I met up with a #blind colleague over the winter break. He was travelling with a sighted partner and said something like: "We'll have so-and-so along, so some things that are usually a pain will be easier."

He did not mean like, white water rafting and shit. He meant, walking to a store next to the hotel at 8 PM because someone needs a tube of toothpaste and then maybe picking up some churros.

I saw a post from someone at a conference saying that they walked out of their hotel to buy a bagel, and instead ended up in the middle of an unexpected antiques show in the street. It got me thinking about how #disability affects spontaneity.

Not in a depressing, woe-is-me sort of way, but from a practical, logistics point of view. Sadly, for many #blind people, this might've gone something like:

Blind Person (BP) to First Hotel Person (HP1): "I want to get a bagel from <bagel shop name>."

HP1: "We have bagels in the hotel, if you'd like me to take you to the restaurant?"

BP: "No, this bagel shop was recommended to me and I've been looking forward to trying it. It's only across the street."

HP1: "Well... I'm not sure. Let me check if anyone is available."

[BP sits awkwardly in lobby for 10 minutes, not knowing if they'll be there long enough to fold their cane or not.]

HP2: "Hi, my colleague tells me you're heading to <bagel shop>; I can take you there now if you're ready?"

BP: "Yep, let's go."

[BP and HP2 head out of the hotel.]

BP: "Wow, what's all this noise?"

HP2: "Oh, there's... an antiques fair I think it is? Happening this weekend outside the hotel."

BP: "Nice. What sort of stuff do they have?"

HP2: "It looks like furniture, pots... stuff like that. We're just here at the bagel shop, let me get the door. One sec."

[HP2 leads blind person inside, leaving them in the hopefully capable hands of their next unexpecting helper and then running back to the hotel as quickly as they can.]

[BP enjoys a bagel, before repeating the whole charade again to get back to the hotel 35 minutes later.]

What they don't do is: explore the antiques fair, pick out a nice piece for a loved one, wander off to find a quieter spot after finding the whole thing ultimately overwhelming, discover an idyllic inner-city oasis, or any number of other things non-disabled people might do without thinking about them upfront.

Living life as a series of planned transactions, all with a defined end point, can be exhausting and kind of sad.

Note: If you've reached this far and are one of those blind people who would've done things differently in this scenario because you have superpowers, please keep your gloating and judgement of others out of the replies.

I have an #accessibility question for #screenReader users.

If I use hashtags within flowing text, like #this, does that annoyingly interrupt the narration flow and should I rather list them all at the end?

Or is in-text tagging the preferable alternative to a large wall of hashtags at the end, like this:

#blind #AskFedi #screenReaders

Anyone who is blind, or who has worked with the blind, knows how expensive our technology can be. This couldn't be more true with relation to braille displays. Even the cheapest costs at least $799, and it's already behind the newest in that line, at $899. This is the Orbit Reader 20 and 20+. Now, a student in India wants to change that by creating a display that is truly affordable (under $50)! Please pass this on, so that we can give him greater recognition within the blind community. Even if it costs a bit more than he initially suspected it would, there is no excuse for the $2,000 to $5,000 average price of such technology when cheaper alternatives can be designed! He is determined to bring this to market, so let's help him do it and show our appreciation for his hard work on this life-changing project!

forbes.com/sites/kevinanderton…

#access #ACB #accessibility #affordability #blind #braille #BrailleDisplays #children #education #employment #independence #India #learning #NFB #ocr #parent #reading #science #school #students #teachers #technology #work #writing

Do you use a screen reader and read arabic content with it? Have you ever wondered why Arabic tts literally always sucks, being either super unresponsive, or gets most things wrong all the time? I've been wanting to rant about this for ages!
Imagine if English dropped most vowels: "Th ct st n th mt" for "The cat sat on the mat" and expected you to just KNOW which vowels go where. That's basically what Arabic does all day every day! Arabic uses an abjad, not an alphabet. Basically, we mostly write consonants, and the vowels are just... assumed? Like, they are very important in speech but we don't really write them down except in very rare and special cases (children's books, religious texts, etc). No one writes them at all otherwise and that is very acceptable because the language is designed that way.
A proper Arabic tts needs to analyze the entire sentence, maybe even the whole paragraph because the exact same word could have different unwritten vowels depending on its location, which actually changes its form and meaning! But for screen readers, you want your tts to be fast and responsive. And you do that by skipping all of that semantic processing. Instead it's literally just half-assed guess work which is almost wrong all the time, so we end up hearing everything the wrong way and just cope with it.
It gets worse. What if we give the tts a single word to read (which is pretty common when you're more closely analyzing something). Let's apply that logic to English. Imagine you are the tts engine. You get presented with just 'st', with no surrounding context and have to figure out the vowels here. Is it Sit? Soot? Set? Maybe even stay? You literally don't know, but each of those might be valid even with how wildly the meaning could be different.
It's EXACTLY like that in Arabic, but much worse because it happens all the time. You highlight a word like 'كتب' (ktb) on its own. What does the TTS say? Does it guess 'kataba' (he wrote)? 'Kutiba' (it was written)? 'Kutub' (books (a freaking NOUN!))? Or maybe even 'kutubi' (my books)? The TTS literally just takes a stab in the dark, and usually defaults to the most basic verb form, 'kataba', even if the context screams 'books'!
So yeah. We're stuck with tools that make us work twice as hard just to understand our own language. You will get used to it over time, but It adds this whole extra layer of cognitive load that speakers of, say, English just don't have to deal with when using their screen readers.

