How does Haiku's accessibility story look like? Any plans for a screen reader?
Blind user here, I would like to try this out and see what all this fuss is about, but I think I can't. Can someone explain what's so great about Haiku's UI?
(Haiku developer here.) The way the UI is structured, creating a screen reader would not be too difficult, and I think one of our developers attempted it at one point, but it was certainly never finished and is not usable right now. Sorry :(
Beyond the spirit of and compatibility with BeOS, Haiku's advantages are being full-fledged desktop operating system developed by a single team as a single unit (that is, unlike Linux or the BSDs where the kernel, window manager, GUI toolkit, application suite, etc. are developed by separate teams and combined by yet other groups); and also our occasionally unique approach to systems design and implementation (for instance, the Haiku package manager is based around a union mount of block-compressed filesystem images.)
The UI itself is reminiscent of 1990s UIs (gradients, bevels, more saturated colors), with a modern feel (modern fonts, antialiasing, etc.) The window borders are not rectangular, but are instead yellow "tabs" which are only as wide as their text is, and so windows from separate applications can be "stacked" and used as a unit, like tabs within applications.
Blind user here, I would like to try this out and see what all this fuss is about, but I think I can't. Can someone explain what's so great about Haiku's UI?