[HN Gopher] Vojtux - Unofficial Linux Distribution Aimed at Visu...
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Vojtux - Unofficial Linux Distribution Aimed at Visually Impaired
Users
Author : TheWiggles
Score : 115 points
Date : 2026-01-07 11:43 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jmward01 wrote:
| I'm glad to see things like this get built. I hate to admit it
| but I rarely consider impaired usecases when building things. I
| wonder how technology is changing this usecase lately both on the
| user end and the design end. (I know, AI) I imagine an LLM could
| help discover inadequate UI and build alternative workflows into
| products more easily.
| shakna wrote:
| Whispir is a much better TTS than almost anything else.
| However, when it gets it wrong, oh boy does it get it wrong.
|
| For everything else? Not really. JS thrashing the DOM is as
| much a pain as ever. Using ico files instead of either emoji
| or... Text... Makes UIs painful and inconsistent.
|
| Everyone using Electron and its broken [0] accessibility,
| including core Windows features...
|
| These aren't things that can be reasoned away with an LLM. An
| interface is not just text - its a reasoned nodegraph. And when
| I'm blind (comes and goes), I need the nodegraph. Not an image
| of the screen reinterpreted.
|
| [0] https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/45856
| graemep wrote:
| I find it very hard to know what to do to follow best
| practice. For example the biggest UK charity for blind people
| make social media posts about the importance of text
| descriptions and alt tags that break what I thought was good
| practice (they duplicate text in post and alt tag) and they
| seem to encourage this.
| shakna wrote:
| I don't recall where, but I've heard that before in the
| past. Perhaps in the kind of slop that makes the rounds on
| LinkedIn.
|
| There is sort of a good reason for it, in the past. Before
| the overhaul, Microsoft Speech used to skip Facebook posts,
| and read the alt text instead. It is now, however, more
| sane. Facebook was pretty darn bad at accessibility in its
| early days. A lot of intermingled broken spans for text,
| causing stuttering and other issues.
|
| However, today, most reading systems prefer the "title"
| attribute, to the "alt" one. If title exists, it'll read
| that and skip alt. Some always skip alt, regardless of it
| exists or not.
|
| Figure and figcaption are about the only way to get good
| and consistent behaviour, but you don't really control how
| those happen on most social media platforms. You throw
| everything you can at the wall, and see what happens. And
| it might change tomorrow.
|
| Today, I'd say the above is bad advice. An image
| description is a good practice. Repeating yourself, isn't.
| zersiax wrote:
| Wait the title attribute?
|
| What are you basing that on? Screen readers tend to not
| pick those up at least on interactive elements by
| default, you need to do a bit of "wiggling" to get those
| to be announced. Disclaimer: screen reader user
| shakna wrote:
| JAWS user, here. It will read both aria-label and title,
| on a button, which is an interactive element. [0]
|
| It does depend on the verbosity, if you dial that down,
| you'll probably lose the title element. But for images,
| which is what I was mentioning, it should pretty much
| always be read out.
|
| [0] https://github.com/FreedomScientific/standards-
| support/issue...
| zersiax wrote:
| I am ... relatively sure JAWS reads out title attributes
| of images because people kept erroneously sticking
| important info there decades ago, I wouldn't say that's a
| generally accepted recommendation. Not entirely sure what
| NVDA would do with an image that has only a title but no
| alt set.
| shakna wrote:
| ARIA and the web group define title to be used. [0][1]
| It's just that many agents just don't use it correctly.
| JAWS and NVDA do. Microsoft Speech used to ignore it, but
| I think they fixed that around Windows 11 release. I'm
| not sure about VoiceOver. Most braille readers I've
| used... Well, you'll be lucky if they read anything
| correctly.
|
| With the three big ones, JAWS, NVDA and Speech using it
| correctly, I'm pretty happy guiding people to use it
| today.
|
| > The title attribute represents advisory information for
| the element, such as would be appropriate for a tooltip.
| On a link, this could be the title or a description of
| the target resource; on an image, it could be the image
| credit or a description of the image; on a paragraph, it
| could be a footnote or commentary on the text; on a
| citation, it could be further information about the
| source; on interactive content, it could be a label for,
| or instructions for, use of the element; and so forth.
| The value is text.
|
| [0] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/dom.html#the-
| title-at...
|
| > Most host languages provide an attribute that could be
| used to name the element (e.g., the title attribute in
| HTML), yet this could present a browser tooltip. In the
| cases where DOM content or a tooltip is undesirable,
| authors MAY set the accessible name of the element using
| aria-label, if the element does not prohibit use of the
| attribute.
|
| [1] https://w3c.github.io/aria/#aria-label
|
| [2] NVDA bug confirming they use it:
| https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/7841
|
| [3] Sorry for the numbers everywhere. I've got a footnote
| macro set for the way most HNers use this.
| graemep wrote:
| Thank you, that is quite informative.
|
| The specific posts I see are from the Royal National
| Institute of Blind People who really ought to know.
|
| What they do is add the image description at the end of
| each text post, even thought this matches the alt text.
|
| This is the one about using alt text: https://www.faceboo
| k.com/rnibuk/posts/pfbid037RmtoSxfAJX82G4...
|
| They do now have a comment on that one that explains
| their reasoning (I did not see it until just now).
| jmward01 wrote:
| I imagine this is where LLMs could really help actually. LLMs
| are natively surfing the web now so I suspect LLM
| descriptions of sites or even having them re-render a site in
| a more usable way is becoming much more possible.
| shakna wrote:
| I don't need the text of the page. Thats easy, and I
| already have it.
