I see a lot of #Blind people ‘apologizing’ for using #AI – I am not going to be doing that. Not now and not ever.
We need to have a conversation about how these models have been trained and how they are used going forward, but shaming disabled people for taking any chance they can to mitigate some of the challenges they face in their lives every day, is a ‘privilege’ we don’t all enjoy.
When you post an image and choose not to add alt text, publish an inaccessible PDF, release an inaccessible app - these are all choices! Maybe a tiny part of the righteous outrage that some of these people are spewing could be aimed at that?
I'm late to the party, but I found out I'm with the majority! lol According to the WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey #10, 68.2% (779 out of 1142) "respondents indicate that individuals should not describe what they look like during a virtual meeting or webinar" for blind and visually impaired participants. #blind#accessibilityhttps://www.webaxe.org/webaim-screen-reader-user-survey-10/
Just installed #archlinux on my computer. Stupidly forgot to install #brltty and #espeakup before rebooting though so now have no speech. Would any sighted person out there be willing to help me login, connect to the internet, and install what I need over a #videocall? It shouldn't take too long, and I don't want to boot from the #usb again. #BeMyEyes is great, but I'd prefer help from someone who knows #linux. #blind#tech#technology#arch
Anyone ever had to OCR a webpage to find a link? I did today. On a supposedly accessible college site, with nice fluffy captions on tables telling us poor simpleton blink blinks what the table will contain. Well it didn't contain the one link we were looking for! So yeah, thank goodness for OCR.
Just spent today at work with Linux. Fedora's Mate spin still works well generally, and Orca is much more stable. And, according to Orca, the system never even ran over about 3 of the 16 GB of RAM on that Intel NUC. I set up Emacs and Emacspeak, Firefox, Bitwarden, VS Code, and never even took my laptop out of the bag. Of course, I really miss a lot of NVDA addons, like the OpenAI one, sounds for entering browse and focus modes, and the Thunderbird addon most of all. But I was able to log into, and use, Salesforce and Google Sheets. So now when I get a good workflow with Markdown and such, I think I'll just about, maybe, be able to start using it more. Packages are all up-to-date, Orca will alwasy be current, and hopefully I can one day move to a desktop environment with a proper notification center! Oh, and I'll have to see if Pidgin still takes up more RAM the more I use it.
Note that I still wouldn't expect a regular computer user to get into Linux, as far as setting it up. But, honestly, having the #BTSpeak out on the market makes me hope that more power users and programmers will hammer Linux into more of a shape that blind people can be at home with.
Es gibt eine Webseite, die das bewegte Bild der Smartphonekamera in Töne umsetzt. Mit viel Übung können damit blinde Wesen ihre sichtbare Umgebung "hören". Nicht perfekt, aber ein genialer Ansatz.
The vOICe Web-App
Sensorische Substitution
Sehen mit ihren Ohren #blind#inklusion https://www.seeingwithsound.com/webvoice/webvoice.htm
If you are in or around NYC on May 31st and June 1st, come check out the Tactile Teach-In at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Books Library run by @ChanceyFleet! We have an awesome team of instructors who will be teaching tactile drawing and artistic techniques to #Blind and low-vision creatives. It's free, open to anyone who wants to learn and create with us, and will be a ton of fun! Time to get in touch with art again! :) https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe0vWNiEbP3n5ojgIkUe-r_E8u-dwttBT47iy-gy1iA09tkaw/viewform
Currently studying for the #cpacc exam and I found the #legal part surprisingly interesting. This topic was also relevant in a workshop I gave, so here's a couple of law suits that are #accessibility related:
Not trying to call out anyone in particular, I see a lot of people doing this, but I'm really curious and would like to understand this better.
Folks who use vague alt text with your images ("a funny book cover", "photo of me outside"), what is your thought process? Is the image description intended for sighted people? Or maybe your admin made alt text mandatory? Or maybe that really does seem sufficient.
So it looks like we’ll need to do some #accessibility advocacy next week. I’m not looking forward to it. But not because of advocating for my needs, or working with large companies. That doesn’t bother me. No, what bothers me is the interactions I will inevitably have with the #blind people who are supposed to be my allies. At least one person will say it works fine and I’m a whiner who needs to shut up. Eight or nine will tell me it’s my fault for purchasing the product at all. Several will tell me that it’s unreasonable to expect a multi-million dollar company to make things accessible on release. I’m tired. Not tired of advocacy, but tired of the lack of support, respect, and community spirit amongst my fellow blind people. We saw it during the #reddit advocacy, and we’re going to experience it all over again #a11y
Please boost for reach if this kind of stuff interests you. Will post more on this later.
