The thing that always worries me about these clean-slate designs is the fear that they'll ignore accessibility for disabled people, e.g. blind people, and then either the system will remain inaccessible, or accessibility will have to be retrofitted later.

It's funny you mention that because the first thing I thought when viewing this page was "is this a loading state? why is everything grey?".

I'm actually ok with that if it truly serving the purpose for what a computer should be.

I think those principles would embody the notion that the same thing cannot serve all people equally. Simultaneously, for people to interact, interoperability is required. For example, I don't think everyone should use the same word processor. It is likely that blind people would be served best by a word processor designed by blind people. Interoperable systems would aim to neither penalise or favour users for using a different program for the same task.

Yeah, this is concerning. Although, if the system is architected well, accessibility features ought to be something that can be added as an extension.

What is a screen reader but something that can read the screen? It needs metadata from the GUI, which ought to be available if the system is correctly architected. It needs navigation order, which ought to be something that can be added later with a separate metadata channel (since navigation order should be completely decoupled from the implementation of the GUI).

The other topic of accessibility a la Steve Yegge: the entire system should be approachable to non-experts. That's already in their mission statement.

I think that the systems of the past have trained us to expect a lack of dynamism and configurability. There is some value to supporting existing screen-readers, like ORCA, since power users have scripts and whatnot. But my take is that if you provide a good mechanism that supports the primitive functionality and support generalized extensibility, then new and better systems can emerge organically. I don't use accessibility software, but I can't imagine it's perfect. It's probably ripe for its own reformation as well.

For all the complaints leveled at Apple, their accessibility on their OS's is astounding.

It is said if we live long enough, we all will be disabled at some point.