weirdwriter

@weirdwriter@tweesecake.social

I'm a Blind, and gay, author and essayist. Former journalist turned Romance writer. I have a literary agent, and freaking love cats and diverse audiobooks and fiction podcasts.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

aral, to accessibility
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

Q. “I am blind, and I have been since 2021. I have grown very accustomed to using NVDA on Windows, which is a free open source screen reader. It's great… my question is, does Linux have good support for screen reading software?”

A. “As someone that deals with this on a daily basis: The short answer is 'no' … The best advice I can give you is to not bother investing too much in Linux and keep with Windows, or move to macOS.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/13rym2j/linux_and_scren_readers_for_the_blind/

AdrianVovk,
@AdrianVovk@fosstodon.org avatar

@aral This really stings, but we do have some good news coming in this front. Through a grant provided by the Sovereign Tech Fund, GNOME has been investing money into accessibility development and making progress on it.

CC @sonny

jik, to accessibility
@jik@federate.social avatar

If anyone knows of any concrete evidence that Google's Invisible reCAPTCHA adversely impacts people with disabilities more than others, I'd be grateful if you could share it with me.
I searched but could not find any; on the contrary, I found at least one study showing that Invisible reCAPTCHA is equally usable for disabled and non-disabled people.
To be clear, I'm not looking for theoreticals, I'm looking for concrete evidence one way or the other.
Thanks.
#accessibility

gnomicutterance,
@gnomicutterance@hachyderm.io avatar

@jik It doesn't impact people with disabilities more than others do, but it does impact PWD.

It's me, I'm people with disabilities. It almost never identifies me heuristically, presumably because I use dictation & kb, no mouse. Like many other users of assistive tech, my patterns are more likely to be not identified as human.

It's certainly more usable than hCaptcha's piece of crap, but it's hard. And I have no cognitive problems but sometimes struggle with recognizing the sounds & images.

jookia, to random

the sighted developer/sysadmin cycle:

  1. ignore accessibility during development
  2. ignore accessibility during testing
  3. roll out inaccessible code
  4. respond to complaints with your own complaint nobody is writing accessible solutions
  5. ignore all your blind users leaving
  6. go back to step 1
menelion, to random
@menelion@dragonscave.space avatar

Re last: Please please please, don't use ! We blind people call it HateCaptcha, and it's for a reason. Their accessibility so-called innovative technology is simply broken and doesn't work reliably. You can't imagine how much time I spent fighting with this so-called accessibility cookie. Please don't use it, for goodness sake.

ChrisChaffin, to iPhone
@ChrisChaffin@dragonscave.space avatar

New Accessible iPhone AI Memo App. The app is called Whisper Memos, and this app lets you record a quick memo, and once your done, it will transcribe it, and then email the results to you. The app is free to download and is totally accessible. I heard about the app on Jonathan Mosens Living Blindfully podcast. Here is the app store link. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whisper-memos-speech-to-text/id6443658039.

kc, to random
@kc@chaos.social avatar

The Mastodon development team currently suggest enabling #hCaptcha in order to combat the current spam wave in the fediverse.

However, hCaptcha discriminates genuine users with disabilities from accessing your instance. So if people and inclusion are important to you, please just don't. Consider closing your public registrations instead, for the time being.

Additional info is on the thread 🧵 #MastoAdmin

kc,
@kc@chaos.social avatar

Even though hCaptcha provides "accessibility", they do it by providing a so-called "accessibility cookie" that screen reader users can apply for and set it on their browser. This will allow them to bypass any hCaptcha checks - but of course only in that specific browser. Many users with disabilities rely on third-party apps to which the cookie does not carry over without major technical troubles, so even if they have the cookie set up, they might not be able to access an instance.

louis,
@louis@emacs.ch avatar

@kc hCaptcha solves nothing and just discriminates against people with disabilities. The suggestion of the Mastodon team is shortsighted.

The only solution is to switch to manual approval of sign-ups. This feature has been there forever and should be turned on by any responsible admin.

When someone runs a public instance but finds it "tedious" to approve signups, which is basically a single click, they shouldn't run an instance at all.

kc,
@kc@chaos.social avatar

Even when hCaptcha is only required for registration, there is no guarantee that the "accessibility cookie" actually works as intended. There are countless instances in which it hasn't, and the hCaptcha support is also known for revoking disabled users' access for "unsupported uses of the service" after they have asked for usage support.

econads,
@econads@chaos.social avatar

@kc also every time I solve a captcha, I'm mildly resentful at being forced to train someone's "AI"

buttondown, to random
@buttondown@mastodon.social avatar

Subscribers can tag themselves
https://buttondown.email/changelog/2024-02-19

dangillmor, (edited ) to random
@dangillmor@mastodon.social avatar

If you've ever posted anything on Reddit, your words are going to be sucked up into an "AI" database. The people who profit from this are Reddit and the "AI" company.

What do you get? Screwed, again, by tech companies that have pure contempt for your privacy and rights.

https://www.engadget.com/reddit-reportedly-signed-a-multi-million-content-licensing-deal-with-an-ai-company-124516009.html

chiefgyk3d, to mastodon
@chiefgyk3d@social.chiefgyk3d.com avatar

The current spam issue highlights EXACTLY why I made my own server and locked down registration. I don’t have time to actively moderate, anyone on my server I know is pretty chill from dealing with them personally.

