Alright. Here's how it is. Once you appoint yourself as gatekeeper, you become part of the problem. We as #disabled people have precious few allies as it is, without actively alienating the ones we have. You can stand up and offer to help, stand up and provide constructive feedback on how to improve, stand up and show appreciation, or just sit your ungrateful self down. Just stop. Thanks @stefan for raising awareness of #AltText. #blind#accessibilityhttps://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/112451222240570433
@stefan It occurrs to me that the #AltText hall of fame is not run by a #Blind or #VisionImpaired person because in the decades that alt text has been a thing, nobody from within this community has stopped to think that demonstrating how to do it well might be helpful for our cause. When an ally does it, we treat them like an intruder. Whatever. Enjoy your internet full of suboptimal alt text.
Just listened to my second podcast of the day 🎧, where the hosts are puzzled about who wants all this AI vision stuff they've seen this week. All they can come up with is blind people. Yes! Yes! Yes! We do! 🙌✨ #Blind#AI#TechForGood#Inclusion#Accessibility#ThisDayInAI#Verge
It's June 10, 2024, at 4:00 PM Central US time. Almost every blind person that owns an iPhone has installed the iOS 18 beta. Some are playing retro games with the new, AI driven screen recognition. Others are gladly using DecTalk as their main voice, the Enhanced Siri voices that use ML to speak using emotion and context, as their reading voice, Eloquence as their notification voice (sent to one ear to minimize distractions), and finding it amazing that VoiceOver emphasizes italic text, and emboldens bold text. Others are finding it amazing that they can navigate their whole phone using Braille screen input, searching to find things by typing a few letters, or just swiping down through everything. A few are connecting their multi-line Braille displays, and feeling app icons and images, made much more understandable through touch, using an AI filter.
The next day, when news of all these features filters down to Android users, they quickly begin hammering Google, wanting DecTalk and Eloquence on their Pixel phones, like iOS users have. But Google is silent as always, only just now having given Chromebook users high quality Google TTS voices.
Note: great liberty has been taken to imagine the coolest outcome for the vague feature announcements Apple gave for VoiceOver users. We'll see just how cool, or not, they actually are on June 10.
Chromebooks already have great screen reading capabilities built in...
Awww Google, how cute of you. Great? Nope. Next time, remember. Nothing about us, without us. ChromeVox has barely been updated in years, just like VoiceOver for Mac, and Narrator. ChromeVox barely has any options for fine-tuning verbosity, keyboard commands, pronunciation, and some keyboard commands, like Search + Control + A for accessibility actions, aren't even well-documented. I should know. I had to use an Acer Spin 713 for a good 3 months as my primary laptop. So kindly stop talking, then ask, then act before you speak further.
"Updated keyboard shortcuts and first-letters navigation in Google Drive"...
First letters navigation? Come on. Any blind person can tell that this wasn't written by anyone who uses these technologies.
And nowhere in this article is anything new for ChromeVox. See? This is the kind of, frankly, bullshit that I hate on GAAD. Just shut your mouth and listen for once.
Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD). Today, I want you to ask yourself, then act, before you speak. Do you have an app you're maintaining? Look at some #accessibility resources for the framework you use for the user interface. Do you know if it's accessible or not? If it's not accessible, are you doing anything about it? Do you tell disabled visitors to your app/site that it's not accessible, and give them a timeframe, if any, when it will be? Do you have a website? If so, do you know if it's accessible or not? Are you an artist of any kind? Is your media accessible? Are you a writer? If so, are the images in your book described with #AltText?
If you're a part of a company that has anything to do with accessibility, including proudly posting about it, do you have any disabled employees? If so, do you show them that they're appreciated? If not, why don't you have any? If you create art about people with disabilities, do you have disabled people take a look at it before you share it? If you write books that have images in them, have any disabled people checked to make sure the Alt-text makes sense, and that the book is accessible otherwise? If not, why not? And when you get disabled people to check out apps, books, sites for your professional needs, do you pay them for it?
Please do remember us on every other day of the year, but particularly today, please remember: nothing about us without us.
I'd actually love to hear from actual #deaf or #hardOfHearing folks about what they think of this. It kinda looks gimmicky in a " who asked for this?" kind of way to me, but I'm a #blind person. I don't know if people have been looking for this but I'd really love to learn more :)
How do you feel about duplicate links in articles, blogs, whatever? Meaning: A certain word is a link (let's say "HEALTH") leading to an external website.
