Version
25.08 of the niri scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor has been
released. Notable changes include xwayland-satellite
integration, modal exit confirmation, and the introduction of basic
support for screen readers:
A series
of posts by fireborn earlier this year on the screen reader
situation in Linux got me curious: how does one support
screen readers in a Wayland compositor? The documentation is
unfortunately scarce and difficult to find. Thankfully, @DataTriny from the AccessKit project came across my issue,
pointed me at the right protocols, and answered a lot of my questions.
So, as of this release, niri has basic support for screen readers!
We implement the org.freedesktop.a11y.KeyboardMonitor D-Bus
interface for Orca to listen and
grab keyboard keys, and we expose the main niri UI elements via
AccessKit. [...]
The current screen reader support and further considerations are
documented on the new Accessibility wiki page.
LWN covered niri in
July.