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Items tagged with: Accessibility


A Brief tour of the End, an accessible fiction podcast directory.


This is a brief tour of The End database, for fiction podcasts, with Apple's screen reader on iOS. I walk through some pages of the website that show how clean markup can make a website very easy to navigate for everyone, not just screen reader users.


My main instance is down, and I am unsure if it will return, so I cannot transfer my followers, so boosts would be helpful! I am a Blind Romance writer, #Accessibility advocate, and more! I do a lot of digital community work and love reading audiobooks. I still do penpals, the snail mail way! I detest #AI but love eating international candy! #Introduction #Introductions


This is why you shouldnโ€™t overuse emojis in social media.

๐Ÿ”— Taken from the UKโ€™s Royal National Institute of Blind People https://www.rnib.org.uk/

#Accessibility #RNIB


Ever found modern fancy scrollbars in #Firefox inaccessible?

about:config and:

widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled โ†’ false

keeps them fully visible while not however.

widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override

can be used to make them thicker (I've set 24).

#accessibility


I know that the mastodon team are suggesting you turn on #hCaptcha for signups to your instance, to combat the spam wave provided by a rudimentary script that doesn't have the smarts to get around it.

I vaguely remember, however, that people have previously raised #accessibility concerns about it. Does anyone have any experience with the accessibility or lack there of, of signing up to instances that use this feature?

If it is indeed inaccessible, I don't consider this to be a reasonable solution.


While I want to recognize @protonmail for lowering prices when funding situation improved, I'd rather recognize them for improving #accessibility for their products. I realize that these things aren't mutually exclusive. But, I'm a bit tired of letting companies off the hook for a basic need for a large part of the population. Disabled people matter.


"We have so much to learn from poetry about being more playful and exploratory in how we write alt text."

https://alt-text-as-poetry.net

#AltText #ImageDescription #accessibility #a11y #poetry #AltTextAsPoetry


Is heraldic the oldest form of structured alt-text? #accessibility



So I wrote a blog post for the first time in 5 years, warning about hcaptcha's accessibility account. Long story short, they banned me from the accessibility account because I'm not blind. I am blind, but well, they seem to think not. Please boost, share, etc since this seriously affects me, and it's not ok at all. You can read the full blog post here: https://4mt.me/hcaptchastory

#blind #hcaptcha #a11y #accessibility #boost


Folks, I donโ€™t know who told you youโ€™re supposed to dump hashtags in your picture #altText.. No, please stop. Alt text is for describing the image content. A jumbled mess of hashtags is not the same thing.

This shit is like the thing I see sometimes with YouTube subtitles where folks dump extra info in the subs that has nothing to do with what is being said. I need the captions for #accessibility, please donโ€™t abuse them for your own purpouses. Similarily donโ€™t dump hashtags in alt texts.


Why is this not a thing always? #accessibility

"Japanese brewers include braille on their beer cans to prevent the blind from mistaking alcohol for soft drinks."

Japanese brewers include braille on their beer cans to prevent the blind from mistaking alcohol for soft drinks.

Image shows the described braille on a can, next to the tab.


Run Linux, post on the fediverse, and care about accessibility?

You need Frog.

https://github.com/TenderOwl/Frog#readme

Frog extracts text from images.

Use it to copy and paste the text in images into your image descriptions and help make the fediverse more inclusive.

#frog #ocr #altText #accessibility #a11y #linux #fediverse


No Mastodon, I do not ever want to use a hashtag in all lower case, stop suggesting it. #CamelCase is the #Accessibility option.



W3C: Detailed image descriptions don't belong in alt-text



I believe people on the #Fediverse are more likely to add alternative text to the images they post than on any other popular social media platform, that's great for #Accessibility. But it isn't the end-all-be-all of it. For example, when one of my contacts posts in German or Finnish or Farsi, I can copy the text and plug it in a translator to figure out what they meant.

