New #screenReader verbosity settings for messages are now widely available in #Slack, under the #accessibility category of preferences. You can now control which parts of messages are spoken and in what order.

As part of this change, you'll also find that recent replies in threads now have relative timestamps (e.g. "just now" or "2 minutes ago") instead of absolute ones. This update brings the screen reader experience in line with the visual interface, with absolute timestamps still being used outside of threads.

If you have suggestions or run into problems, please use the /feedback command and mention that you use a screen reader. Alternatively I'm also happy to pass along any issues if I can reproduce them.

A rant in the face of the industry’s continued neglect and outright hostility towards digital accessibility and care for users.

vale.rocks/posts/accessibility…

#WebDev #Accessibility #a11y #FrontEndDevelopment

You Can't Opt-Out of Accessibility

Shiny exclusion all the way down.

^Vale.Rocks

Top 5 #accessibility improvements in #GNOME Calendar 49:

1. Focus indicators were added in various places
2. Events are focusable with a keyboard
3. Year/month spin buttons are navigable with arrow keys
4. Calendar grids are skippable with Tab, and cells are wrapped via keyboard focus
5. Calendar list box now behaves like a check box

For screen readers: events and year/month spin buttons have proper semantics!

donate.gnome.org/

#a11y #GNOMECalendar #FOSS #OpenSource #FreeSoftware

• Yes, it's still valid (50%, 1 vote)
• No, this argument is no longer valid. We have found ways to make these tools more affordable. (50%, 1 vote)

Accessibility poll for people who use screen readers for daily use. I’m writing a guide about alt text.

🧵 Poll 2 of 2:

I’d like your opinion about long description methods for complex images. What is your preferred approach? (Feel free to comment if you want to elaborate.)

Please boost for reach. 🙌🏻

#Accessibility #A11y #ScreenReaders #AltText #WCAG #UI #FrontEnd

• Adjacent link to long text (0 votes)
• Long text in figcaption (0 votes)
• Link in longdesc attribute (0 votes)
• Use of aria-describedby (0 votes)

Accessibility poll for people who use screen readers for daily use. I’m writing a guide about alt text.

🧵 Poll 1 of 2:

I’d like your opinion about alt-text length for simple images. How long should it be? (Feel free to comment if you want to elaborate.)

Please boost for reach. 🙌🏻

#Accessibility #A11y #ScreenReaders #AltText #WCAG #UI #FrontEnd

• Just the context (33%, 1 vote)
• Lots of details (33%, 1 vote)
• Balance of brevity/details (33%, 1 vote)
• It depends (0%, 0 votes)

The Accessibility Problem With Authentication Methods Like CAPTCHA, by @smashingmag:

smashingmagazine.com/2025/11/a…

#accessibility #captcha

The Accessibility Problem With Authentication Methods Like CAPTCHA — Smashing Magazine

CAPTCHAs were meant to keep bots out, but too often, they lock people with disabilities out, too. From image classification to click-based tests, many “human checks” are anything but inclusive.

^{Smashing Magazine}

I'm sponsoring @TheEvilSkeleton for $20/month to help work on #accessibility for #GNOME! Who wants to join me!?

github.com/sponsors/TheEvilSke…

tesk.page/2025/12/16/please-fu…

Please Fund My Continued Accessibility Work on GNOME!

I have been under distress lately due to personal circumstances that are outside my control. I cannot find a permanent job that allows me to function, I am not eligible for government benefits, my grant proposals to work on free and open-source proje…

^{TheEvilSkeleton}

I uploaded the accessible goban on printables! No more need to go on my git repository.

printables.com/model/1507988-g…

et

printables.com/model/1508000-g…

#GoGame #Accessibility #DIY #blind

my siblings in dionysus, when you're posting an image, don't just write whatever text is in the image as alt text. alt text is (primarily) for accessibility and that means describing the image

if you're posting a screenshot, say that

if you're posting a photo of something, say so

anything else is just half assing it to get around whatever warning your client is saying, acting like people who care about that are stupid, and most importantly completely ignoring people the needs of people who rely on alt text to know what you posted. in fact, when you do this i think the only player who wins from this move is AI scrapers who wanna improve their computer vision models

