To #Blind and #LowVision Linux users:

Which #Linux or #BSD distributions are you able to install without assistance? Are there any that work better with screenreaders and other assistive technologies out of the box?

I'm trying to understand how much of the problem is specific to distributions, their installers or differences in windowing system such as Wayland breaking screenreaders vs X11.

#accessibility

Make this End of Financial Year special with an #EOFY donation to NV Access, or as we call it, #NEOFY!

Your gift helps keep the NVDA screen reader free for blind people around the world, helping give EVERYONE access to technology!

Donations over $2 are #tax deductible in Australia.

nvaccess.org/support-us/

#Donation #Technology #Blind #GoodCause #Cause #Philanthropy

So there's a meme where you give kids the first half of a proverb, and ask how they think it ends. My friend's Four year old has apparently never heard the proverb "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

She guessed it goes: "In the land of the blind...
Netflix is cheaper."

It made me chuckle.

#blind#joke#funny#humour

Hi @fireborn ! Is this your blogpost?

fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/you…

If so, I just wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I love #linux and always have. I have literally made my career with it ever since I first booted the H.J. Lu boot/root floppy set on my 486 DX2/66, but I'm partially #blind, and my vision is getting worse as I age.

And at times the amount of negativity and crap I get when I say that I generally run #WSL on Windows or a Mac? It's huge, pointless, and speaks to some ways in which parts of the Linux community are its own worst enemy.

When screen zoom broke for 2 years in #ubuntu and many of us kept signposting how important this is to us, over and over, and one of the Canonical engineers wrote in the issue saying that, due simply to the very limited number of engineering hours available, this was a low priority fix? That was a wake up call for me.

There's no malice there. It's not that anyone in the Linux community is doing an evil laugh and thrilling to the number of disabled users who can't reliably enjoy Linux on the desktop, it's about the reality that a tiny, rag tag group of engineers working for a handful of companies are doing the vast majority of the work keeping the Linux desktop world moving, and they BARELY have the bandwidth to keep development going at all much less catering to the myriad accessibility needs folks like us (Not comparing the nature of our didabilities, mind you. Everyone's different!).

But people like the guy your post responds to can make us feel not smart enough, not good enough, or not motivated enough to thrive in an environment that throws up HUGE obstacles, and that's just not right.

Pardon the length, I have Strong Feelings about this stuff as you can see, and thanks again for posting!

Something I've thought about today:

Android is kind of less "blind friendly". I use that to mean how well the OS, accessibility frameworks, and screen reader are working together to give an experience that doesn't assume a visual user. A really good showcase for this is scrolling. On iOS, if you swipe, you barely notice that the screen scrolls when you get to the bottom of it. On Android though, you can hear the half second or so it takes to scroll. Also there technically are no screen reader commands to scroll up, down, left, or right. There's just "scroll forward" and "scroll backwards," which means that if you scroll forward in an app with tabs, you might find yourself on the next tab rather than the next list of items.

Now, for those who only use speech, this is usable. But a lot of blind Android users who just explore by touch don't seem to get that "swiping" is all a Braille user can do. Like, the system should not care which way one navigates. And even though on a touch screen, you can scroll in any direction using two fingers, this isn't screen reader specific, so a Braille user cann't do that. But who cares about Braille, it's dead don'cha know? /s

Another thing that really gets on my nerves sometimes is putting in my PIN. I really need to try a password and see if that works better, but the PIN entry field isn't an actual keyboard, it's just an interface that looks like one. So, using a Braille display, I have to navigate one number at a time, and enter them by pressing Enter on the one I want. Sometimes I can press Space with dot 4 to go down a line of numbers, but sometimes that puts me on the bottom row instead of the next row. Of course, on iOS, I can type my passcode as expected.

It's also kind of baffling to me that Gemini on Android doesn't automatically speak or Braille responses whenever I type to it. It could easily send those responses to TalkBack. But, as usual, the hearing, speaking blind are the testers Google has, so of course the feedback is that it works, it's fine, and if there are any descenting voices, they're either drown out or unheard. And this is AI, the current money-maker and time-waster for all these companies. And yet, even in that, they still can't get accessibility right. Just look at it on the web. The thing says Gemini replied, except it hasn't even finished generating the response yet. Imagine if VoiceOver did that in iMessage and the person had just started typing, and VO didn't even say when they actually sent the message? The NFB would have all their resolutions on just that one topic.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of things in Android work well. But there are just these things that remind me that there really needs to be a big shift in Google regarding accessibility, and not just a surface-level cleaning, for Android to really lose that speech-only attitude of workarounds. Also I'm not saying iOS is anywhere near perfect, even for Braille. But when I do use Braille on iOS, I feel a lot closer to a second-class citizen than a third or fourth like on Android.

#Android #iOS #blind #accessibility

After reading this thread, I don't want a new Mac anymore. I do wish there were posts like this going over Android and Windows' accessibility frameworks, but I'll take what I can get.

applevis.com/comment/188396#co…

#apple #accessibility #VoiceOver #MacOS #mac #blind

"Smart glasses offering a combination of sensory substitution based 'raw' vision and AI-based scene description and OCR appears to be technically and economically the most feasible and sustainable way toward meeting expectations, needs and interests of many blind people." artificialvision.com/neuralink…

And yes, I did already check this statement with a number of totally blind people, including a congenitally blind and a late-blind person.

#BCI #NeuroTech #blind #blindness

This felt too valuable not to share. Braille-labeled maps of washrooms to help people find and use facilities in the washroom. Everyone deserves to get in, do their business, wash their hands, and get out in peace and safety.

This seems valuable for all public spaces.

#Blind #Accessibility

#a11y Experts, I've a question:
How is the the state of #hidden #content support in 2025?
That seems outdated:
stevefaulkner.github.io/HTML5a…
I wish to display a list of words only for #screenreader users.

It will be the real text content for a canvas element (wordcloud). I hope, I can it make #accessible for #blind users.

Or is there a better way to provide the word list?

Maybe @SteveFaulkner@mastodon.social have an idea?