I want to be a Gnome user; however, it is fairly difficult without a proper screen magnifier. I have read Gnome team making several improvement to Orca in version 50 and hoped that the same effort would be spent for the other visual accessibility technologies. However, impressively, Gnome magnifier had not have ANY improvement since version 46, which I tried with Zorin OS. The bugs are exactly the same, in-fact, it had gotten worse with the switch to Wayland. Is there a reason for why Desktop Zoom has not gotten any attention over 4 versions? Will Desktop Zoom get same attention in later updates of Gnome?
Realistically speaking, it’s because nobody volunteered to do the work/nobody paid anyone to do the work. That’s a sad reality of FOSS projects.
What improvement do you want to see?
I have found several bugs that are related to the magnifier. I have reported the most major one which is the fact that I cannot do Window Capture while using Desktop Zoom see here: Cannot Take Windowed Screenshot on Magnification (#8925) · Issues · GNOME / gnome-shell · GitLab The other huge thing I realized is the fact that Cursor will not accurately change shape under Xwayland windows while the Desktop Zoom is active; however, I have not made a bug report about it yet due to not getting much feedback about the first 2 requests I sent. Should I make a bug report about it, how likely is it to be fixed?
The first request I posted was about the screen recording issues I had while using the screen magnifier. I would have liked it be implemented; but, I understand that this is a feature request, so it is unlikely for it to be implemented, see here: GNOME Magnifier and Screen Recording Issues (#8385) · Issues · GNOME / gnome-shell · GitLab
Am I doing something wrong or is this simply the case of people not really caring about Desktop Zoom feature?
It’s not that people “don’t really care”: it’s that there aren’t enough people to work on everything.
GNOME is a volunteer-based project, and not only volunteer work is not fungible (you can’t tell volunteers what they should be working on), it’s also limited in resources (there aren’t enough volunteers in general, and in accessibility specifically).
What you can do, aside from filing issues, is help out with fixing issues, or fund somebody to work on them.
while I understand the nature of FOSS projects, the lack of attention is not the only reason, I believe people really do not care about the Desktop Zoom. In fact, the feature did not had the mentioned issues in the X11 session of Gnome. Gnome have switched to Wayland, knowing that it will break most of the accessibility tooling. And we have the same bugs we had from version 46, which led to my conclusion of people not caring. I do understand that Wayland might be better for Desktop use; but, it does not change the fact that it broke a working feature.
If I had my own means to fix or make someone fix this issue, I would not have written here; but, I acknowledge how useless my question was. However, I might conveyed in wrong attitude, my intention is not tell someone what to do; however, I need to draw attention to this issue since it prevents me from using the DE.