If you don’t have the ability to monitor your server 24/7 with a team, don’t leave registration open. Lock it down. Now hundreds of small instances are waking up to headaches cleaning users out or finding they were blocked. #Mastodon #fediblockmeta #cybersecurity #infosec #spam

Gargron, to random
@Gargron@mastodon.social avatar

There is an ongoing spam attack on the fediverse for the last couple of days. It's more widespread than before, as attackers are targeting smaller servers to create accounts. Before, usually only mastodon.social was targeted and our team could take care of it. For server administrators out there: If you don't need open registrations, switch over to approval mode. If you do, blocking disposable e-mail providers is a massive stopgap to the problem. Mastodon also supports hCaptcha.

thomas,
@thomas@metalhead.club avatar

@Gargron I honor every line of code that your team and you produce to maintain Mastodon.

But what I really miss as an instance administrator is some sort of spam detection. We have tools and libraries for that, e.G. for simple naive bayes detection.

Maybe it will not be 100 percent precise, but it would help a lot of Mastodon could block / delay suspicious posts based on simple machine learning mechanisms (like we have them for email).

joenepraat,
@joenepraat@todon.nl avatar

@Gargron Still the problem is Mastodon. See https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/29267.

Please see these issues (two of them are created by me and are related) as well:

Require blocking of disposable email providers and/or require a captcha provider when registrations are open

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/29270

Set new registrations on new servers to manual approval by default

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/29269

Ability to greylist new servers

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/29266

Ability to use heuristic spam filtering tools

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/29265

Instance-wide filtering

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/29256

cc @renchap

jaz,
@jaz@toot.wales avatar

@DavidTanner @LibrarianRA it's all our fantastic @teamtoot staff and a lot of experience managing a busy service. Please do (if using Mastodon) go to your notifications preferences eg https://toot.wales/settings/preferences/notifications and review "Other Notification Settings" to minimise spam notifications and messages.

collectifission,
@collectifission@greennuclear.online avatar

@Gargron hCaptcha is problematic. I'm sure you're aware of this github issue: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/25023

It's becoming a harder sell that this is an "emergency feature implementation" 9 months after the issue was opened.

yatil, to random
@yatil@yatil.social avatar

Yeah, sure gonna trust your conference where, according to the generated image, the “Registrratiion Open”.

I’m so tired of people not caring about their own stuff and making it mediocre by having half-assed “AI” involved.

jookia, to random

people only now noticing hcaptcha is a nightmare is wild

smeg, to random
@smeg@assortedflotsam.com avatar

I've run my Mastodon server from 2017 or 18. In that time, until a few days ago, I had received fewer than 20 reports.

In the last few days, that number has reached nearly 200.

The spam problem seems like a major engineering shortcoming. #mastoadmin #fediadmin

jeff,

@smeg

You said the quiet part out loud.

The spam problem seems like a major engineering shortcoming. #mastoadmin #fediadmin

Several months ago Mastodon created an update that forced spam reports not only to the SOURCE instance admins, but also to the admins of instances that are mentioned or tagged in post.

A horrible decision that has only made running Masto 1000% harder.

TimeLime, to audiofiction

I'd like to see #audiodrama / #audiofiction creators label show status as a courtesy to listeners. Are you actively planning more episodes? On short-term hiatus? Long-term hiatus, but hopeful? Have you realistically abandoned it?

I'd like to know if I should keep waiting. It's ok if you shut it down, but hang a sign on the door on your way out.

weirdwriter, to Discord

Holy banana bread. Just used #discord on mobile after months of not using it, and I’m just consistently amazed at how sluggish a chat app is. It’s even so sluggish that it slows down my actual iPhone and screen reader. How does a chat room application get to be so Bloated that it feels like there’s malware on my phone until I force quit the application. The website is just marginally better. Can we go back to #IRC or forums again please?

pixelate,
@pixelate@tweesecake.social avatar

@weirdwriter Just wait until you're trying to scroll through your list of books on Audible. I honestly thought there was something wrong with my phone. And Doordash does the same thing, even on Android.

maxleibman, to random
@maxleibman@mastodon.social avatar

We're no more than 18 months from at least one streaming service adopting a business model where the only thing you get for your monthly subscription fee is the ads.

#enshittification

theendupdates, to random
@theendupdates@podvibes.co avatar

Supreme: The Battle for Roe - complete series ⚖️👩‍⚖️👨‍⚖️

Dramatized political thriller | Total listening time: 5h 28m

An inexperienced 26 year old attorney and recently minted Justice are both new, untested, and scared out of their minds—and on a collision course to create one of the defining moments of the century. Together, they create one of the de...

https://www.theend.fyi/shows/supreme-the-battle-for-roe-complete-series

theendupdates, to random
@theendupdates@podvibes.co avatar

PREVIA: A Tech Heist - complete series 🔒💰👩‍💻

Dramatized thriller | Total listening time: 3h 9m

A thrilling heist tale that pits the haves against the have-nots and a cadre of badass women against an all-powerful megalomaniac, Tech Heist is a must-listen for fans of capers and high-tech adventures alike.

Nominated for a 2024 Ambies Award f...

https://www.theend.fyi/shows/previa-a-tech-heist-complete-series

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