Accessibility on a Linux desktop is not one of the strongest points to highlight. However, GNOME, one of the best desktop environments, has managed to do better comparatively (I think).

In a blog post by Christian Fredrik Schaller (Director for Desktop/Graphics, Red Hat), he mentions that they are making serious efforts to improve accessibility.

Starting with Red Hat hiring Lukas Tyrychtr, who is a blind software engineer to lead the effort in improving Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora Workstation in terms of accessibility.

The first concerted effort to support accessibility under Linux was undertaken by Sun Microsystems when they decided to use GNOME for Solaris. Sun put together a team focused on building the pieces to make GNOME 2 fully accessible and worked with hardware makers to make sure things like Braille devices worked well. I even heard claims that GNOME and Linux had the best accessibility of any operating system for a while due to this effort. As Sun started struggling and got acquired by Oracle this accessibility effort eventually trailed off with the community trying to pick up the slack afterwards. Especially engineers from Igalia were quite active for a while trying to keep the accessibility support working well.

But over the years we definitely lost a bit of focus on this and we know that various parts of GNOME 3 for instance aren’t great in terms of accessibility. So at Red Hat we have had a lot of focus over the last few years trying to ensure we are mindful about diversity and inclusion when hiring, trying to ensure that we don’t accidentally pre-select against underrepresented groups based on for instance gender or ethnicity. But one area we realized we hadn’t given so much focus recently was around technologies that allowed people with various disabilities to make use of our software. Thus I am very happy to announce that Red Hat has just hired Lukas Tyrychtr, who is a blind software engineer, to lead our effort in making sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Workstation has excellent accessibility support!

• Fan Builds Custom Miniature IBM Model F 40% Keyboard

  It uses the same buckling spring switches as an original Model F, but with a much smaller footprint.

• Edge opportunities guide Red Hat’s evolving partnerships with GM and chipmakers - SiliconANGLE

  Leading up to the start of Red Hat Summit in early May, the major news was expected to be the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 9 after a three-year wait.

  But that script changed when Red Hat Inc. announced its In-Vehicle Operating System in partnership with General Motors Co. during the Boston event. The impact of the deal with GM was hard to miss. RHEL, as a key resource that has driven enterprise computing for over 20 years, has now become a key element in one of the most personal of use cases — the safety and performance of cars.

  “This is a pivotal moment for the transportation industry and the technology industry to come together,” said Francis Chow, vice president and general manager, In-Vehicle Operating System and Edge, during a media briefing at Red Hat Summit. “It is built upon the strong heritage of RHEL.”

• Evaluate PowerVS for a streamlined hybrid cloud environment

  Move on-premises IT environments into the cloud with PowerVS and determine if PowerVM is a better option than -- or a better companion to -- the hybrid cloud.

• Tanzu vs. OpenShift vs. Ezmeral: 3 rivals' Kubernetes offerings

  Learn how container management products from VMware, Red Hat and Hewlett Packard Enterprise compare when it comes to their overall Kubernetes strategies.

• How to approach sustainability in IT operations [Ed: Mindless, facts-free greenwashing by LF]

  Sustainability has become a priority in all aspects of a business, and IT operations is no exception. To manage energy efficiency and be climate conscious, IT ops teams must look closely at where and what is using the most energy -- and a major offender is Kubernetes clusters.

  But many teams don't know how to measure pod energy use or overall energy consumption.

  At the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit, Huamin Chen, senior principal software engineer at Red Hat, and Chen Wang, research staff member at IBM, led a session on how to approach and implement sustainability in container environments to help cut unnecessary energy use.

• Green software summit outlines developer best practices [Ed: More greenwashing from LF]

• Finserv Responds To IBM z15 Mainframe With 45% Increase In Installed MIPS Since 2019

• How to Build Organizational Resilience to Cyberattacks [Ed: Can we stop assuming everyone uses Windows or that Windows security is possible/can be salvaged? Security is not part of the goals. Also, alcohol isn't medicine.]

  I became quite interested in cybersecurity around a year ago, given the growing threats of cyberattacks by criminal groups and adversarial governments. I then joined CAMS, MIT’s interdisciplinary cybersecurity consortium and started attending its online weekly seminars. A few weeks ago I attended a CAMS seminar on cyber resilience by Manuel Hepfer, a research affiliate at Oxford University and a research analyst at ISTARI, a cyber risk management company.

  What is cyber resilience? While cybersecurity is the practice of protecting critical systems and sensitive information from digital attacks, cyber resilience is the ability to prepare for, withstand, and recover rapidly from any major disruption, whether an intentional cyberattack or a natural disaster.

  The seminar was based on a study by Hepfer and colleagues of the 2017 NotPetya ransomware attacks, a series of powerful cyberattacks which caused over $10 billion in global economic damage across a number of industries. Their study was primarily focused on three global companies that were the subject of NotPetya attacks: a logistics company with over 60,000 employees, a manufacturing one with over 20,000 employees, and a third in professional services with over 5,000 employees.

• Prioritize people during cultural transformation in 3 steps

  For the past few years, organizations have focused on finding technologies and processes that enable their employees to work from home. But with C-suites and HR professionals investing enormous resources into tools and processes, many are doing so without fully considering the most crucial piece of an agile enterprise – the people.

  To optimize performance in this new agile work era, boost employee morale, and recruit and retain the best talent amid a global-scale hiring crisis, organizations also need to address the needs of their workforce.

  As more employees voice their needs and concerns regarding their work lives, here are three ways to prioritize the people within your organization.

• Create a more diverse and equitable open source project with open standards

  This article is intended to serve as a reference so that you can understand everything you need to be proud of your repository and make your open source project more open. By using open standards, an open source project improves its quality and shareability, since such standards exist to foster better communication between creators and consumers of the project. Most importantly, open standards can guide technology development by gently enforcing space for diversity and equity.

• Fedora Community Blog: CPE Weekly Update – Week 25 2022

  The purpose of this team is to take care of day-to-day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work.

• The road to JBoss EAP 8 | Red Hat Developer

  As a leading, open source, Jakarta Enterprise Edition (Jakarta EE)-compatible application server, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) has been a trusted workhorse for enterprise Java workloads for the past decade. This article describes how the Jakarta EE specifications have evolved since the release of the current version, JBoss EAP 7, and what you can look forward to with JBoss EAP 8.

  JBoss EAP 7 is optimized for cloud environments, and when deployed with Red Hat OpenShift, offers containers, load balancing, elastic scaling, health monitoring, and the ability to deploy to a container directly from the IDE to improve developer productivity and experience.