You know, I hear some talk of getting rid of techno-utopianism, of getting rid of the corporations, but what else is there? Linux, where no screen reader works with touch screens so no mobile Linux for us, where the best desktop for us blind people is Mate, with no notification center, where if you have Braille enabled, and quit any app that isn't GTK based, Orca gets lost in the middle of nowhere? Maybe that bug has been fixed, but for like a year or more, it wasn't. And yes, I know the Orca maintainer has been doing tons more work on Orca lately, and Gnome now has a blind person working on a new way of doing accessibility on the desktop. But I keep coming back to that Fedora #accessibility meeting, where the tools were really hard to use so that I could barely participate in being one of the few blind people there that has even a finger on the wheel to steer a thing that should be about us. And I don't feel like a group of sighted, able people can make this new vision of computing, a sort of community-lead thing, any better than Linux. I mean, we have communities. And there's still images without Alt-text. There's still Linux live images that don't even have Orca on it. These distro communities still expect blind people, which have been thrust aside for the past 20 years, to come to them with their... feedback. Such a clinical word that's become.
Look, even if it's a community from the bottom up, who's at the bottom? I assure you, it won't be blind people. And if you splenter up that community and tell us to make our own distros, well, we've tried that. Vinux, Sonar, F123, Blinux. All gone. You know which distros support us the most? Debian/Ubuntu, Mint, and Arch. With Fedora you still have to enable accessibility variables last time I checked around V37 or 38.
When you say "everyone," what do you mean by that? Your group? Your group and adjacent groups? All people? Do you know about all people? Do you know about blind people? Or Deaf people?
@devinprater I literally had these thoughts over 20 years ago. Wanted Linux to be an accessible desktop. The incentives for devs to bother were never there. It became so tiring. Decided to just deal with MS and Apple. They care because of laws. Most of these laws are irrelevant to FOSS devs, and they don't have any fux to give about our problems. I don't have a lifetime to put on hold while I beg people to care, so I'll just pay Apple/MS to do an okay job.
@devinprater totally right though, decentralization is good, but only if everyone has a say in how its run, whether its linux or Mastodon or something else, if we a blind people don't have a say in providing feedback that actually gets taken care of instead of ignored for the prettiest visual thing out there, decentralization is no better for us than getting centralized and using a Microsoft or Apple computer. At least if we get Windows or Mac OS, they are required to follow the laws on accessibility and will support accessible software way more than the people randomly creating Linux Distros in there garages and not following any laws whatsoever.
@devinprater Agreed with this so much goddamn. You literally said everything I've been thinking for the past little while. I find this is a big problem with open source in general, obviously not all projects, there's some amazing work happening, but just the lack of awareness around accessibility is staggering to me.
@devinprater Thank you for sharing that — it's an important reminder that #accessibility is a fundamental human right, not a minor adjustment we can make later.
@devinprater I've seen the same issue in the cycling community. I strongly support safer cycling infrastructure and moving away from a car centric culture, but there seems to be an attitude that we need to do that first, and then figure out later how to accommodate disabled people who need vehicular transportation (followed by hand waving and vague predictions).
What it always comes down to is telling disabled people to get out of the way of some ableist dream and take one for the team.
@devinprater well, I really don’t know anything about Linux. I have to disagree that the corporations are helping with accessibility. We don’t need a company who only cares about using us as money machines. What we need is more education, and I think the corporations actually make it worse. It’s basically all about the fact that these devs really only care about making money, and they do not give two flat darns about us.
@dennou_reijuu19 Linux isn't much better though. They're only now starting to consider listening to us. And they've not even gotten to a point where they're actively looking for feedback. I mean, at least Windows works for a lot of what we need. I mean I know a lot of that is scripts from the screen readers but goodness, we have tools on Windows. Games. Book readers. All kinds of stuff.
@devinprater that’s very true. And all of those people or entities that don’t want to listen to us are the companies. So when we say we want to get rid of this Silicon Valley bullshit, we’re basically just saying we want to get rid of this class warfare that allows them to shut us up and not listen to us and remove screen reader support from things and yell at us if we don’t agree with their emojis being blank spaces. Once money gets involved all the empathy goes away.