#a11y #accessibility #altText

Today's Web Design Update: groups.google.com/a/d.umn.edu/…

Featuring @yatil, @GraceSnow, @SteveFaulkner, @eric, @TetraLogical, @michaelharshbarger, @deconspray, @mgifford, @lloydi, @nolan, @andy , @tylersticka, @zeldman, @AlexDawsonUK, and more.

Subscribe info: d.umn.edu/itss/training/online…

#Accessibility #A11y #WebDesign

Welcome to our last In-Process blog post for 2025! nvaccess.org/post/in-process-1…

In this edition:
- Holiday Season Trading Hours
- NVDA with Digitech Reece
- World Blindness Summit Presentation
- Finding Things

Do check it out, have a wonderful break if you are having time off or a holiday, spend time with loved ones, and we look forward to catching up with everyone in 2026!

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Accessibility #Christmas #NewYear

I tried making a Neocities account today. I was stopped dead in my tracks by an unlabeled field with protected input in the signup form. I thought it was the password field, but there's a labeled password field with protected input a little further down, so I have no idea what that first one is. Just a little further down is an hcaptcha challenge that forces me to give my email address to hcaptcha because hcaptcha can't be bothered to implement actual accessibility

#blind #accessibility #hCaptcha #neocities

Visited Winchester Christmas Market this afternoon. It was very busy and crowded but mostly nice to just see the pretty lights and have a massively overpriced but very tasty sausage roll.
However, it was pretty disappointing to see that I couldn’t get to 90% of the stalls.

I get that it’s on historic ground and there are limits to what they can do but I feel like they could’ve done a bit more to make it accessible.

Most of the stalls were up a large step. I could see what they had from a distance but I couldn’t get to most of them to view things up close.

#Accessibility

Vojtux - Accessible Linux distro which is almost pure Fedora

Vojtěch Polášek has put together a technical preview of a version of Fedora that should work well for blind or visually impaired users. While his goal is explicitly to see these improvements and changes become part of Fedora itself, for now you can use this implementation based on the Fedora MATE spin. :)

➡️ freelists.org/post/orca/Announ…

#Vojtux #Fedora #Accessibility #a11y #Linux #OpenSource

Not just unsurprising, but utterly predictable.

“Trump administration says sign language services ‘intrude’ on Trump’s ability to control his image”
apnews.com/article/american-si…

Though he has a point — having an ASL interpreter could make it look like he cares about, well anything other than himself. That’s not his brand.

#accessibility #ASL

About fucking time.

“Judge orders White House to use American Sign Language interpreters at briefings”
npr.org/2025/11/05/nx-s1-55991…

Sadly, does not include VP briefings. White House is supposed to update court on progress by end of week. Curious how it will jerk court around.

#accessibility #ASL

Hey, I've been under distress lately due to personal circumstances that are outside my control. I can't find a permanent job that allows me to function, I'm not eligible for government benefits, my grant proposals got rejected, paid internships are quite difficult to find. Essentially, I have no stable monthly income that allows me to sustain myself.

Nowadays, I work mostly on accessibility throughout GNOME as a volunteer, improving the experience of people with disabilities. I helped make the majority of GNOME Calendar accessible with a keyboard and screen reader — still an ongoing effort with !564 and !598 —which is an effort no company ever contributed financially. These merge requests take thousands (literally) of hours to research, develop, and test, which would have been enough to sustain myself for a couple of years if I had been working under a salary.

I would really appreciate any kinds of donations, especially ones that happen periodically to bump my monthly income.

These donations will allow me to sustain myself while allowing me to continue working on accessibility throughout GNOME, potentially even 'crowdfunding' development without doing it on the behalf of the Foundation.