However, when they share a picture including text in the same language, even if they transcribed the text in the picture in the alternative text attribute, I can't access it on mobile at all, and even on desktop I can't copy it from the default popup on mouse hover.

I tried to dabble with #CSS to reveal the alt-text attribute value using pseudo-content, but it doesn't work since we're dealing with an #HTML <img> which is an empty element by definition. Is there any other way to expose this attribute value other than just parse the text in the post body directly?

#WebDevelopment


I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I am certainly disappointed that the closed captions on the Black Hat videos, which I paid $2500 for are widely inaccurate and have not been proofread. I feel bad for deaf people who rely on these, as the machine generated ones are questionable at best. For free content I understand relying on it, or even for real-time content, but for recorded video that you pay a premium for this is unacceptable. #InfoSec #AI #Accessibility


PSA: optional HCapcha support has been addded to Mastodon 4.2 beta 1. HCapcha's solution for screenreader users involves setting a user cookie, which is a privacy risk and not always reliable. If you'd rather a more accessible capcha solution be implemented for managing spam, please add viable options to the ongoing discussion at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/25023

#accessibility #spam #mastodon #capcha


I just want to say for my first post to the #Fediverse that I've already seen more #alttext in the last couple of days than I've literally seen in my entire life. I don't know what it is, but as a blind user it's making me emotional to be able to actually interact with content. Think I'll write an introduction soon.
#accessibility #Mastodon #redditMigration


People of the #fediverse, especially those creating various services, there are alternatives to HCAPTCHA when you ask people to create accounts or login. Despite HCAPTCHA's propaganda, HCAPTCHA is not truly accessible to #blind people. It requires us to give up our privacy if we choose the cookie option. The text alternative doesn't work most times. I just tried to sign up for a /kbin server at https://redit.buzz and wasted 30 mins on HCAPTCHA.

Please be #inclusive!

#accessibility


I often hear "let's wait til we hear from users" as a way of deferring #accessibility work from a new feature. This is not ok. It puts the burden on the user to tell you how the feature should work for them rather than starting from the assumption that all features should work fully for everyone from the beginning. It also signals to people who rely on accessibility that #a11y was considered secondarily. A11y isn't part of the feature for all users; rather, it IS the feature for some users.


Content warning: Linux GUI


Please, please do not do this under any circumstance, if you care about your instance being accessible to the #blind and visually impaired (hint, you should).

#HCaptcha is a horrible example of how not to implement a #captcha solution, forcing people to register their email address and store a cookie, as well as disable cross origin restrictions on their devices in order to pass validation.

There are much better alternatives, such as the no-hassle https://github.com/mCaptcha/mCaptcha, which does not need any user input other than checking a checkbox. Alternatively, use captchas that provide text versions, e.g. via solving a math question or at the very minimum, provide an audio version, knowing that it is not ideal for the hearing impaired.

HCaptcha is NOT the future. #accessibility #a11y


Accessibility is important, and by describing your photos with alt text you can help vision impaired people better understand the context.

@pixelfed makes this easy, and we embrace alt text by making it more visible on our official app.

Simply tap the โ€œALTโ€ label to see alt text! #pixelfed #accessibility
Pixelfed app
Pixelfed app


How do I do good alt text?

This is the hard part. I'll use some examples from D-A grade below (IMO) and I'm not expert.

Share this with people who don't understand accessibility helps them meet their goals.

Also, images and posts cost money to host. Don't forget to support your local Mastodon server, even tiny amounts help! #BuyYourRound #MastodonServer #accessibility

Edit: A reader informs me that screenreaders don't do paragraphs of alt-text just one big lump. So try and be concise!

