Tux Machines

The quest for a secure and accessible desktop

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 16, 2023

COSMIC DE: Tiling redesign and libcosmic rebasing

Devices, Tinkering, and Open Hardware

This article is an overview of accessibility and security efforts in Arcan “the desktop engine”: past, present and those just around the corner. It is not the great and detailed one I had planned, merely a tribute, presented in order to assist ongoing conversations elsewhere.

Because of this the critique of other models is omitted but not forgotten, as is the firey speech about why UI toolkits need to “just fucking die already!” as well as the one of how strapping a walled garden handsfree to your face hardly augments your reality as much as it might “deglove” your brain — but it is all related.

What should be said about the state of things though is that I strongly disagree with the entire premise of some default “works for me”, a set of trapdoor features (repeatedly pressing shift is not a cue to modal dialog a ‘do you want to enable sticky keys?’ in someone’s face) and a soup of accessibility measures hidden in a setting menu somewhere. I consider it, at most, a poor form of ableism.

Due to the topic at hand this post will be text only. Short-links to the sections and their summaries are as follows: [...]

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↺ Read On: Arcan

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