility features as possible, because it seems a lost cause to wait for some other distro to pick the right combination of tools.
How about devs that are using speech recognition because their hands or arms don't work or are not even present?
Also, telling someone to use a dedicated distribution because of the disability is telling them they're not worthy enough to use any distribution that suits their needs beyond accessibility issues.
I'm fortunate to have enough hand function to use a mouse to point and click on big UI elements, but for writing, I use Aqua.
I highly recommend that if you want to understand what it's like to live with speech recognition, or even be mildly disabled, you rent Aqua for a couple of months. It's affordable. No need for a dedicated microphone; it works with the built-in microphones on your laptop, provided you have a relatively quiet room.
Once you've started using Aqua to get comfortable with how Aqua works, place a book on your keyboard to block easy access. Every time you touch the book to use the keyboard, send $10 to an accessibility developer. Alternatively, you could send the money to Aqua to encourage them to develop a Linux version of the desktop client.
It's not your intention, but it is functionally what you suggested.
First, we've had these distros, about 5 of them. They're very hard to maintain and are all abandoned now. SOme of these were long-running projects but scale matters in these enterprises.
Second, you can't always use some custom distro. I work for a security company. For various reasons, it makes sense to use a small set of distros that have some major maintenance / royal road element.If I try running Slackware or some distro only maintained by one guy on my work machine, as a practical matter I'm putting my career in jeopardy when I can't do something basic and I ahve no explanation.
The reality is, this shit needs to get fixed. It's not a problem that's going to go away, blind folks aren't going to go away, though that would be really convenient for many, I guess. Let's just clean up this mess. Blind folks are trying to contribute and help, there have been some major breakthroughs lately, mostly because folks have somewhat less crappy attitudes and it's just gotten too ridiculous, but the attitude of "oh just go do this" has run its course, as has the RTFM and figure it out when you can't even get intital purchase on the system. Let's just grow up and clean up this mess, own it and get on board, no on'es asking you to fix this but at least don't be a pain from the sidelines and just say hey, this needs to happen, I support it.
>This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Then the dozens of desktop environments, each doing things differently, split between X11 and Wayland.
I feel like blind devs should get together and make a distro that, out of the box, has as many accessibility features as possible, because it seems a lost cause to wait for some other distro to pick the right combination of tools.