#HelpNeeded@mutualaid Hi, I am Lauren a #blind#Pansexual#woman who is living in a horrible #environment and I need to get out. I am over-all raising $10k and I know that's rediculous, but let me tell you why. I don't have my #SSI and that takes a #CourtCase to obtain. I am living in a #Mentally#Abusive and #unsafe environment, and it has taken a lot for me to realize this. I am going back to #College in #January, and being here is stressfull enough to where nothing gets done.
I am looking for suggestions for social/party games that can be played digitally over zoom (can also take suggestions for in person games) that are accessible for as many ppl as possible, especially blind and deaf players.
I find with digital social meetings it's really difficult to get a convo started until everyone has warmed up to each other, and social games are a great way to fast forward that.
Stuff like werewolf can be made more accessible with a GM or narrator that recaps everything that's happened every night (and a sign interpreter or simul-subtitling), but I don't know how well it'd work for the wolf-meeting parts. I do not want to arrange any kind of game meant for ppl to get to know each other that excludes some ppl from some of the roles.
📣 Attention all #Blind folks! Google Chrome is testing an experimental feature called Auto-Verify that could help us bypass those pesky CAPTCHAs. No more struggling with image-based tests! 🙌
👉 Available on Chrome Canary (still experimental!)
👉 Stores your CAPTCHA pass history to verify you're human
👉 Works even on websites you're visiting for the first time #Accessibility#TechForGood#ChromeCanary#AutoVerify
A great opportunity for #blind and #PartiallySighted people interested in #theatre - take part in a research and development week, based in Leeds, UK @disability | ‘Otto Weidt is a new musical by Amir Shoenfeld and Caitlyn Burt. The show is inspired by the true story of Otto Weidt – a blind German man who employed visually impaired Jewish people in his brush and broom workshop and shielded them from Nazi persecution. The show features integrated “stealth” audio description, weaving visual information into dialogue, lyrics and soundscapes to create an elevated experience for audiences with any level of sight.’
This project looks great! One of the artist involved is Aaron McPeake, whose work I enjoyed interacting with at an exhibition back in December #blind#PartiallySighted#Disability#art#sculpture@disability | Beyond the Visual: Blindness and Expanded Sculpture: ‘This three year project will feature a research season and public engagement events.
It will culminate with a landmark 2025 exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute, foregrounding work by blind and partially blind artists.
Working with Shape Arts, the project will generate the first international database of blind and partially blind sculptural artists.’ https://www.shapearts.org.uk/blog/btv-press-release
I want to make custom jewellery for blind and visually impaired individuals.The goal here is even if they (or you) can not experience seeing the item in the mirror, it can help them communicate their wonderful inner world outwards through unique personal designs based around their most loved things, values, shapes, textures, feelings and more. Would also be jewellery nice to touch and easy to put on and remove, and all climate friendly. Know anyone who may be interested? #blind#visuallyimpaired
This is a weird request, but I figure the worst I can get for it is silence. I'm totally #blind and have very bad hearing. To set up a device through its inaccessible software, I'm in need of a sighted person for about an hour and a half to two hours who can access a computer remotely, speaks and reads English, and can describe images and graphs. The person needs to be quite patient with follow-up questions, needs to be willing to repeat if needed, as well as be able to click on items and describe what happens on the screen. The person needs to be fairly detail oriented because some of the images appear to have arrows and other ways to expand them, according to the manual. Though I'm happy to be reasonable, I have no clue how much to offer as payment, this is my first request of this kind. I'm posting it because I know we have some blind people here who may be able to point me towards someone who has done this before and may be willing to do it for such a short period. Boosts welcome, indeed, they're appreciated. #hearingimpaired#software#A11Y#accessibility#remote
Honestly, next blind convention season, I want to see Apple and Google accessibility engineers get on stage and do a battle of the screen readers. Note that this is not a truth claim and any of the text below could be false, change, not work, or not even exist.
Audience member: Show us how you check your email!
Apple: Okay, on the home screen, opens mail with Siri, open a message, read it with a swipe down with two fingers, and closes mail.
Google: Easy! Open Gmail with Google Assistant, opens a message, reads it with a double tap and hold with two fingers, and closes Gmail.
Audience member: Navigate a thread of emails!
Apple: On the home screen, Turns the rotor to Braille Screen input, types "mail" and swipes right with two fingers to open Mail. Then, finds a conversation, opens it and turns the rotor to "messages" and swipes down through the thread.
Google: From the home screen, swipes down with two fingers to show a search box, double taps to begin editing, uses TalkBack Braille keyboard to type and open Gmail with a two finger swipe up, opens a conversation, and double taps on a message header to collapse a message to show the next one. And the next one.
Audience: Show us how the new NLS EReader works on the phone.
Apple (probably after a few point updates to iOS 17): Puts EReader in Braille Display mode, chooses to add a device, goes to Settings > Bluetooth on iPhone and double taps the EReader's Bluetooth name. Then has to work around some new bug in Braille support.
Google: Puts the EReader in USB Braille Display mode, finds a USB C to USB C cable, plugs the 2 devices in, and things work. A bit sluggishly, but they work.
Audience: Show us how we can learn what's new in the screen reader.
Apple: Opens Safari and goes to apple.com/accessibility, and has VoiceOver read the whole page.
Google: Opens TalkBack settings, double taps on "new features in TalkBack," and lets it read actually useful info.
So today when I get home, I'm gonna try resetting my Samsung phone, and seeing if that fixes the Google Assistant issue. Better than spending another $500 or so on another phone right now. Y'all why do I do this to myself. iOS works okay, and yet, here I am even messing with Android. Like maybe I'm a masochist or something? Same thing with Mac and Linux, although with WSL and Homebrew I don't feel the call of the foss as much anymore. Gosh I wish I could be one of the normal blind people that are just happy with their iPhones and don't even think a thought about Android. Sometimes.
