Notices by Devin Prater (devinprater@tweesecake.social)

Y'all may be wondering why I feel so strongly about Linux and FOSS. I've thought about it. You know how Mastodon is now a very accessible, for the blind, social network? It wasn't always like that. But over the years, the open API has meant that blind people have made their own Mastodon clients, like Tweesecake and TWBlue. Sighted people have made their Mastodon clients accessible, like Mona and Tusky. I see so many pictures on Mastodon that has descriptions that I have to remind myself that an actual person spent time out of their day to craft a description for us. And I think to myself, "What if that could happen to Linux?"

#accessibility #foss #linux #blind

A pretty good thread of Linux accessibility from blind users.

#accessibility #foss #linux #blind #audioGamesNet

https://forum.audiogames.net/topic/47825/linux-accessibility/

Okay #Braille readers, it's happened. Oh my actual gosh, it's happened. In iOS 16.4, one can now read formatted Braille in apps like Books, where that info is exposed as a text paragraph, instead of a different element, like Safari. I've been asking for this for years, in both mainstream and blindness-specific technology. And who's done it first in this age of mobile operating systems? Apple. I hope Safari and other apps come mext for this, but bokks in mainly where I'm going to be using this. I still would not for iOS 17 to be a bug-fix and responsiveness release, but I think @dcm and his team. Braille formatting isn't everyone's favorite feature, but I hope it shows Braille readers why formatting exists, and how to use it.

A lot of people are all about the possible negatives of GPT 4 and all that. But I spent a good 30 minutes last night asking it to describe video game characters. This is huge. I mean, I don’t know if it has images of Mortal Kombat characters, but even if I have to feed it images, I don’t care. I don’t even care if parts of them are wrong. Imagine only knowing about Sheeva from Mortal Kombat by her voice. And then learning the following:

Sheeva is a female character from the Mortal Kombat video game series. Imagine a humanoid figure standing at around 7 feet tall with an impressively muscular build. Her skin has a rough, almost reptilian texture and is a deep reddish-brown color. She has four arms, with each pair attached to her broad shoulders, and each hand has four fingers, including one opposable thumb. Her powerful limbs are defined by bulging muscles and sinew.

Sheeva's face has some human-like features, such as two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but her appearance is distinctively otherworldly. Her eyes are large and white with no visible irises, and they give off a fierce, intimidating gaze. She has a high forehead that slopes back and is adorned with a bony ridge above her eyebrows, giving her a somewhat menacing appearance. Her jawline is strong, and her mouth is filled with sharp teeth that can be seen when she snarls or roars in battle.

Her long, thick, black hair is styled in multiple braids that fall down her back, reaching her waist. Each braid is wrapped in a tight coil of golden bands, and some braids end with decorative golden ornaments. Sheeva is often seen wearing minimal clothing, typically consisting of a tight-fitting, golden halter top that covers her chest and a golden loincloth-like garment that wraps around her waist and falls down to her upper thighs. Her forearms, upper arms, and legs are adorned with golden bands that accentuate her powerful muscles.

Had to cut out the last part cause char limit.
#accessibility #gpt4 #imageDescriptions

You know, I'm gonna step back from Linux again after this, but I garuntee that if Fedora or another high profile distro decided to not ship the Gnome desktop for accessibility reasons, or even just put on their site that the Gnome spin may not work well for some disabled people, the Gnome team would go from "Well we just don't have time to work on a11y and we don't have enough man power for it. How dare you call us ableist!" to "Hey so we're working on Gnome 45 and we've set aside time to work on our accessibility stack. Can disabled people try it out? We're reaching out to the Orca mailing list, the audiogames forum, and several Reddit communities for other disabled communities to gather feedback." Meanwhile KDE would go "Yep, and here's our plan to fix it and we've already got a developer working on things. Thanks for pointing out our issues." Yes, this is a rant. Yes, I'm tired of even thinking about this crap. Yes, I forgot to take my anti-depressant today, and... yesterday, but I've rectified that. :)

#accessibility #linux #foss

I’d forgotten how nice using Android can be. A good, accurate onscreen braille keyboard that actually allows you to use all six Braille dots at once, so responsive it feels like I’m using a computer, ugh yes. Oh and Samsung TTS. It's really. nice, although I’ve heard that Google TTS on Pixels have gotten very good too. USB C, works with standards not against them, 5G before my iPhone SE, Dolby Atmos, which, before it came to iPhones, one of the big Apple fans on Youtube said couldn't be done because of physics, with a "dude it's science," kind of laugh. Yet, now Apple is like "the future of audio isn’t high quality, it's spatial audio." I mean, Android of course isn’t perfect. TalkBack has maybe a few more years to go before it has all the features of VoiceOver. But my goodness, when I get tired of bugs and focus issues and Braille issues and a sluggish CPU or unoptimized software, I can turn on Android and just zoom around the interface.

#accessibility #android #apple #blind

So I don't know if many Apple developers, or app developers for Apple devices, know about this site. But if you want to see a community of blind people that have formed around Apple devices, Applevis has you covered. They not only have a forum and blog, but a directory of accessible apps, across all of Apple's devices. They also have a bug tracker, user submitted guides, a podcast, hardware reviews, and developer resources! They're even on Mastodon, @AppleVis

https://applevis.com/

#accessibility #apple #applevis #mac #iOS #iPhone

@x0 @SingingNala @nellie_m @JesseF8693 Wonder if "hash" would do? It can be short for hash tag, but is one sylable so hash hash Markdown subheading, wouldn't be too hard to listen to.

