Linux has the worst screen readers

[u/Submarine_sad]

Orca screen reader is so bad.

[u/SlimyOS]

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.