TL;DR: Is my statement below incorrect? Are there in fact meaningful efforts to improve accessibility on Linux? Are there distros that people have actually used practically that make an effort to be accessible?
I have used desktop Linux on and off since 2009, mostly flavors of Ubuntu with occasional detours into things like Arch or CentOS (RIP).
I currently have Mint installed on a separate drive but I can't fully break away from Windows because as a blind user the experience is not only unsatisfactory it has gotten worse in the years I've been using it. Orca hasn't improved at all, and the magnifier has actually lost functionality at some point, my guess is the move away from GNOME 2. Among other things you used to be able to assign arbitrary modifier keys to zoom in and out with the mouse wheel but this is no longer the case.
I have little faith that things will improve. Any given Linux distro isn't one product, it's a bunch of different projects. One group makes the kernel, another makes the shell, another the window manager, yet another makes the desktop environment, audio, bluetooth, graphics drivers etc. All these make the assumption that the user is able-bodied, and bolting accessibility on top of all these disparate systems after the fact is very difficult. It's no accident that MacOS and iOS are frequently cited as the most accessible platforms. Apple controls the entire stack from hardware to UI and even many of the apps and has the resources to devote to serving a comparatively tiny portion of their userbase.
There has been some noise about the state of accessibility in Linux last year. Seems that things are improving and the Devs of major DEs are taking things more seriously. From a more recent blog post on the topic:
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-4-wayland-is-growing-up-and-now-we-dont-have-a-choice/
The other posts in that series gives a good overview of previous things as well. Seems that author has been successful in raising awareness about the subject which hopefully will help improve things.
Addendum to my previous reply. I've installed Pop!_OS on bare metal. The magnifier is marginally better. Scrolling to zoom doesn't also pass the input to the current application causing a page to scroll at the same time. That's good. Invert colors is present, but there's no obvious quick way to switch between normal and inverted. There's no options to change the size or color of the cursor, though I did find a config file
/etc/environmentwith a cursor size setting. Unfortunately the cursor size depends on the currently focused app, so if the cursor is over the desktop or a component of the DE like the settings app, its size will reflect the setting in/etc/environmentbut if you move it over a Firefox window, for example, it will shrink.Orca is as bad as ever, perhaps worse since there's no obvious way in the GUI to change screen reader settings like verbosity and rate.
UPDATE:
Much of the documentation references options that are no longer present, I assume referring to GNOME rather than Cosmic. Docs on Github, for example, mention
typingandpointing & clickingas options in the accessibility settings menu, but these are not present in Cosmic.So I'm not much better off.
Currently trying Pop_OS in a VM.
Long way to go but the fact it presents the accessibility options the first time you log in post install shows some thought has been put into it. Magnifier is present, and unlike Mint there's an invert color option. Haven't explored enough to see if any of this can be globally bound to keyboard shortcuts. Orca still craps the bed as soon as it's started but that might be due to the VM not playing nice with audio. My use case is reading text under the mouse. It has to be responsive and it has to read more than just a line. Paragraphs are usually the ideal.