I accept donations through the following platforms:

- “TheEvilSkeleton” on Liberapay: liberapay.com/TheEvilSkeleton/… (free and open-source platform)
- “TheEvilSkeleton” on Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/theevilskeleton
- “TheEvilSkeleton” on GitHub Sponsors: github.com/sponsors/TheEvilSke…

Boosts welcome and appreciated.

#Accessibility #a11y #GNOME #GNOMECalendar #MutualAidRequest #MutualAid

GNOME Calendar: A New Era of Accessibility Achieved in 90 Days

There is no calendaring app that I love more than GNOME Calendar. The design is slick, it works extremely well, it is touchpad friendly, and best of all, the community around it is just full of wonderful developers, designers, and contributors worth …

^{TheEvilSkeleton}

And finally done with the alt-texts for my trip to Japan. In total we are talking about 597 images, only a very small number of which received empty alt texts (because they showed largely the same thing as the previous one from a slightly different angle).

I don’t claim that they are perfect, but they are there! If you don’t like one, send me a better one.

I’m not yet done with the site, I still want to add more regular text, and more notably some videos, but this is a huge step in any case…

I’m proud of it, but my takeaway here really is that it is simply not practical to do like this for a personal site: I easily spent 20 times as much time on getting alt-texts than I spent on selecting the images and if anything that is a very low estimate. It simply doesn’t scale for posting a large number of vacation pictures, with this selection being very much a selection, we have many more images, not all of them good or even that dissimilar from what is there now, but still…

I was originally planning to also put pictures from my previous trip up, but the way this went I don’t think I’ll do that, at least not with fully manually generated alt texts.

I see a lot of complaints about AI-generated alt-texts, but I’m honestly not sure that they are worse than much of what I came up in this case, especially once I do a second path on them to fix any mistakes, in the same way in which I use DeepL for translations: It’s not that they are fully reliable, but they are good enough, that I can focus on the few issues they have and don’t have to do all the tedium that translating everything manually brings with it. And in a lot of cases DeepL does a better job than I would have done: My English is pretty good, but I am not a native speaker, and sometimes that’s noticeable in that my vocabulary is not as comprehensive as it is in German. Maybe the same approach would be fine for #accessibility? I’d be interested in opinions and proposals.

And I am familiar with all the benefits of alt-texts, but since that page is first and foremost a image-site, where not being able to see them will really remove most of the reasons to use it, it also does make me wonder how many people will actually benefit from it, compared to the effort I put in…

I normally use my computer with a regular qwerty keyboard. But since it's a seven-inch Toughpad, I wanted to try it with my Orbit Writer, due to the size. I bought it to use with my iPhone, which it does very well (better than with Android,). I read the manual and even saved the HID keyboard commands so that I could refer to them quickly. But I don't understand a few things.

1. It is missing the Windows key. Due to this, I can't get to the start menu as I usually do. I also can't get to the desktop in the regular way.
2. I created a desktop shortcut which I put on the start menu, but I can't type ctrl+escape at the same time, so that method of getting to the start menu is also blocked, meaning that I still can't get to the desktop.
3. I can't type NVDA+F11 or F12 for the system tray or the time and date, respectively. I was able to create new commands for both under Input Gestures. But I also tried NVDA+1 for key identification, with both caps lock and insert, and that didn't work either. Fortunately, I was able to create another gesture to get into the NVDA menu.
4. On a qwerty keyboard, I can type alt+f4 to switch between windows. If I hold the alt key, I can also continue pressing f4 to switch between more than two windows. But with the Orbit Writer, while the command works, it seems to only work for two windows i.e. I can't hold alt and continue pressing f4.

Am I missing something here or is this a half-implemented system? How can they say it works with Windows when basic commands can't even be performed? If there are ways around these problems, please let me know.

#accessibility #blind #braille #NVDA #OrbitWriter #technology #Windows