Well, Sun Accessibility Office already did great work from roughly 2003 to 2008. Then came 2008. And Sun AND IBM terminated their Accessibility work. From then on, Orca was basically kept alive by a single developer for roughly a decade. I am not 100% sure if she has given up by now, but I'd be surprised if she didn'.t

So, giving this job to Fortune500 companies is demonstratably not sustainable. A single higher up can terminate such projects with the wink of an eye.

I was more hopeful 20 years ago. Then I watched how all the good work on GNOME2 was basically trashed because of DBus transition, GTK3, and now Wayland. Fact is, hoping for the corporate world to do the work is no guarantee they will continue. And for "scratch your own itch"-philosophy to work, there are not enough disabled OSS devs. Maybe after WWIII there will be a surge in Open Source Accessibility.

You read my comment, but you are missing that I'm building to tools to bundle the work together, which is the way to make a strong enough open foundation that things like open accessibility technologies can have more ground to stand on.

Scratching our own itch works better when coordination means we can bundle together a whole lot of itch. There is no such thing as individual incentive to cooperate without a means of coordination. Anything else is just the volunteer's dilemma, and so only small itches get scratched.

Not everything can be handled using death by a thousand cuts. In the Rust in 2021 blog [1], the importance of depth versus breadth was pointed out. Depth comes from dedicated, full-time, paid work.

[1]: https://matklad.github.io/2020/09/12/rust-in-2021.html]