Disability and Accessibility

I hope this is allowed here.

With the stuff happening in the UK atm. And honestly since 2010.

It really seems time we had a lemmy community specifically to discuse UK issues benifits and advice in general. These things are so specific to each nation. Such forums are a good idea.

While I am happy to set one up on feddit.uk . Or join and help anyone else setting one up.

Running such a community really will need several people willing to dedicate a bit of time moderating etc. More so as it is more likely for moderators to experience periods were they are less able to be involved. A decent sized mod team following agreed rules. Will allow any members to take a stress break as life gets complicated.

I am thinking about a community that allows posting of UK specific news. Asking advice. And rants as long as all members are friendly to each other. About life in the UK with any disability. Even self identified. Although depending on advice asked etc. Self identified disabilities are likely to need to be identified.

Please share you opinions.

Description: a toilet door with a multigender symbol and a disabled symbol. Text below the symbols reads "Inclusive| Ira tāngata katoa".

For context, this is the disabled toilet in the main art gallery in my country's biggest city. There are the standard male toilet and female toilet right there as well.

Edit: sorry, image upload isn't working for me. Basically the one disabled toilet has been turned into an inclusive gender and disability toilet. I love it that there is a gender inclusive bathroom but I don't love it that they siloed it into the disability accessible toilet instead of renovating a new one or changing one of the 4 standard ones instead or as well.

Amber Galloway doesn’t just do sign language to music – she uses American Sign Language (ASL) and her body, face and vibes to channel the live experience and energy to deaf and hard-of-hearing fans.

If you're wanting to build something accessible but not sure which tools / software to test it with, this is what you need to know: most used screen readers, web browser usage, braille usage, and more!

A while back I was in a business class, and I had this thought, that I really wish there was a way for me to log how many mental spoons* (how much mental energy) it takes to do a task. Something like a period tracker app, or a habit tracker, that could allow me to enter some data, and when it had enough it would be able to estimate how much energy a task would take, and how much energy I probably have on a given day, so that maybe I'd have an easier time managing my own energy. This idea developed into extending to physical spoons, as I've since developed chronic pain. It's not just that I suck at time management, although I do suck at that, it's that I have a hard time knowing how mentally or physically strenuous an activity will be for my mind/body, or how much energy I will have on a given day.

The hypothetical app would allow the user to input tasks, state how long they take, rate on a scale how strenuous the activity is both physically and mentally, or maybe have a number of custom scales. Like, for me it would be like, let's say i need to go get something from the pharmacy. I could input how long I need to get ready, how long the walk is, the fact that it involves bright lights in the store but it's usually pretty quiet, aside from cars on the way there and back. I could input that it involves talking to a cashier, which I hate doing but usually is only a few words. So I spend roughly 30 minutes on my feet, the task is low to medium Sensory Bad, has a small amount of Interacting With Humans, and takes a tiny bit of emotional energy due to the People Will Think I'm Stealing anxiety. Using this data and ideally previous data that the app has about my energy levels before and after other similar tasks, the app could then say "this will take 2 physical spoons, 1 sensory spoon, 1 mental spoon." So then I go to the pharmacy and when I get back, I note how tired I am, whether each of these aspects were worse/more draining than I thought, and whether the task involved more types of spoons than I thought, and it could adjust accordingly to future instances. There would have to be a means of quantifying everything, but I think this would help me as a Moss quite a lot. It would be even better if I could also input things like, how much i slept, spoons used the previous day, etc. so that the app could guess how many spoons i have on a given day. I think this would help me manage my energy levels better, both in reassuring me of what I am capable of and reminding me gently that I shouldn't overexert myself.

I looked into it briefly, and I haven't found many apps that specifically are made to help disabled people manage their energy levels like this. The closest I think is one called Flaredown, which is meant to help chronically ill folks track their symptoms and meds.

I was wondering if y'all had any thoughts on this? I know a small amount of java and C++ (I think, whatever tinkercad uses when you code virtual arduinos.) and while I would definitely need to learn a lot to make this happen, the logic of coding comes easily to me. My ADHD is likely to make it hard to follow through on this project, and it's pretty ambitious, but I still think it would be interesting to try and see how far I get. Do you folks think this is a good idea? Anything you'd like to see in an app like this? Any feedback or tips?

*For those who don't know, spoon theory is a framework for thinking about energy made by Christine Miserandino. It was originally used to describe her own Lupus, but has since been extended to a wide array of disabilities)

A relative wants to buy a wheelchair and I can tell there a lot to consider, but I'm having a hard time finding useful reviews of any model's actual usability, so I thought it'd be nice to get a discussion going on which chairs people loved, hated, or would otherwise like to rate. Is there something that is really great or really annoying about one?

Hi there,

I've been building a threadverse web app, "PieFed", for the last few months and recently put a bit of effort into making it more accessible. It is almost WCAG 2.1 AA compliant now.

However I have no lived experience of using the web with disability so any feedback in this area is most welcome. Please give it a try at https://piefed.social and let me know what you think, from an accessibility perspective.

Thanks!

Everytime I leave the house to do anything, I either

1. get shit from people because I am wearing a mask -either minimizing and simply gaslighting comments, or plain agression
2. when they seemy mask they decide to share their grief with me. It is so hard to listen to all the stories of people dying and becoming disabled from covid, shared by maskless people. I tell them masks work, and they should vaccinate. But it is so tiring. I am just trying to survive. I wish others would help each other survive. I am already tired from my chronic illnesses. Seeing the COVID numbers rise and no one masking or doing anything and staying in denial is horrible for my mental health. I am trying my best to hang on to my sanity. I wish you all that you stay sane too.

How do you write alternate text for a work with visual artistic merit?

• How you balance too many words versus sufficient details?
• What details should come first?
• How do you account for different audiences, their needs and preferences?
• Should it be written by the original artist or a professional describer?

In a recent IAAP webinar, inclusive media expert Joanne Pak explained an initiative to answer these questions and more.

The Literary Image Description (LID) Best Practices Guide is a Canadian government-funded project aiming to:

offer a more vivid and engaging approach to writing image descriptions in an effort to make art and literature more accessible to all readers everywhere.

Visit the project website to download a well-researched and illustrated guide in EPUB or PDF. Then maybe next time you see a painting, sculpture, comic strip, or even clever set of visual instructions, you can take a swing at making your own image description*!

*But of course, don't publish unless you first talk to the author or do sufficient research into the intent!

web.archive.org link -- excerpts follow.

The ACS uses a set of six yes-or-no questions—related to difficulty with hearing, vision, and other functions—to determine disability status. A respondent who answers “yes” to any of those questions is counted as disabled.

Now, bureau officials are recommending replacing those questions with a set developed by the Washington Group on Disability Statistics ...

Seltzer, for her part, agrees that the more comprehensive WG-SS could “potentially yield greater insights into disability” in the U.S., but worries that many policymakers will use the 8% statistic to cut funding to programs that help disabled Americans.

The proposed change will be open for public comment until 19 December, although the National Advisory Committee, which advises the Census Bureau on policy and research issues, will discuss initial comments on 16 November. Landes hopes policymakers will listen to the voices of disabled Americans and not move forward with the change. “The power of the disability community is strong,” he says.

A newmembeer of the GNOME accesibility team talks about current issues and plans