Hello!
I only discovered Sailfish OS a little while ago and I was extremely mindblown when I learned about it. The interface looks so, SO good! This might just be the most matured “Linux on mobile distro” that I have seen so far. It looks very userfriendly and the porting guide was amazing - I read the whole 63 pages. It was a fantastic read.
Now, I have been looking for a way to get away from iOS. These days, I am trying out an Android phone (Razer Phone 2 - which is my porting target) and it’s accessibility features… well, they exist. But this is still farther than some of the feature sets in GNOME, Plasma and other Linux DEs that are being “ported” to mobile. Meanwhile, SFOS was never a desktop shell in the first place - from what I figured. But as such, it never really needed accessibility features.
So, I would love to request these.
In detail:
- Screen Magnification
- On iOS, this is a double-tap with three fingers.
- On Android, this is a tripple tap with one finger (which conflicts with turning on developer settings. Derp…?)
- Color Inversion
- Some apps, but most specifically websites, use a bright theme. This can be very difficult for people that have issues with very bright light and can’t read black text on a white background. I have that issue - and trust me, especially during the iPhone 4S days, my retina felt like it was set ablaze more often than not…
- On iOS, this can be turned on using a tripple-tab on the home- or side button.
- On Android, this can be turned on by holding Vol+ and Vol-. Annoyingly, that also plays a notification sound…
- Screen Reader
- Plain simple: Since SFOS uses Qt, and almost that exclusively, NVDA or Orca should really just work. Some customization might be preferable though, but for most of the basics, it’ll do. Most of the customization would probably go into touch control (change reading language, “tab” between controls, reading labels, …)
- On iOS, it can be turned on with either a tripple-press of the home or power button
- On Android, it can be turned on with Vol+ and Vol-. It might also be triggered by other means, that I haven’t explored yet…
- Color-Blind / Greyscale
- This really is just a color-filtering shader.
- There usually are no shortcuts for it.
- Voice Control
- Might become useful eventually, where simple voice commands (Open app …, select textbox …, call contact …)
- Bigger (system wide) text
- Explains itself.
For me, personally, the most important part is the screen magnification. But I thought I’d list the others just in case.
Let’s see what becomes of this! In the meantime, I am going to try and port SFOS to the Razer Phone 2 so I have an actual “test device”.
Hope you found this useful!
Kind regards, Ingwie