|
| But information has a hierarchy, usually visual, and that
| hierarchy needs to be reflected. LLMs are famously bad at
| structure, especially any tree with significant depth. RAG
| is not enough - hallucinations become common at depth.
|
| My response now, to you, is in a semi-structured node
| graph. I know a reply has happened, because of the dangling
| children. I know who made it, and what they said, by cell
| attributes in the spans, surrounding it.
|
| Don't worry - AI is being shoved down accessibility's
| throat, like everywhere else. FSCompanion for JAWS, NVDA
| has an OpenAI plugin, and VoiceOver has it builtin.
|
| Why do I hate it? Because when it _doesn't work_, you can't
| tell. You don't know if it is hallucinating data, and
| cannot verify the response. If it is the mode of
| communication, it is all you have, making every failure a
| catastrophic failure.
| jmward01 wrote:
| Thanks for helping me, and hopefully others, understand
| the challenges more!
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Visually impaired people are more than willing to tell
| everyone what they need as far as accessible UIs, myself
| included. Barely anyone listens. Let's not let LLMs be the
| next thing that people that don't understand the actual
| problem try shoving in as a solution.
|
| Wheelchair users / people with mobility impairments
| rightfully scoff at the myriad "concepts" you see now and
| again of mech suits, wheelchairs that can climb stairs,
| etc. "Just give us a ramp! This is a solved problem. Your
| alternative is just sci-fi fetishism!" Still, it keeps
| happening. LLMs are increasingly becoming the same thing
| for people with visual impairments.
| zersiax wrote:
| 'Honestly this is a people problem more than a tech problem. We
| have the tech. We're just not using it.
|
| I'd say LLMs COULD make it easier to implement accessibility,
| it also couldn't, always a coinflip with those, but I'd say
| LLMs actually succeeding is probably unlikely given how much
| shitty code is probably in its training data :P
| cl3misch wrote:
| Are there "official" Linux distributions?
| klez wrote:
| Maybe "unofficial Fedora version" would have been more
| deserving of the "unofficial" specification.
| bandrami wrote:
| GUIX is the official GNU Linux Distribution
| SahAssar wrote:
| That is not an answer to the question. There are no "official
| linux distros".
| bmacho wrote:
| Does GNU know about that?
|
| https://www.gnu.org/distros/distros.html
| mngnt wrote:
| Here's an interview (in Czech) with Vojta, the main (only)
| developer. There might be follow up articles discussing specific
| issues he's facing as user and as a developer.
|
| https://www.root.cz/clanky/pristupnost-se-musi-stat-obcanem-...
| zersiax wrote:
| The tricky thing with these "unofficial" distros is that they are
| generally maintained by either a single individual or a small
| group of people.
|
| This is true for many accessibility projects actually (game mods,
| third-party UIs for inaccessible services/platforms, etc.). These
| are generally really meant as short-term patches while the
| problem gets fixed, except ... the problem often doesn't get
| fixed because the platforms in question figure it's been solved
| now and they don't need to care about it anymore.
|
| Accessibility really only works when it's an ongoing, first-class
| process within an app/platform's design, and we can absolutely do
| that; the standards and guidelines have existed for decades.
| People working in cybersecurity, localization, general UX should
| recognize this song and dance, which is amusing because a lot of
| the tools of those trades have atrocious accessibility and
| require all sorts of workarounds, ask me how I know.
|
| People just ... aren't including it in this way, which means
| people like myself (screen reader user and accessibility
| professional) essentially have to keep reminding people that we
| exist and that it's kinda shitty to keep forgetting about that
| fact or to decide the least amount of effort possible (LLM,
| unpaid volunteer, send in a PR LMAO) is enough to cater to people
| who have very real, very annoying and very constant UX issues we
| either crash into or crash through on literally an hourly basis.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| It's because adding new shiny features is fun and adding
| accessibility is boring, and most people in the free software
| world are there to have fun. That's also why bugs are always
| forgotten while people keep piling new features.
| serial_dev wrote:
| It's not a free and open source issue, it's a general issue
| in product development.
|
| Whereas in free software, people develop apps to have fun, in
| business product development, teams always try to ship a
| feature that is the highest leverage, and making the app work
| well with screen readers is usually not the highest leverage
| item, unfortunately.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > adding accessibility is boring
|
| I also think it's partly because adding accessibile
| interfaces is hard.
|
| If you are not visually impaired then designing then when
| designing a visual interface for an application you are more-
| or-less designing for yourself. You know how to use visual
| interfaces, so it is relatively easy for you to evaluate
| whether you've done a good job.
|
| Most people do not know how to use a screenreader, so if
| you're designing for a screenreader then it's going to be
| much harder for you to test the interface and evaluate
| whether it's actually usable by it's target audience.
|
| I'd also love to see more educational resources on this
| topic. Not just "use this attribute/role for this use case",
| but "this is how using a screenreader works. This is an
| example of a good workflow . this is an example of bad
| workflow". There's tons of material out there for visual
| design, but I haven't come accross nearly so much for other
| interfaces.
| RobMurray wrote:
| The readme addresses this problem comprehensively. "The
| ultimate vision of Vojtux is "NO VOJTUX NEEDED!" because Fedora
| will be fully accessible."
|
| It's not really a distro in the usual sense, more a minimal
| customisation of Fedora.
| a-dub wrote:
| seems like the real places to make durable changes would be in
| the desktop environment software packages (kde, gnome, etc)?
|
| although it also seems useful to figure out which third party
| packages and default settings make sense.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| I was looking at this wondering where are the previews, images,
| etc... yep, right, this is for people who can't see properly.
|
| Was pretty eye opening.
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