accessibility has been going down for the last few years
Quick counterpoint as this gets raised a lot and I consider it disinformation.
In the Xorg -> Wayland transition, accessibility was immature as were a number of other things. And the implementations between x11 and Wayland were different (and so difficult to compare feature by feature).
Because of this, Wayland detractors made accessibility a favourite bugaboo and, even now, it is possible to find examples of things that worked better on X11 than they do on Wayland.
And there is no denying that accessibility was worse on Wayland for a while. You can say that about other things as well.
What the detractors do not tell you is that, for the major desktop environments at least, accessibility on Wayland is now better overall than it ever was on X11. Like a lot of things, whereas the poor security in X11 allows you to do many things, the capabilities have to be explicitly built into Wayland resulting in a period with poor support followed by systems that work excellently (better than they do in X11). This is a Wayland truism overall but particularly true for accessibility.
Latency and security are improved in particular. Assistive tools in X11 are a massive security hole. And accessibility in Flatpak apps is now far better as the tech built to work with Wayland sandboxing helps with Flatpak samdboxing as well.
Finally, accessibility is a greater focus in Wayland and so still improving whereas it was always an afterthought in X11. So regardless of the current state, I would say things are looking up for accessibility.
Quick counterpoint as this gets raised a lot and I consider it disinformation.
In the Xorg -> Wayland transition, accessibility was immature as were a number of other things. And the implementations between x11 and Wayland were different (and so difficult to compare feature by feature).
Because of this, Wayland detractors made accessibility a favourite bugaboo and, even now, it is possible to find examples of things that worked better on X11 than they do on Wayland.
And there is no denying that accessibility was worse on Wayland for a while. You can say that about other things as well.
What the detractors do not tell you is that, for the major desktop environments at least, accessibility on Wayland is now better overall than it ever was on X11. Like a lot of things, whereas the poor security in X11 allows you to do many things, the capabilities have to be explicitly built into Wayland resulting in a period with poor support followed by systems that work excellently (better than they do in X11). This is a Wayland truism overall but particularly true for accessibility.
Latency and security are improved in particular. Assistive tools in X11 are a massive security hole. And accessibility in Flatpak apps is now far better as the tech built to work with Wayland sandboxing helps with Flatpak samdboxing as well.
Finally, accessibility is a greater focus in Wayland and so still improving whereas it was always an afterthought in X11. So regardless of the current state, I would say things are looking up for accessibility.