Adaption of the Netwon accessibility protocol

[minf-xs]

First I want to say that I am very excited about the Cosmic desktop environment. It looks great so far and the attention you pay to accessibility issues already at an early stage is far beyond the (unfortunate) norm and shows you really care about making this a desktop environment for everyone.

My idea: Would you be interested to implement Matt Campbell's Newton protocol along the full accessibility stack? It's a successor to AT-SPI designed for Wayland. It is inspired by the protocol modern web browsers use and deploys a push based approach to reduce the latency and improve the responsiveness of the screen reader. Matt is also the author of access kit and used it for his proof of concept implementation for GTK.

There are still some open questions with regards to Newton that need to be answered. Matt wrote a blog post about the overall state of the project and about what still needs to be done.

So the idea is to implement the protocol for Iced, for the Cosmic application and UI, the compositor and a screen reader (Matt has a fork of Orka that implements a DBUS based protocol between the compositor and the AT, Odilia as a rust based screen reader might also be an option). It would not only be great for Cosmic to have a working and modern screen reader setup, but also Cosmic could help finalize the protocol and lead the way for the rest of the Linux desktop space.

[minf-xs]

I have been thinking about this and I actually want to give this a try. I got together with two other developers and we are thinking about applying for a grant to work in this full time. Would you be willing to accept pull-requests for this?

Also, if we get this implemented and merged, would you be willing to support it as a feature of Cosmic in some future release?

[jacobgkau]

I think we tried to use Newton a while back. It may've just been too early, and/or we got working what we were trying to without using it. See the default newton_noble branch of https://github.com/pop-os/orca (this is a dev branch, not currently shipped by default in Pop!_OS).

Would you be willing to accept pull-requests for this?

We're very busy right now with trying to polish as much as possible for the Epoch 1 release in a couple of weeks. But in general, we're very interested in accessibility and are open to pull requests that improve it.

Also, if we get this implemented and merged, would you be willing to support it as a feature of Cosmic in some future release?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this. If it gets merged into COSMIC, it will be a feature of COSMIC.

You're welcome to join the Pop!_OS Mattermost server to chat about potential development (join the ~development and/or ~cosmic-epoch channels). Again, keep in mind the developers and UX team are currently focused on the feature-locked version we're about to release, but they may have thoughts on what you're seeking to do.

[minf-xs]

Thanks for your reply! I will have a look at your Orca branch.

We're very busy right now with trying to polish as much as possible for the Epoch 1 release in a couple of weeks. But in general, we're very interested in accessibility and are open to pull requests that improve it.

Sounds great. I don't think I get to this before the second quarter of 2026 anyway.

Also, if we get this implemented and merged, would you be willing to support it as a feature of Cosmic in some future release?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this. If it gets merged into COSMIC, it will be a feature of COSMIC.

Yes, but there might be a difference between a feature that happens to be part of COSMIC and a feature that the COSMIC team is willing to actively support, e.g. in case something breaks in the future. At least that was my thinking behind the question.

You're welcome to join the Pop!_OS Mattermost server to chat about potential development (join the ~development and/or ~cosmic-epoch channels). Again, keep in mind the developers and UX team are currently focused on the feature-locked version we're about to release, but they may have thoughts on what you're seeking to do.

I will, thanks for the pointer!