Jules @afewbugs@librem.one

OK #Mastodon. I've seen several toots on #accessibility for #screenreader users, however, I've not seen one from a screenreader user (as far as I know). I've used ZoomText, Outspoken, JAWS (AKA JFW), Supernova, NVDA (Windows), and VoiceOver (both on Macs and iPhone). I don't have experience with Windows Narrator or TalkBack. I would like to rectify and clarify a few small things.
First off, any awareness of accessibility issues, and endeavours to make things more accessible is great. Keep going!
But…
Blind/low-vision people have been using the internet as long as everyone else. We had to become used to the way people share things, and find workarounds or tell developers what we needed; this latter one has been the main drive to get us here and now. Over the past decade, screen readers have improved dramatically, including more tools, languages, and customisability. However, the basics were already firmly in place around 2000. Sadly, screen readers cost a lot of money at that time. Now, many are free; truly the biggest triumph for accessibility IMHO.
So, what you can do to help screen readers help their users is three simple things.
1. Write well: use punctuation, and avoid things like random capitalisation or * halfway through words.
2. Image description: screen readers with image recognition built-in will only provide a very short description, like: a plant, a painting, a person wearing a hat, etc. It can also deal with text included in the image, as long as the text isn't too creatively presented. So, by all means, go absolutely nuts with detail.
3. Hashtags: this is the most commonly boosted topic I've seen here, so #ThisIsWhatAnAccessibleHashtagLooksLike. The capitalisation ensures it's read correctly, and for some long hashtags without caps, I've known screen readers to give up and just start spelling the whole damn thing out, which is slow and painful.
That's really all. Thanks for reading! 😘

A typical European car is parked 92% of the time. It spends 1/5th of its driving time looking for parking. Its 5 seats only move 1.5 people. 86% of its fuel never reaches the wheels, & most of the energy that does, moves the car, not people.

I’m sure North American, Australasian, etc vehicles are similar.

Sound efficient to you?

HT @circulareconomy on Twitter. #carculture #cardependency #cars #evs #transportation #mobility #cities #energy #climatechange

They say “We can’t do that. We’re not #Amsterdam.” You respond “Amsterdam wasn’t always like that either,” showing before & after transformations illustrating that the cities we admire made CHOICES. And they’re still making choices TODAY. They make more tired excuses. You don’t accept them either. (1e van der Helststraat, 1978 & 2005) #Dutch #Cityplanning #urbanplanning #streets #urbandesign #cities #streetsforpeople

New blog post:

What Everyone Seems To Get Wrong About Mastodon (or what What Mastodon’t)

Posted: November 12, 2022

Let’s get this out of the way up front. Twitter is a massive corporation that recently sold for tens of billions of dollars. Mastodon (or, really, the Fediverse) is an adhoc collection of dozens of servers run on spare change and passion by hobbyists the world over.

https://ajroach42.com/what-everyone-seems-to-get-wrong-about-mastodon/

(originally posted at gemini://gem.ajroach42.com, reposted to the web with minor revisions.)

Yesterday, my local Mastodon admins called for people to donate voluntarily. So much money was pledged that today they posted a poll asking how many months of reserve funding they should keep on hand before donating the overage to charity.

Meanwhile, Elon's breaking Twitter because he desperately needs cash.

Protip:

When designing a user interface, imagine some old woman using it, say Margaret Hamilton, and she's clicking your app's buttons and saying to you, as old people do,

"Young whippersnapper, when I was your age, I sent 24 people to the ACTUAL MOON with my software in 4K of RAM and here I am clicking your button and it takes ten seconds to load a 50 megabyte video ad and then it crashes

I'm not even ANGRY with you, I'm just disappointed."

I built this tool a year ago but I feel like Mastodon folks would like it

The "Weird Old Book Finder"

Type in a search query, and it'll find one randomly-chosen public-domain book that matches the query -- and present it for immediate reading: https://weird-old-book-finder.glitch.me

Why only one book? To prevent the paradox of choice! Just *start readin'*

Can't promise every book will be weird, but most are

A longer essay on how/why I developed it: https://debugger.medium.com/a-search-engine-that-finds-you-weird-old-books-3a74fbb5f3d4

This was a search for "mastodon"

the aim is not to produce acclaim-worthy posts that make you stand out on the timeline. the aim is to post at the same resonant frequency as other users in the shoal, creating confusing patterns to deter killer whales and other large predators

@SaraSoueidan there's also https://branch.climateaction.tech/ which switches to low bandwidth images when the power grid runs on fossile fuels and high bandwidth images when there are more renewables in the mix

This website runs on a solar powered server and will go offline during longer periods of bad weather: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html

The background is a battery meter & always display the relationship of the energy powering the website and the visitor traffic consuming it.

Brilliant☀️

If your morning isn't going the way you were hoping, take a moment and enjoy this photos of sleeping #squirrels. I promise it will help.

I see a lot of people emphasizing to new users that "mastodon is not twitter", in a way that I suspect alienates those users while also being misleading.

Mastodon and mastodon-like fediverse nodes (ex., pleroma, gnu social, etc) look and act almost exactly like twitter, very intentionally.

To the degree there are technical differences, they are largely either scale-related (the fediverse was federated since long before mastodon was a twinkle in gargron's eye, because centralized social media is only possible with stupid amounts of no-strings-attached VC money) or downstream from culture.

Almost every technical decision that differs from twitter here is downstream from culture, and almost every technical decision that isn't different from twitter is the result of the culture not yet having enough discourse to change it.

What is the culture?

The culture on the fediverse is formed from ex twitter users -- people who left twitter in various waves at various stages. These waves are mostly people who felt like they didn't fit in (or who felt actually unsafe) on twitter.

The first wave predates mastodon by years, and was open-source / free-software / security / privacy / civil liberties people. Basically, the kind of guy who tries to get everybody he knows to use tor & kali linux. These folks felt like the proprietary nature of centralized social media software was an ethical problem, and that the centralization & ad-based monetization was a security risk.

Later waves include: furries, LGBTQ people, and non-white people, all of whom faced systematic harassment on twitter; anarchists and communists, who don't like the profit motive in general and were happy to move as soon as they were aware that something else was available; retrocomputing / slow-computing people, who felt that centralized social media produced an unhealthy and environmentally unsound relationship between people in social media; sociology-of-UX & software-utopianism people, who felt that centralized & profit-driven social media produced unhealthy relationships between the people it mediates.

These categories overlap, and the more of these categories you fall into, the more likely you've actually been on the fediverse for a while. (For instance, I'm an anarchistic free-software guy with sympathies for slow-computing & software-utopianism, so all of the concerns other than systematic harassment have affected me personally, & I've got a lot of friends who have gotten systematic harassment too, so I've been on the fediverse for a good half-decade.)

Anyway, despite the fact that the fediverse is populated mostly by people with strongly-felt objections to the way things work on twitter, these cultural concerns actually only rarely result in visible technical changes -- and even then, they tend to be subtle. Emphasizing the technical differences is probably not helpful for onboarding new users, because new users are unlikely to encounter them on their own for weeks or months! To a new user, mastodon looks like twitter with a different color scheme.

It is more useful, in my opinion, to emphasize to new users that the fediverse, in general, cares about the users that twitter was happy to subject to harassment & other forms of violation long before a Musk regime was on the radar. Then, when a user encounters a technical difference, they are primed to understand it as downstream from culture: they know that it's somebody's attempt to fix a social problem that was rampant on twitter, and every former twitter user is aware of the kinds of social problems that were rampant there.