mcneely @mcneely@librem.one

Mastodon users: accessibility is a core principle of the community's culture

Mastodon UI: A 1:21 contrast ratio for scroll handles is good enough

If you do not schedule maintenance, your systems will schedule it for you.

The Vala Discord community is organizing a casual online meetup during the first weekend of December (3rd~4th)

It's a great opportunity to meet other Vala programmers, showcase your projects, get to know about other people's projects, prepare a presentation for a conference, or just stay up to date with what's happening in the community and have fun!

#vala #event

If you’re looking for a non-coding way to get involved, I just created a project for improving the metadata we show for our apps in AppCenter. Check it out: https://github.com/orgs/elementary/projects/112

3 steps to prepare for the future:

1) Integrate Plausible into your site
2) Import your historical GA stats
3) Ditch Google Analytics 🚀

If you're an #academic studying complex collaboration (multiteam, networked and non-hierarchical, interorganizational, group dynamics, etc.) I'd love to talk. Currently looking at doing the deep dive and joining #academia to study the psychology of it.

✨ Our new https://pixelfed.org website is now live! 🎉

"The internet’s town square should never have been one specific website with its own specific rules and incentives. It should have been, & should be, the web itself.

Having one entity own & police that square could only deform the worldwide conversation" https://inessential.com/2022/11/13/after_twitter

You can’t solve social problems with technology but my god can you make them far far far far worse

@Lizburton @mekkaokereke that's the "systemic" part of systemic racism. Tactics to suppress Black votes specifically, also end up suppressing votes of other races.

While there will be a lot of Democratic votes suppressed, because that's the point; this will ALSO suppress some Republican votes as well.

The flip side of this is that - a minority reaching places usually taken by for the majority, does not mean the systemic issues are gone.

Recognizing that this is probably a very popular place to say this, I think the world needs a vibe change where we value cooperative action more and winner-take-all contests less.

#photography

There's so much I haven't said about the making of the fediverse, ActivityPub, this moment. And so much of all of this feels really emotional for me *personally*. How we got here. The making of the spec. The huge role transphobia is playing in Twitter falling apart paralleling the huge role that trans people played building the fediverse. What I am trying my damnedest to build for the future of decentralized social networks.

There's so much I'd like to say, but talking about it feels dangerous, forbidden, selfish.

Sometimes I do kinda feel written out of all this history, but maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it's for the best.

I didn't realize how fucked up that is until the other day when I commented out loud that I was "lucky" that I didn't get BlueSky because, given what's happening with Twitter, I'd almost certainly be getting a ton of transphobic attention right now. And a friend pointed out how terrible it was that I was even put in a position to *think* that.

Heck, up until pointing that, that's a thing I never even mentioned publicly. There you go, now you know: I was, I believe, second in the running to run BlueSky. It's not a shock they gave it to Jay Graber, I think she's great. But... (cotd ...)

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! 😘

There are at least two #instances dedicated to #disabled people on #mastodon now. The (more or less) German http://fedisabled.social and the English http://disabled.social
Maybe one of them can be a home for you too?