I love Linux. I use Linux. It has its advantages.
It’s responsive—sometimes. Some things just work plain better. Settings being stored in actual config files instead of opaque registries? That’s an accessibility win. When something breaks, you don’t have to reinstall the whole OS like you would on Windows. Most importantly: it’s mine. To do with as I please. To fix, break, rebuild, and own.
And let me be clear: This post is not an attack on the people who maintain Linux accessibility.

Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.

Back in 2017, I was building a rich text editor in the browser. Unsatisfied with existing libraries that used ContentEditable, I thought to myself "hey, I'll just reimplement text selection myself! How difficult could it possibly be?" I was young. Naive. I estimated it would take two weeks. In reality, attempting to solve this problem would consume several years of my life, and even landed me a full time job for a year implementing text editing for a new operating system.

John Graham-Cumming wrote an article today complaining about how a computer system he was working with described his last name as having invalid characters. It of course does not, because anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them. John was understandably vexed about this situation, and he has every right to be, because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition.