Question for the blind travellers among us: Is there an app for Android or iOS that is similar in design to the Stellar Trek from Humanware? For example, can a sighted person go with you on a route and record that route so that the blind person can travel it independently the next time following the breadcrumbs? #blind #accessibility
Listen to a Recording of Tim Noonan Demonstrating the New Editor Features on the BT Speak Tim Noonan, who himself did a lot of development improving and enhancing the BT Speak’s editor, produced an excellent recording demonstrating some of these new features. You can find it on our Web site, along with another recording where Tim demonstrates using the AI Chat app. You’ll find both of these demos on our Web site at www.blazietech.com. Look for the Play button for each of these recordings. DG #BTSpeak #Blind
Happy first anniversary to the BT Speak!! We have just released our anniversary Update: featuring one-handed mode, numerous Editor enhancements, append mode, time announcements, expedited web searching, YouTube expansion, improved Bluetooth, new languages, and much, much more.
Do not try to replace Vipmud keys. You will not get the emails. A friend just tried and then I, annoyed when they didn't get their email, decided to temporarily give them one of my keys--and I didn't get mine either. Whatever you do, don't replace them until someone answers the problem. Please boost this if you're a blind mudder who uses Vip. I will update this--when/if either of us gets an email. Until then, though, get your shit, together. You chose to participate in the capitalist hellscape. Play the game like they play it but they pretend not to for the purposes of saving face, or dont' play it, you don't have to. I'd be happy to donate. #blind #muds
So it turns out, I am getting the same BT-speak pro that has been demoed by the company which means I get to enjoy the new updates that come in every month. This will be a lot of fun. I had to ask them about it because I didn't know how many models they released but at least I know that I'm not getting something that will become a brick. #Blind
Please #Boost, the #YuGiOhAccess client beta test is out for people to use. Please keep in mind, the client is a work in progress and as such bugs are being fixed and updates are coming along as they are. Just in case people don't know, YuGiOH Access is a project started to give #Blind people a way to play YuGiOh against sighted players. It has been a project going on almost 4 years in October, and I am happy to finally see it come to life here via this beta, it took so much effort from people and a bunch of others came to the server years ago to support us, and I couldn't be happier than I am now to announce this. She's not on Masto, but in particular I want to thank to developer of this client for her work on it as she has been incredibly amazing in helping to make this client what it is today, Jessica Skarlet, you are absolutely awesome. Anyway, the client can be found on www.YuGiOHAccess.com and more information about it is all on the website leading to the discord server. If you want to learn more about the actual game of YuGiOh and what it is, there are plenty of resources online to get you started, or me and other YuGiOh enthusiasts, commonly known as duellists, would be happy to help. Indeed, this started out as a dream of mine when I was just over 20-years-old, it was nothing more than that, and seeing it now in its full state as it is now is absolutely a dream come true for me, and I couldn't be more grateful for everyones' help in this on the server and even on Reddit where this originally started on the YuGiOh subreddit. Y'all are awesome, and I can't wait to see you on the duelling field.
So the new CoPilot app on Mac is a bit clunky and misses important festures like file upload. Accessibility on the onboarding screens is hit and miss - tab is your only friend. And once in the app there’s no way to access previous chats. Day one - so fingers crossed it improves. For now I’ll stick to ChatGPT on the web. #blind #accessibility
Been playing with a video/article concept as of late with the working title"What you see is NOT what you get", pertaining to making things #accessible to fully #blind users. A lot of #accessibility issues are easy to visualize: a missing ramp in front of a building, bad contrast, missing captions etc. but #screenReader accessibility is a lot more nebulous because there's actually not that much reading of the screen happening. I can't "point" at a screen reader accessibility issue because it happens behind the curtain, in the land of metadata, APIs and standards, rarely on the actual screen, which also makes it more difficult to "visualize" for devs. hrmm.
Inklusion - Das kann ja nie gelingen!
Davon möchte ich mich eigentlich gar nicht entmutigen lassen, sagt Heiko Kunert
https://www.kom-in.de/190/inklusion-das-kann-ja-nie-gelingen
#Info #Barrierefrei #blind #sehbehindert
First, they shut down the Basic HTML site, forcing many of us to switch to clients such as Thunderbird. Now, they're using qr codes which are not only inaccessible to the blind but also to those who don't use smartphones! This is ridiculous! Yes, they do still have the option to click whether it's you trying to sign in or not (which still requires a smartphone and a carrier, which they claim to be concerned about), but how long before they remove that, too?
With all that is going on, this verbose toot that I am about to write may seem insignificant, but I just had to share with my fellow #blind community members, particularly those who work in #law and have served in #court proceedings, specifically on a #jury. Especially since January 20 of this year, I've been earnestly praying for opportunities to speak up for my disability community. One of my answers came in the form of a jury summons to serve in municipal court later in March. This came, of course, via regular mail, a printed letter which I read using Seeing AI. The letter included a form that needed to be returned within ten days of receipt, so I called the number provided to ask for an accessible form and to discuss the necessary reasonable accommodations.
The first person to answer my call was doing a lot of rattling of things on the desk and shuffling of papers, to the point that I asked if she could hear me. Finally, she said, "Oh, ma'am, I thought you were a recording. Let me transfer you to the person in charge of that court."
When the next person answered, I explained that I am blind and asked what accessible accommodation was available for submitting the form which came with my jury summons. She said, "Ma'am, if you are traveling that week, just mark the box on that form and you can serve at another time."
I said, "No, ma'am, I am not traveling. I am blind (spelling the word blind)."
The response was, "Oh, I thought you said you were flying. Don't you have someone there with you to help you with this form?"
"No, ma'am, do you have a digital version of this form?"
"No, we don't, but I'll just mark down that you are incapable of serving."
"No, ma'am! I will find a way to submit this form."
After a call to the mayor's office, I contacted #Aira, and with a lot of trial and error, my wonderful agent, Nicki captured the form, filled it out on her end and Emailed it back to me. I forwarded it on to the representative of the municipal court, and received a polite response this morning, saying that my completed summons had been received and that I was excused per our phone conversation yesterday.
I responded, explaining that I was *not* trying to get out of jury duty, that I own my home, work and pay taxes, and that serving as a juror is not only my responsibility, but my civil right. I clarified my request for reasonable accommodation per the Americans With Disabilities Act and further said that I had contacted the mayor's office about the inaccessibility of this process.
It was not long before I received an email response, apologizing for the misunderstanding, that I had been marked as serving and that my concerns had been passed on to the court administrator.
Whew! All that, just to serve on a jury! We'll see how things go later in March. At least I got the proverbial brick wall to move a tiny bit, anyway. Thanks for reading this. If there is anything that you think I need to know from the prospective of a blind juror, feel free to comment.
@mastoblind Any blind folks have experience with Linux desktop environments? I have thoroughly enjoyed Bash over SSH for many years. I want to switch away from Windows entirely, but my experience with screen reader accessibility on Linux desktops has been mixed at best. Any tips or advice? Has the situation improved substantially? Is one desktop environment better than others for blind users? #blind #linux #accessibility
I #voted at the advanced poles in #Ottawa in the #Ontario#election. As a #blind voter everything was smooth, even though I didn't get my voter card in the mail, and the Elections Ontario app requires a driver's license to look up your voter registration. It was busy; already a lineup at 10 AM. Hopefully that means high voter turnout, and hopefully people aren't buying Doug Ford's lies masquerading as patriotism. #a11y#accessibility#Canada
I know some out there aren't fans of AI, but I have a bit of an counterarguement for you. When you're blind like me, having AI tools that allow you to do certain tasks independently is a game changer. Getting image descriptions, being able to check if what you're wearing looks good on you and identifying everything from doors to furniture + everyday objects is useful. Doubly so when like me, you live alone and don't exactly have someone around to ask for help from. Using AI for tasks like this is reasonable in my opinion, but some other things surrounding AI do have me concerned. All I ask of anti-AI protesters is think about what context AI is being used in before completely condemming it. #A11Y #Accessibility #Blind #StopAI #AIProtests
Well hot damn, my Steve scammer is back. Same first 2 messages, a third "You didn't reply to me, so I'm guessing you don't know me," followed by a pic and "Remember me?"
I'm going out on a tenuous limb here and suspecting that, no, I don't in fact know this person.
As an aside, any #blind folks know how to accessibly find a Matrix ID in @element? At the very least I want to find if this person is coming through a bridge, then shut that down if needed.
And this is why Element accessibility is important. When I review the interface, I see what look like a ton of noisy stale ARIA announcements hanging around at the bottom of the interface, making it very hard to do the "move to the bottom to find if new interface elements were added to the DOM" trick. It's not just an inconvenient annoyance. It makes defending against potential pig butchering and other scam attempts much harder. How can I feel confident on a network if I can't safely use its flagship client?
So, a quick question for others in the blind community: Do you use ReddIt at all? I'm wondering if it's worth my time to create an account over there or not. Feel free to vote on this quick & dirty poll if you wish, and add any additional thoughts if desired. #A11Y #Accessibility #Blind #Poll #ReddIt
Do we have any news of the so-called selest glasses? It was all we could see for months a while back and suddenly, radio silence. Nothing. Have they disappeared into nothingness somehow?
📣 Sei #A11y und unterstütze den Zugang zum !@metalab für Menschen mit Sehbehinderung oder Blindheit! Komm zum Do-It-Blind (DIB) Treffen 🛠️ am Montag, 24. Februar, Treffpunkt Ring-Passage, U3-Station Volkstheater um 16:00; Ende 20:00 metalab.at/calendar/event/7914… #make #blind #inklusion
So now that bit.ly is showing ads, if you need a URL shortener, #lynx is decent and #accessible and easy to host. And before you tell me that we don't need URL shorteners anymore and how they're a security risk, I need them for: 1. Business cards, slides, signs, and other physical objects that need a URL. While most phones can scan QR Codes, you can't read them out loud for #blind folks. If you're doing a presentation, "scan the QR code on screen" isn't good enough. You need to have a URL that you can speak and another human can remember. Yes, NFC is a thing, but it doesn't solve that problem. 2. Places that still don't allow URLs (LinkedIn) or where long URLs are awkward to work with (text-only emails, the terminal, etc.) 3. Times (like a phone call) where I need to tell someone a URL using the noises that come from my face-parts
Doing a test post from Tuba. Turns out if I want GTK4 apps like this to behave themselves, I need to have the computer hooked up to a monitor of some type. In this case, it's the TV in the living room, since it's the only decent display in the house. Just a bit annoyed that the old blind nerd trick of going without a monitor because Orca gives me speech won't cut it for GTK4 apps. #A11Y #Accessibility #Blind #Linux #Orca #tuba
Question for #blind folks, or I guess any #disabled folks for that matter, who were active on Twitter when Squelon took over and dismissed the accessibility team wholesale:
Did any moderate to significant accessibility issues crop up shortly or soon after that happened? If so, what? Also, how is Twitter/X accessibility today for anyone still around? Better, worse, or comparable?
Not looking for a whole lot of detail--I'm just writing a thing and would prefer to not just make up my anecdotes. I might reference this thread in the post for anyone wanting more detail.
An welchen Stellen ist das denn explizit hilfreich? Gibt es Stellen, an denen eins vielleicht eher anfängt als an anderen? Beim C3 waren ähnliche Schilder ja auch schon vielfach vorhanden, aber ich kann die Wirkung noch nicht ganz einschätzen; hat da wer eigenhändige Erfahrungen mit? #blind #inklusion
Any interest in learning to #code from the #Blind community on an old-school platform?
a MOO is a text-based virtual world. if you ever played an old interactive fiction or text adventure game you'll be familiar with the idea. you type in commands like "go north" to move, "put coin in box", "kill dragon with sword" and so forth, and you get written responses unfolding the story.
This type of interface was taken online with a MOO in the 1990's, and rather than a playable story, you can join in and work with other people in an interactive, virtual world.
More than that, as well as just playing, MOO has a rich and beginner-friendly programming language, so you can create objects and code them to do things to your own specifications.
through a series of structured lessons with code samples and plenty of explanation you'll learn some of the basics of any programming language, all whilst having fun and playing about. The world is always open and you can build as many rooms and items as you like. You can practice your written English, socialising and programming all at once, in a 100% text-based environment perfect for screen readers and Braille displays.
This will be my twenty-seventh empty MOO. Each one has gone off in a different direction with between 1 and 15 participants, mostly young visually-impaired school-children and teens needing an introduction to programming in a fun way when the UK introduced coding as part of our national curriculum. I taught high school computing and college for a decade, and I'm wanting to open this opportunity up to more blind and visually-impaired people because coding is fun, and a MOO is a fun thing to play with. it's Only worthwhile if we have the numbers though, so if you're not interested please pass on if you can.
Unser Webshop hat eröffnet! oskars.org/b/ Hier bekommst du Schilder mit deinem eigenen Text. Der Schildgenerator erzeugt dir eine Voransicht deines Schilds. Unsere Schilder mit Blindenschrift Braille und Profilschrift sind von Menschen mit Seheinschränkung oder Blindheit entwickelt worden. Begreifbare Zeichen laden zur Teilhabe ein und sorgen für Orientierung. #make #blind #inklusion
If anyone uses Android with TalkBack and the onscreen Braille keyboard, please try to reproduce and report this issue:
In Talkback, if onscreen keyboard echo is set to words, and a word with punctuation after it is typed, TalkBack does not read the word when Space is typed. Similarly, if an emoticon is typed, like ":)" nothing is spoken when Space is typed.
Steps to reproduce:
• Turn on TalkBack, and open TalkBack settings by tapping once with three fingers. Set up the TalkBack Braille keyboard under the Braille section. • Go to Verbosity settings, then the keyboard echo option for onscreen keyboards, and set it to "words." Now, open a text box, turn on the TalkBack Braille Keyboard, and type something like "this is a test." Note the period after test. Then, swipe right with one finger to enter a space.
Expected results:
TalkBack should read "this" "is" "a" "test period."
Actual results:
TalkBack reads "this" "is" "a" and is silent after test is written.
I also put it up on Google's issue tracker if anyone wants to start it.
Dear #blind developers, what is the current state of generic #accessibility for a software developer on a #MacOS powered computer? Like, VS Code, terminal, something else? I last tried this like six years ago, and everything was awful. What is it like now? Thanks! Boosts welcome.
📣 Do-It-Blind (DIB) online Besprechung am Montag, 17. Februar, um 19:00 Uhr. Du bist eingeladen! bbb.metalab.at/rooms/joh-szv-o… Wöchentlich am Montag um 19:00 besprechen wir neue Formen der digitalen und inklusiven Zusammenarbeit. Mach mit! 🛠️ #make #blind #inklusion
Learn using BigBlueButton, the trusted open-source web conferencing solution that enables seamless virtual collaboration and online learning experiences.
Decided to sign up for #Codeberg, the #GitHub alternative that the Fediverse at large is insisting is worth a try and, in some cases, claiming will improve project contributions by avoiding some of the GH antipatterns. I expected to find some #accessibility issues; this is the modern web, after all.
I did not expect a fully inaccessible visual CAPTCHA with no workarounds. I'm unable to solve it, so I cannot create an account.
In short: If you want people who are #blind or #lowVision to contribute to your projects (you do, right?), Codeberg is currently not an #accessible platform.
Fellow #Blind #ContentCreators, have any of you found a decent free website platform that is #accessible and usable by someone who isn't a professional web dev? I'd hoped to go with Neocities, but their hCaptcha doesn't seem to let me use my cookie. I need, at this point, a free option, sadly. Any suggestions? Boosting greatly appreciated.
