Accessibility Conformance Report
What Dagric OS actually does for users with disabilities — including the three places where the honest answer is "it does not."
This is a self-assessment, not a third-party audit. Every row below was checked against the built ISO rather than against a design document, and the build refuses to produce an image if the screen-reader speech chain is broken or if the high-contrast colour scheme fails its contrast target. It has not been reviewed by an independent accessibility auditor. If your procurement process requires one, say so through the contact form and we will tell you plainly where we are rather than send you a filled-in form.
Summary
A blind user can evaluate Dagric from the live USB and run it on an installed machine. The gaps are the login password prompt, refreshable braille displays, and slow keys — all three are described below with the reason, not glossed.
Keyboard access — Section 508 502.4 / ANSI-HFES 9.3
| Criterion | Conformance | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| 502.4(A) Sticky Keys ANSI-HFES 9.3.3 |
Supports | Implemented by KWin's StickyKeysPlugin, which ships loaded and enabled by default in its own metadata. Off at install; switched on in System Settings → Accessibility. |
| 502.4(B) Slow Keys ANSI-HFES 9.3.4 |
Does Not Support | This is a real gap. KWin 4:6.3.6-1 ships sticky, bounce and mouse
keys plugins and no slow-keys plugin. The older path — kaccess applying it through
XkbSetControls — reaches only XWayland clients, and the Dagric session is
Wayland, so the setting would appear in the interface and do nothing for native
applications. We would rather report this than ship a switch that lies. |
| 502.4(C) Bounce Keys ANSI-HFES 9.3.5 |
Supports | KWin's BounceKeysPlugin. The repeat-rejection delay defaults to 200 ms and is configurable. |
| 502.4(D) Visual alternative to audio cues | Supports | Visible bell (screen flash in place of the system beep), implemented by kaccess. Off by default because an unrequested full-screen flash on every terminal bell is startling. |
| Mouse Keys (pointer from the number pad) | Supports | KWin's MouseKeysPlugin. Off by default, since enabling it takes the number pad away from numeric entry. |
| Full keyboard operation of the desktop | Supports | KDE Plasma 6 desktop, launcher, panels and System Settings are keyboard navigable. |
Screen reader and non-visual access
| Criterion | Conformance | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Screen reader, installed desktop session | Supports | Orca 48.1 with speech-dispatcher and espeak-ng over the AT-SPI2 bus. The build
verifies the whole chain — reader, speech daemon, the sd_espeak-ng output
module, its configuration file, and a working audio plugin — and fails rather
than shipping an image where Orca would run and stay silent. Toggled with
Meta+Alt+S, which is bound before first login. |
| Screen reader discoverable in the menu | Supports | Debian's Orca package ships no menu entry at all, so searching the launcher for "screen reader" or "narrator" on a stock system finds nothing. Dagric adds its own Screen Reader and Accessibility entries, keyworded for the terms people actually type — including narrator, JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver. |
| Screen reader before purchase / during evaluation | Supports | The live USB boot menu carries a second entry, "… (with screen reader)", in both the BIOS and UEFI menus. It boots with autologin and starts Orca automatically, and the choice carries into the installed system if the user proceeds to install. Verified present in the shipped ISO. |
| Screen reader at the login password prompt | Does Not Support | A real gap, and not one we can close. SDDM 0.21.0 has no mechanism to run assistive technology in its greeter; the upstream request is open and unassigned. Launching the AT-SPI bus before the greeter does not help either, because Qt reads the bus address only from the environment and never from the X root-window property the launcher publishes — Orca would attach to a bus the greeter never joined and announce an empty screen. Mitigations: on a single-user machine the installer offers autologin, which removes the prompt entirely; and once enabled, Orca returns automatically at every session start, so the gap is the password field alone and never the desktop behind it. Nothing in Section 508 or EN 301 549 requires a pre-login screen reader, and we would rather state this than imply coverage we do not have. |
| Refreshable braille display support | Does Not Support | Orca is capable of driving a braille display, but brltty — the driver
layer — is not installed, so no braille device will work out of the box. A user can
install it themselves from Debian. We do not claim braille support. |
Low vision — contrast, magnification, text size
| Criterion | Conformance | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| WCAG 1.4.6 Contrast (Enhanced), 7:1 — high-contrast theme | Supports | The bundled High Contrast style is measured, not named on trust: the build computes WCAG relative luminance for its colour pairs and fails if the scheme does not clear 7:1 — the enhanced bar, not the ordinary 4.5:1 one. It is one of the four styles included in the free edition, not a paid upgrade. It also switches to a flat wallpaper, because text over a photograph has no statable contrast ratio. |
| Screen magnification | Supports | KWin's built-in zoom, available from System Settings → Accessibility. There is no separate magnifier application. |
| Text and interface scaling | Supports | A dedicated Text Size tool in the Dagric Hub, plus global scaling in System Settings. |
| Pointer visibility at the login screen | Supports | The login screen pointer is enlarged to 32 px to match the desktop; the stock 24 px pointer is genuinely hard to find on a 4K panel, and the login screen is the first thing a new owner sees. |
| Colour is not the sole means of conveying information | Partially Supports | Dagric's own tools, wizard and documentation were checked for this. Bundled third-party applications (LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and the rest) carry their own upstream conformance and are not covered by this report. |
Other
| Criterion | Conformance | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Biometric sign-in not the only method | Supports | Fingerprint sign-in is available (fprintd) and always optional; a password always works. |
| Documentation in an accessible format | Supports | The user guide and the 95-page application manual ship on the machine as plain, semantic HTML readable by Orca, and work with no network connection. Documentation is currently available in English and German only. |
| No automatic restarts or timed interruptions | Supports | The system never reboots itself. Updates apply in the background and wait for the user. |
| Accessibility settings preserved across sessions | Supports | Settings are stored per user and reapplied at every login. |
Scope and limits
This report covers the Dagric OS desktop environment, its own tools, its installer, its boot menus and its documentation. It does not assert conformance for the independently developed applications bundled with the system — LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Blender and the rest each publish their own accessibility information.
Where a row above says Does Not Support, that is a deliberate statement rather than an omission. Slow keys, braille and the login prompt are the three known gaps as of this release; if that changes, this page changes with it.
Feedback
If you use assistive technology and something here is wrong, incomplete, or does not match what the machine actually did, we want to know — that is more useful to us than a compliment. Use the contact page. If you are evaluating Dagric for an institution and need something in a particular format, ask; we would rather answer a specific question than guess.