#screenreader #blind #tts

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Final update: The developer is now on Mastodon via @andrew_guide.

Update: The developer has removed the ability to download Guide until the security issues mentioned in the linked thread are fixed.

Update: this product contains some code flaws that are concerning from a security perspective, beyond just giving control of your computer to an LLM. You might want to read this thread before installing the product: toot.cafe/@matt/114258349401221651

Update: I've exchanged some long emails with Andrew, the lead developer. He's open to dialogue, and moving the project in the right direction: well-scoped single tasks, more granular controls and permissions, etc. He doesn't strike me as an #AI maximalist can and should do everything all the time kind of guy. He's also investigating deeper screen reader interaction, to let AI just do the things we can't do that it's best at. I stand by my thoughts that the project isn't yet ready for prime time. But as someone else in the thread said, I don't think it should be written off entirely as yet another "AI will save us from inaccessibility" hype train. There is, in fact, something here if it gets polished and scoped a bit more.

Just tried guide for fun. It's supposed to be an app to use #AI to help #blind folks get things done. I asked "Where are the best liver and onions in Ottawa?" It:
1. Decided it needed to search the web.
2. Thought that the "stardew access" icon on my desktop was a kind of web browser, so clicked it.
3. Imagined an "accept cookies" dialogue it needed to accept.
4. Decided that didn't work, so looked for Google Chrome (I don't have chrome installed on that machine)
5. Finally opened edge from the start menu. By the way, it just...left Stardew open and running. Because apparently having Stardew Valley running in the background is a vital part of finding liver and onions in Ottawa.
6. Opened a random extension from my edge toolbar (goodlinks).
7. Clicked the address bar and loaded google.com, instead of just doing the search right from the address bar.
8. Got blocked because it couldn't sign into my Google account, even though it could have also searched from the Google homepage.

To be fair to AI, that was the kind of open-ended task AI is terrible at. If I had asked it to check an inaccessible checkbox, or read a screenshot, or something, I'm sure it would have been fine.

Anyway, I'm still better at using a computer than an AI. So is my 87 year old grandfather, for that matter. www.guideinteraction.com

Guide - AI assistant for people with low vision or blindness

With Guide, inaccessible doesn't have to mean undoable. Guide is a Windows AI assistant that helps people with low vision or blindness navigate the digital world.

^Guide

Matt Campbell

2025-03-31 18:00:52

There's a new product that has been gaining some buzz in the blind community, a Windows app called Guide that uses AI to perform tasks on your computer. It's pitched as a way to get around web accessibility problems in particular. I won't link to the thing itself, because I don't want to give it that validation, but I'll link to a previous discussion thread about it: fed.interfree.ca/notes/a5wf4ys…

I've spent some time taking this app apart. The level of shoddy work here is deeply disgusting. 1/?

Friends, please help make the public aware of Section 504's importance by sharing your story. Read the below post from my girlfriend, Kaleigh Brendle, to learn more. Your voice matters. Thank you. #Save504

facebook.com/share/1L2JxLxgS1/

#Section504 #Blind #BlindMasto #BlindMastodon #BlindFedi @blind @mastoblind #LowVision #Disabled #DisabledMasto #DisabledMastodon #DisabledFedi @disability@a.gup.pe @disability@beehaw.org @disabilityjustice @disabilityhistory

Kaleigh Brendle

Please share this as widely as you can: Judy’s League, the social media campaign I’ve started to help save Section 504, is launching a new initiative and we need all of you. We’re asking that you...

^{www.facebook.com}