@dennou_reijuu19 I agree with that. But what do we replace it with? I mean, "communities" aren't really that much better. Everyone has something way more important to work on than accessibility.
@devinprater we replace the money with more education for these developers before they start programming. The ones I’ve had to work with literally don’t think it’s important because they don’t know about it. Let me tell you the only reason why we got a readable play and share button on voice synthesis. Samples is because I screamed at saeho like a little fucker for three days straight. I had to force him to learn about alt text.
@dennou_reijuu19 That would be nice. But that would mean we'd have to be noticed, not just by individual developers, but by whole communities. And keep being noticed. And that it's not just one blind person doing all the work.
@dennou_reijuu19@devinprater Very true. Big tech corporations don't care about accessibility, but they do care about being sanctioned through lawsuits or legislation. Governments are able to force them to support minority rights like accessibility; True, they'll do the bare minimum they can get away with, so what we have to do is keep raising that minimum.
Meanwhile, how do we get FOSS projects to care about anyone but their participants or sponsors?
@david_megginson@devinprater well first of all, we can’t just speak in the US because some of these programs are in places like Canada and I’m not sure about their laws. And if anyone doesn’t care, will just practice localism and do what’s right for us.
@dennou_reijuu19@devinprater I can speak for Canada. Section 15 of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Accessible Canada Act give legal guarantees of accessibility, but I haven't seen anything enforced as strongly as the Americans with Disabilities Act is (at least sometimes) in the U.S.
@boujee_bottle@devinprater@david_megginson I do agree with that, but I think it’s more of a worldwide problem. They call it the worldwide web for a reason, and the whole world clearly doesn’t know much about accessibility.
@dennou_reijuu19@devinprater This is meaningless twaddle. Compare, in the real world, the accessibility of any Apple product, or Microsoft prodoct, or even Google product to anything produced by the Free Software Foundation or Linux--sorry, GNU-Linux--in the past decade. The corporations come out ahead every time. There are reasons for that.
@objectinspace@devinprater of course they come out ahead because they’re always the bigger corporations. They only try so they don’t get backlash. It’s the smaller corporations that are more concerned about money and they apparently don’t have time for accessibility that I’m upset about. It’s the developers who purposefully let accessibility go to the wayside just so that they can make money off of their latest releases without a care in the world.
FOSS developers, on the other hand, could care less who uses their product or why; it is released for free, and therefore exists in the world as it is. Want to change it? Learn C# and submit a pull request!
@objectinspace@devinprater then I would like an explanation of why a certain developer that I used to work with had the audacity to say that he didn’t have time to add alt text to the emojis that were being read as blank spaces but then he had the time to make a $400 a year subscription. Explain the decision to remove the accessibility from BitLife game for three months a couple years ago.
@dennou_reijuu19@devinprater easy: he's an idiot who doesn't care about blind people. Claiming to not have the cash is just another excuse.
I know this from personal experience. My company cut over 20,000 jobs this year, but not accessibility. By contrast, Elon bought twitter for $44 billion and the first thing he did was cut everyone in accessibility. Since then, the richest man in the world has spent $0 on helping people with disabilities.
@objectinspace@devinprater that is the biggest grain of truth in this entire thing. I can see that we have different experiences with developers but yes, Saeho is an ableist idiot and I also have experience with a completely unpaid developer of his own software who has taken hours out of his days to work with me on being able to use it. So while not all corporations are caring and loving, not all community developers are dimbos.
@dennou_reijuu19@devinprater I'm saying that profit+regulation motivates people to fix accessibility; without it we have nothing, beyond good will and pleading.
@objectinspace@dennou_reijuu19 Well they sure love donations right? I mean, I don't know how much NV Access gets from users, but foss devs could maybe care about having a little more money from loyal users.
@devinprater@dennou_reijuu19 They also get quite a bit of money from corpos, ironicly (or they used to, at any rate) (not that there's anything wrong with that)
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