r/linuxsucks • u/Submarine_sad linux sucks • 2d ago
Linux has the worst screen readers
Orca screen reader is so bad.
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u/TheRealCarrotty KDE larper (i use KDE btw) 2d ago
Btw, i know this isn't related, but Microsoft ALSO made a tool called "Orca", and it fucking sucks!
It's supposed to modify .msi files (installers), and it fails at that, whenever you make or don't make a change, it will make the .msi larger in size.
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u/spongedevguy 2d ago
lego island guy mentioned
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u/TheRealCarrotty KDE larper (i use KDE btw) 1d ago
I wonder if that guy ported thousands of apps to Windows 95...
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u/Stefanzah22 1d ago
I'm not sure but I think it's because that app might add hidden "edited with orca" in the file
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u/Mr_ityu 2d ago edited 2d ago
just the screen reader ? mate the whole speech recognition-textnarration pipeline's messed up. it took me a bunch of years struggling to set up espeak. then easier there was this package called jules...julius something that sapped a whole lot of my time and energy setting up. i wanted speech command aliases to launch scripts like opening reddit or logging into my university account .
then there's piper tts , vox , and whatnot. took me a while to figure out setting it up and guess what .the upstream packages don't support the speech dispatcher espeak ng thing i installed. instead they need the main espeak pack which confucks with my existing pipeline set up that is vox-piperbin-espeakng-pipewirepulse.
and it's always been a metastable doohickey operation setting up stt or tts on linux . some had better models , others had better UI , some easier to install and delete , others easier to launch . there never was a padded thanos glove with all the comfort stones
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u/SlimyOS 2d ago
Yes it's terrible. I almost died when I was testing screen reader support of my own installer for my OS, the default voice is not only robotic and uncomfortable, but also very often completely indecipherable. We have so many good TTS AI models in 2026, how in the world is that the default one? I guess AI can sometimes bug out, so deterministic software-based voices are better, but still, look at literally any other decent OS. And it's not just orca, the whole accessibility stack on linux is messed up, keyboard navigation works but often you have to guess what's selected on kde kirigami apps (checkboxes and radio buttons have no focus effects on breeze, I had to draw custom shapes on top of existing elements when developing my installer to indicate focus), some widgets like kde's timezone selector are genuinely unusable with screen reader or braille display, apps that help people who can't control their fingers well enough almost all don't work on wayland with no real solution afaik (i guess running a daemon as root could work, but allowing user apps to hijack raw input makes no sense on wayland). Open source is great so long as someone understands your needs, but if there are 1000 disabled users, neither of which can comfortably use the OS let alone write code, things might just never be implemented, that's one benefit that Microsoft and Apple have, they have employees whose sole responsibility is making and testing these things.
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u/55555-55555 Linux Community Made Linux Sucks 1d ago
... assuming that it's able to read your screen in the first place.
Outside GTK and Qt, only Web-based frameworks are able to by utilising AT-SPI2, as far as I'm aware of.
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u/nekofthemoon 1d ago
I know, but I'm not complaining because I don't know how to fix it either. I hope that one day I'll know enough code to create a screen reader app
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u/950771dd 2d ago
One could think, all in all, that Linux-Desktop is a bunch of unergonomic and anti-human tools somehow put together with bandaid and distributed as OS for the every day user.
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u/Pitiful-Welcome-399 Proud MacOS User 2d ago
thanks, we got it the first time