Once upon a time, there was a cool emulator frontend called Retroarch. This emulator wasn't accessible until I and a few other gamers went to them and asked about adding accessibility. An amazing person known as BarryR made it happen. Now, if you turn on accessibility mode in settings, or pass the "--accessibility" (or something like that) flag on the command line, you get spoken menus, including the emulator's pause menu, good for saving states and such. Then, using PIL and other image processing Python utilities, running a server and hooking into Retroarch, the script allowed players to move around the map, battle, talk to NPC's, ETC. The only problem was, no one wanted to test it. The blind gaming community pretty much spoke, saying that we want new games. We want cool new, easy accessibility. So that's what we have no, follow the beacon or get sighted help in the case of diablo and such. It's sad, but meh. It's what we wanted I guess. No Zelda for us. So, this is about as far as he got:
To expand on what devinprater was saying: I am working on an accessibility pack/service for Final Fantasy 1 for the NES (this was what was shown in the latest RetroArch update). The idea is similar to how Pokemon Crystal access works, but it's using the RetroArch AI Service interface to do so.
Right now, the FF1 access service is mostly done, but I need more testers to try it out and give me feedback on how it's working. Right now, you can get up to the point where you get the ship, but there's no code to deal with how the ship moves, so that still needs to be done. Likewise with the airship later on.
The service works the latest version of RetroArch, on linux and mac, but not windows. This is due to how nvda reads out the text and until the next major update to nvda (which will have a feature to fix this), it'll have to wait. If you have those, I (or maybe devinprater) can help you set it up on mac/linux to test out. The package itself is available at: https://ztranslate.net/download/ff1_pac … zip?owner=
If anyone else wondered where the theme tune for PCS Games/GMA Games Lone Wolf came from, it was the main theme from Victory at Sea, a World War II documentary.
I've wondered this for about 25 years.
Thanks @pitermach for digging it up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-EXNounv-U #Blind@mastoblind
Meine getooteten Fotos versehe ich mit #ALT . #Bildbeschreibung machen mir persönlich Spaß, denn ich wende meine im Bereich Kunst angelernten Skills wie Bildinterpretation/Bildanalyse an, die ich in meinem Grafik Beruf schon lange nicht mehr benutze.
Wofür das überhaupt? Es gibt nun mal auch Menschen mit #Sehbehinderung, die können Bilder in dem Maße wie Du und ich nicht sehen. #Blind#Amaurose
Viele waren einst gutsehend.
Is there a screen reader guide for OBS? If the documentation is open source, I could write documentation no problem. I just don’t want to start from scratch. I also just can’t get the hang of scenes without sighted help so if anybody has any audio or written screen reader tutorials, that would be super helpful! I am very techy so any level will do @mastoblind#Blind
Edited with Michael fair's Mastodon username.
I'm re-reading issues of Audyssey. It was a Magazine created by Michael Feir that was dedicated to games accessible to blind people that ran from 1996 until 2008 . He edited it for the first few years before passing it on to Ron Schamerhorn.
I think it's fascinating to look back at to see how things have progressed, and of course we still have a long way to go.
Michael Feir's on Mastodon @mfeir.
You can download all 54 issues individually from the below page as well as a zip file with them all in.
There was also an e-mail discussion list. I wonder if that got archived anywhere. https://ksapergia.net/audyssey/ #blind@mastoblind
Hi all. Hoping there are some #blind#linux users out there that can help me out. I'm using an old computer, not the one I mentioned in my previous posts, but a different one, and #Orca isn't speaking. I originally installed #Ubuntu Mate, but Orca was freezing a lot, so I switched my #DesktopEnvironment to #KDEPlasma. It seemed like a lot of things were inaccessible, though, so I decided to try #Gnome. I installed Gnome, chose GDM as the display manager, and restarted the computer. Now, Orca works on the login screen but nowhere else. It seems to be running, and when I run "orca --replace" in the terminal, I get an error about something only working with X11. I've been able to tell that by scanning the screen with #SeeingAI on my #iPhone. I need to get Orca up and running again so I can use my computer. What's the best way to do this, preferably without sighted help, as my mom and stepdad aren't good with #technology. #accessibility#tech@mastoblind@main
I know what you mean about added image descriptions in the replies getting lost. On twitter I used to use quote tweets to add image descriptions.
But quoting posts doesn't work the same way here. So I do a reply with #AltText4You and then try to remember to boost the reply (I've been told that boosting helps?)