Please boost for reach: Fedora Linux is focusing on accessibility for the next five years. I'd love to see people with disabilities, very much including blind people, comment on this. If you're interested in Linux, or free and open source software, your voices are valuable. I hope Fedora finds our voices valuable too.

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-strategy-2028-focus-area-review-accessibility/46898/12

#accessibility #linux #fedora #foss

So I know it’s only been like two or three people so far, but sighted developers asking how to use Orca on Linux to test for accessibility, shows that the time is fast approaching where accessibility is going to matter on Linux. I don’t know if it’s gonna be the explosion of the SteamDeck, or FOSS communities, or the rising interest in non-corporate computing and social networking and stuff. But this is already trickling down. Developers are needing to know about accessibility. They use Linux. I’m so glad to see KDE working on accessibility, and I hope that, one day, blind people can boot up a Linux installer, be told how to enable a screen reader, be guided through setup and onboarding after installation (with no unlabeled buttons please even though it’s just a slideshow Gnome (And an accessible Internet accounts adding process)). Shoot I’d even be glad to write tutorial information for it, like I did for QuickDocs in Fedora. But the time is now to focus on it, not when accessibility hits the FOSS community like a train. And I appreciate every single developer that comes to me, wanting to learn and understand. It’s miles, **miles** better than not giving a damn.

#accessibility #foss #linux

I mean I can say a lot of things that are wrong, or frustrating, or nearly impossible to do well on Android. But dag nabbit, I have never had really awful bugs where a whole section of a pretty important page in settings or the Play Store won’t read. I mean I’m not even saying the grass is greener. The grass on Android is still very wild and uncut. But at least I can manage my subscriptions there without having to OCR the screen. I don’t know. I just think both companies could use an accessibility person in just about every team.

@_nb This *is* a very good, and even helpful, solution to the problem. I mean just about no screen reader supports using an emphasis tone, besides Narrator when the option is selected, JAWS when the speech and sound schemes are set up how the user wants them, which takes a good 15 minutes if the user is familiar with that system, and possibly Apple stuff if the errors generated by Console for VoiceOver meals they’re working on a MacinTalk Emph thing. But yeah that would be great.

Ugh my gosh I can’t wait till Mastodon at least supports freaking Markdown so people can stop using mathematical latin italic capital u mathematical Latin italic lowercase n Mathematical Latin italic lowercase i Mathematical Latin italic lowercase c Mathematical Latin italic lowercase o Mathematical Latin italic lowercase d Mathematical Latin italic lowercase e Mathematical Latin italic lowercase t Mathematical Latin italic lowercase e Mathematical Latin italic lowercase x Mathematical Latin italic lowercase t.
Yeah. You feel that? The need to concentrate and pick out each individual letter and then reconstruct the word? That’s how I feel whenever I hear that in a username or post. You know what I do when I hear that? I skip it. Social media simply needs formatting tools. At least italics, bold, and underline. At least then screen reader will just read the post. Oh it won’t speak the formatting unless forced to cause blind people don’t need to know formatting /s but it’ll be bearable to listen to.

Please boost for reach: From a mailing list I’m on, some blind people are reporting that they can no longer manage their subscriptions in the App Store. They cannot see the list of subscriptions, so cannot select one to change the subscription, or more importantly, unsubscribe. I tried this with my iPhone running iOS 16.3, restarted my phone today so shouldn’t be some week-old-cache issue. This is… pretty darn bad.

#apple #accessibility #subscriptions #AppStore

Hey y'all, did you know CUPS, the Linux printing system, supports Braille embossers? Yep. Did you know you can even send your embosser images, and it'll emboss that? Yep. No expensive image to Braille program needed. We just need a good GUI lol, and Linux would have a lot of what we need, built into just about any distro. BRLTTY supports Braille displays, even the Canute 360 and HID displays. Such a good base to work on!

#accessibility #foss #linux #braille #blind

For the blind Mac users out there, how would you read a book line by line, like a book on programming?

#mac #accessibility #blind #reading #books #macos

Accessibility never, ever appears out of nowhere.

If you didn’t have to do anything to make your content (website, app, book) accessible, it’s probably missing, at least, image descriptions. The reason it can be browsed by a blind person is because the browser is good and the user’s screen reader is made for their use. Or the platform you’re using to make your app (SwiftUI, JetPak Compose, React Native) is doing the work for you and you’re taking the easy rout and not using any custom controls and all that bullcrap. Or your book is mostly text and the Ebook Reader the person is using is accessible enough for them to read your book. That book better not be a PDF, you hear me? No PDF’s. Ever. No, not even during the time you’re thinking about. Nope, not even that other time, either.
Again, accessibility doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. You work on the backs of people below you, who have made the web standard in such a way that accessibility is mostly built in. Label your links with text. Label your buttons and other form controls with text. Describe your images and graphs. If you type in another language, give that element a lang attribute telling what other language that item is in. Oh and please divide your content into headings, and mark the main content, like an article or main part of the page, with the <main> landmark. Thanks so much for coming to whatever the crap this is.

Please boost for reach. I'm trying to get some perspective here. I'm leaning more towards blind people, but able people are welcome to respond as well to get differing data. How long does it take you to perform a Google search. If possible, list your OS and screen reader. Browser doesn't matter too much to me. By perform a Google search, I mean the process of telling your browser in whatever way you do it that you want to search Google, finding the results, and activating that result.

Idea: What if sighted people boycotted software that people with disabilities can't use? I mean is that kind of solidarity a thing?

@aral Micro.blog is good too, and works better with screen readers.