Would it annoy you if this word was always a link and it's mentioned for example 20 times in an article? Or would you rather have it only once to make it easier to scan for links?
I’m asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application....
I think a good approach could be to think about how you could reach users of different platforms.
A lot of Mastodon users follow hashtags, so including relevant hashtags (#accessibility and #blind seem like good starting points) might be a good idea. Tagging groups, such as @accessibility, might also help.
I think Kbin/Mbin might be better suited for this than Lemmy, as it integrates better with other federated networks. You can follow microbloggers and boost content, which in turn makes them likely to follow you back and creates a community beyond which Lemmy community you choose to post in. Your Mastodon followers will see your posts, but it won't matter to them which community you post it in.
It's hard for content to make the jump from Lemmy to Mastodon as Lemmy does not make itself discoverable, but as soon as content reaches Mastodon users nothing stops them from interacting with it (by boosting or replying).
Sadly Kbin.social lacks sufficiently active moderation these days, so you might be better off with an mbin instance. I also have no idea how accessible Mbin is to blind users.
Edit: I over-emphasized the point about reaching a broader audience. If you want to discuss a narrow topic but you don't want most ActivityPub users to see it because you don't value their input, I guess Lemmy is as good as it gets.
A lot of Mastodon users follow hashtags, so including relevant hashtags (#accessibility and #blind seem like good starting points) might be a good idea. Tagging groups, such as @accessibility, might also help.
As I’ve already said, for someone who is not on Mastodon, it’s pretty much worthless to try and discuss Fediverse post accessibility as applied on something that isn’t Mastodon with people who are on Mastodon. And Guppe is practically exclusively used by Mastodon users.
One example: Many Mastodon users have stuck in their heads that you can’t post more than 500 characters in the Fediverse. For even more Mastodon users, “alt-text” and “image description” are 100% mutually synonymous and mean the exact same thing. Image descriptions, no matter what they contain, always go into the alt-text. It’s like a law of physics, deviating from which is unimaginable.
If you talk about describing or explaining something in the post text body, whoosh, it flies over their heads. No matter how much sense that’d actually make.
Not to mention that you have to keep every post and every comment at 500 characters or below, otherwise a large number of Mastodon users will pretend you aren’t even there or mute or block you outright. I know that from personal experience. And there are things that simply can’t be discussed in glorified tweets.
Also, Mastodon seems to only know two kinds of pictures. One, screenshots of social media posts. The stuff that requires transcripts. Two, simple real-life photographs, especially cat pictures.
Edit: I over-emphasized the point about reaching a broader audience. If you want to discuss a narrow topic but you don’t want most ActivityPub users to see it because you don’t value their input, I guess Lemmy is as good as it gets.
Ideally, I’d discuss this topic with people from all over the Fediverse. And I want these people to discuss it with each other within the comments section. Mastodon users who really care a lot for accessibility, who want everyone’s needs to be catered to, and who are shooting for WCAG level AA, just as well as users of Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey etc. etc. who have much higher character limits in their post and users of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) who do not have a character limit.
I don’t just want a bunch of one-on-one discussions between myself and someone else. I want to discuss such matters with Mastodon users and non-Mastodon users, and I want the Mastodon users and the non-Mastodon users to read and reply to what the other side has written.
I want people on non-Mastodon projects to tell Mastodon users who only know Mastodon what things are like on other projects. I want Mastodon users to tell non-Mastodon users how important accessibility is and which aspects of accessibility is how important. And I want to learn from this discussion.
I want to read opinions and ideas from all over the Fediverse. And I want users from all over the Fediverse to read these opinions and ideas.
And in particular, I want to discuss with them edge-cases in accessibility that go far, far beyond Twitter/Mastodon screenshots and cat photographs.
A few more notes about video games and VoiceOver Recognition: the story mode of Blazblue reads very well with screen recognition, even better than Windows OCR! In some games, when menus have descriptions, you can tell which menu item you're on by the description of the item at the bottom. With the Provinence app, audio latency is amazingly low with my AirPods Pro 2. So, playing games using those is really, really amazing! No game mode needed! I can't wait for more blind people to get into this! #accessibility#blind#gaming#Provinence#iOS#RetroGames#emulation#emulators
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:
For discussing Fediverse accessibility, where would you recommend me to go? Or stay here?
I’m asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application....