Anyone out there know of a list of accessible games for #android? I'm #blind and would like some entertainment in my life. I'll even be fine with having to install the apk's myself.
As now everyone seems to be mad with that "degoogling" thing, I'll reiterate my point: I won't stop using services that are accessible and usable for me as a blind screen reader user. Period, full stop. You can be a thousand times open-source, have good intentions and be saint angels in flesh, but if your service is not accessible and usable by a blind user, I cannot perform my daily tasks, be it for work, hobby or leisure, hence I won't use your service. Make your services accessible and usable for everyone and then preach about degoogling, de-appling, de-microsofting and de-whatevering. #Angry#Blind#Accessibility
Hey Blind mastodon users. I have a totally blind friend looking to join here. I've recommended them disabled.social, but wondering if anyone has any mastodon tips for totally blind newbies. They use IOS.
It's 2027. LLM's are built into Systems on Chips. Everyone sees their own personalized worlds. Their computers show things in a way the user likes. Or the manufactorers like. Or the ad agencies like. Who knows. Apple helps us all write calm, understandable texts, posts, and books. Google shows us, in AR, "only what we need to see." A map on our walk we take to decompress. No, there are no homeless people in the street. Just follow the lines on the map. Yeah, like that. Hear that soft music. Your own personalized playlist, all made by AI. You like Mooncake right? Well, here's something that sounds like them. A little. But it's 24/7. More, more, more.
Some people make mistakes in their work to show that they're human. That wrong note? That's a mark of humanity. That misspelled word? They're one of us. That blotch of ink? A soul made that. Perfection is of the machines. To err is human.
The blind can see now. But at what cost? The machines know us all now. They see our faces. They see them, pick out details from what they see and what they know. Then they feed that to blind people, who eagerly gulp it down like a dry sponge. But the AI doesn't mention how fake the smile is, on the person who sees the camera that sees them. Wave for the camera, for the machine. But for the blind person, who only wants to have what sighted people were born with? Well.
Our computers then correct all that input. That misspelling? Surely the human didn't mean to do that. The blotch of ink is gone. All distilled into blandness. People begin writing on paper again. Blind people get what the AI gives, just as before. People are angry that their analog becomes digital again. Cycles and cycles. Dim and light. Gifts and hooks. Humanity and the seeking and the taking.
I’m loving all the posts for #AltTextCoverDay today so join in if you can!
Here’s a beautiful book I bought earlier this year on a trip to Oxford. We visited the historic Blackwell’s bookshop which is enormous as I wanted to go to the rare books section at the top of the shop to see if they had any first editions of my favourite author, Barbara Pym. She studied at Oxford University and many of her books, which were published in the mid 20th century, are set in the city. I was surprised to find they only had one, Crampton Hodnet, and that it was no more expensive than a standard hardback book. I’m #blind so my husband described the cover and read the blurb for me and even though I’ll only ever read this book in Braille or audio now I had to buy it!
This novel was one she wrote just before WW2 but it was not published in her lifetime. She had a difficult #publishing journey after initial success in the 1950s and was eventually shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Quartet in Autumn in 1977. After her death in 1980 Macmillan finally published this one in 1985.
I’ve read all her books and a recent biography of her, so I love that I get to own this piece of her publishing history which is something she never got to enjoy. #bookstodon@bookstodon
Reading Braille is a bit different than reading with speech, simply because with Braille, we can skim and pattern-match a bit easier. Speech is incredibly linear. Braille, well if there's a load of question marks, or dashes, or whatever, I can just feel across the display or page until I come to something different. With speech, though, if it's reading punctuation or can't read some punctuation and just says "symbol symbol symbol symbol," or "question mark question mark question mark," then there's no way, on that line, to skip to the next different text. In a document or site, you can skip to the next line, but you then don't know if the previous line had something else on it. Maybe you can skip to the next word, if symbols are all together with no spaces. Especially in apps like Tweesecake, though, where text is sent directly to the screen reader, you can't skip forward throughout a post or message passed repeating symbols or emoji. That's why I always try to follow a format for my posts. My thoughts or info at the top, links next, and any hash tags at the bottom. Having hash tags in the middle is okay if they're spaced out throughout the text, and I do that sometimes too.
Reddit has now sufficiently broken their own site that moderators of the blind community's subreddit who are themselves blind can no longer access the moderator tools.
This statement by the mod team is worth a read to understand the full extent of the failure.
Hey, it's kind of weird I'm just now thinking of this, after all these years, but: does anyone think there should be a list for #blind and #VisuallyImpaired people on #Trunk? We do have one for #accessibility, but not all of us post abut that, and that's OK! And while a big chunk of us are scattered among a few obvious instances, there's more out there, and perhaps it'd be nice to connect better?
Or perhaps something a little less narrow? A list for all physically #disabled people, or even all #disability stuff in general?
If you're not sure what Trunk is, look at this first: https://communitywiki.org/trunk
I wish more people would add alt text to their NSFW images. I wanna know just what that fox is doing, how those ropes look, and oooh what's that Lucario up to? Blind people wanna have some fun too. #alttext#furry#nsfw#blind#accessibility
I'm not blind and just want to know so I don't do the sort of stuff that may make it difficult for screen reader. So it just made me wonder what are best way to make any of the post/images more accessible for screen readers which I imagine blind users commonly use?
I have tried to add alt-texts to most my images but I wasn't sure if there's more stuff I could do and also unlearn to make it easy on you