T/T
Technically alt text: two birds on a branch. Better: A cockatoo with a tiny parrot lodged under its wing.  The cockatoo is labelled  "Some random Internet admins I never knew existed until 4 days ago, just trying to live their lives."  The parrot is labelled me.
Bare minimum: two birds one says "some random Internet admins I never knew existed until 4 days ago just trying to live their lives.  The other says me. Best: A sleepy white plumed cockatoo dozes with a tiny orange parrot protectively lodged under its wing.  The cockatoo is labelled  "Some random Internet admins I never knew existed until 4 days ago, just trying to live their lives."  The parrot is labelled me.

The meme is about how coming to Mastodon makes you feel taken under the wing of the admins here and how you get to feel safe being yourself as opposed to constantly afraid of being attacked for just existing.


Here's few words about #accessibility, specifically #CamelCase and #altText on #Mastodon. From a pragmatic as well as ethical point of view. If you are already signed up on ethical grounds, good job, let's keep at it!

Pragmatically: If you are not writing for an audience outside of people you personally know then there is a non zero chance you will have someone with difficulty seeing or with dyslexia try to read your work. Effective communicators remove barriers for their audiences.

1/T


Friendly reminder that using those 'fancy text' generators to make your name or the text in your posts all pretty makes them inaccessible to screen reader users. They can also be a pain to read visually.
to you, they're just cute lettering you can just skip over. For a screen reader user like me, depending on various things, they could come out as
'mathematical small bold k mathematical small bold a mathematical small bold r mathematical small bold a',
'letter 126b letter 17dj letter 13y7dwiz'
or nothing at all.
I'm not sure off the top of my head how they appear on a Braille display but it's bound to be a right mess.
I don't particularly call any of those pretty, do you?
Plain boring text that is accessible to everyone is the new pretty.
#a11y #accessibility


When I was in Luxembourg this weekend, I saw these embossed markings on crosswalk buttons that show the layout of the crossing. This one shows multiple car lanes, tram tracks and inbetween pedestrian islands. #accessibility
A button at a pedestrian crosswalk, viewed from the side. There is an embossed diagram of the crossing's layout with a line indicating the path you walk along and several rectangular pieces indicating car lanes and tram tracks.


Thanks to the makers of #Fedilab for your continued work towards #accessibility on #Android.

The latest version of the app has an setting to require alternate text before making a post. A great reminder for users sharing images on Mastodon, Pixelfed, or Friendica servers.

I hope all Fedilab users turn the setting on, so everyone can benefit from your pictures!

#AndroidA11y #A11y #AltText #Blind #LowVision @apps
Screenshot of a settings screen. There is an option set to true that says: "Mandatory media descriptions: The message will not be sent if a description is missing with a media."
Screenshot of a picture being uploaded with a toot. There is a warning sign next to the word Description. There is also a popup warning that reads "There are missing media descriptions."

The picture being uploaded is a drawing of Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion from the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.


I've thought about doing this for a while now.
#AltText is something I advocate for, as well as some other simple ways to make posts more #accessible and #inclusive. Let's make this #interactive.
Reply with an #image and I'll tell you what my #ScreenReader thinks it shows, as a practical #demonstration of inaccuracies, limitations and why alt text is better.
Edit on request: Not all screen readers can do image recognition. Alt text is the only viable way to be inclusive. #accessibility #blind


I wanted to send out a massive #ThankYou to @ronja for prompting me a few weeks ago to look into the captions that were automatically generated for my #YouTube videos.

I had been a little over confident in Google's ability to understand what I was saying.

I have since gone through all of my content over the last few weeks and manually fixed the CC myself.

Not only has my viewership increased, the percentage of people using CC has increased from 12% up to just over 30%.

#accessibility


All-terrain wheelchairs arrive at U.S. parks: โ€˜This is life-changingโ€™. Georgia and South Dakota are the latest states to provide off-road wheelchairs on public trails.

https://wapo.st/3GRo4RN

#Accessibility #Disability
Brittanie Wilson traverses the snow in a track chair at Minnesota's Myre-Big Island State Park on March 22. (Deborah Rose/Minnesota Department of Natural Resources)

โ‡ง