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ethinyesterday at 9:55 PM1 replyview on HN

I would love to give Haiku a try. Indeed, I've looked at it's code before (it's quite good, or was, last time I looked at it). What prevents me is accessibility. To be fair to Haiku, implementing an actually good accessibility stack is genuinely a nightmare that AI isn't going to help much with, were you to ask it to help you with it. Primarily because many accessibility stacks (UIA, MSAA, IAccessible2, AT-SPI, ...) are massive collections of incredibly nasty hacks. I have yet to find an accessibility stack that is actually well-designed, thought out and future-proof. And screen readers are pretty much collections of good code alongside a bunch of app-specific workaround as well which just complicates things.

All of that said, I might fire it up if only to play with it from the console if I can get something like SSH working.


Replies

functionmouseyesterday at 10:37 PM

In a world where Haiku is widely adopted, I figure its accessibility model would be much like that of Windows XP, in that it works by not restricting you from doing things, rather than specifically allowing certain things. XP and Haiku let the user do pretty much whatever, and for this reason, many disabled people still rely on systems like XP.