Blind Main

NVDA 2024.1 Beta 1 is now available for testing. Highlights include a new on-demand speech mode, the ability to drop speech modes from the NVDA+s command, a new "native selection" mode for Firefox, bulk actions in the add-on store & ability to review add-ons & more!

Note this release breaks add-on compatibility and only works on Windows 8.1 and newer.

Full info and Download from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-1beta1/

Hey, folks! As the holiday season approaches, and time off work is granted unto some of us, I thought it'd be a good time to post a quick and informal "state of the instance" report.

First, the critical info: I've updated the instance to the latest version, and that has changed the way two-factor tokens are handled. If you've enabled two-factor previously, please check to ensure it's still enabled. I posted this on our Discord, but realized I forgot to post here. Sigh.

Second, we're still looking for a designer to create a custom theme that prioritizes accessibility. We promised this ages ago, I know, but nobody has had the time to drive the effort forward. If you're a person with a disability, you have design experience, you're comfortable with Lemmy themes, and you're interested in helping out, let us know! You can post in the comments, or you can post in the lemmy-alpha-testing channel on Discord.

And that segways nicely to my third topic: when the heck are we getting out of Alpha? The answer is: who knows! The servers are stable, and the infrastructure is all working well, with one exception. However, I'm not willing to declare this a stable instance until we have a theme that's fully accessible to everyone, and the accessible apps on mobile have matured a little bit.

Next! Email, the one exception I mentioned above. If you have email notifications turned on here, please note that our email deliverability is terrible. If you're not getting emails from rblind.com, that's why. We do have SPF configured, and we send email via IPV6 and TLS. However, I don't pay for a service like SendGrid to ensure deliverability, and we send emails directly from our server. Paid email services are expensive, and I have no plans to pay for one. So check your spam folders, and whitelist our emails if you want them. Outlook usually accepts our emails, and Gmail does so when it's in a good mood. This will probably not be getting better any time soon.

The last topic I guess I have to talk about: threads. We have no plans to block federation with threads at this time. However, threads currently isn't federating directly with Lemmy, and federation is a per-account opt-in on the threads side. Should these things change, we will respond accordingly. In the interests of full transparency, because I don't think this information is publicly visible anywhere, we currently defederate with the following instances:

• lemmy.saik0.com: personal instance, user trolling
• lemmygrad.ml: communism, genocide denial
• invariant-marxism.red: more of the same
• hexbear.net: abusive comments in multiple posts, no action taken by the moderators of hexbear.

We only add a server to that list less than once every three months or so, and only when we notice or get reports of abusive or spammy comments. We don't use any automated blocklists. If this changes, we'll update the community.

That's everything! Happy holidays, everyone, however you celebrate!

I’m not blind but I browse with images disabled. This means I can no longer login to Protonmail because they push CAPTCHAs. I know some CAPTCHAs have an audio option but I just get a blank box from Protonmail’s CAPTCHA. So I was wondering how blind people deal with that, or if they are simply excluded from using #Protonmail.

I gave my best effort to make a post on a Lemmy instance accessible to the visibly impaired, but I don't know if what I did was effective. Lemmy doesn't provide for alt text on image posts, so I figured I would put it in the body of the post. It seem that rind.com hasn't had much activity. Is Lemmy simply not workable for rblind.com's intended purpose?

I know of the ACB and NFB. I am looking for specific groups on the following topics. I have heard that there are a lot of specific support groups on Facebook, so feel free to suggest them. PM's or responses here are welcome.

Leber Congenital Amaurosis

Programming / tech

Cooking (Youtubers are welcome)

Dating

Travel

Blindness and sexuality

Thanks in advance.

As the holidays are warming up, let's share our suggestions and idea requests for gifts for our blind and VI family and friends.

When requesting or offering suggestions, please include:

• Budget (free, just about free, rough Dollar, Pound or Euro range)

• Relevant recipient characteristics (level of vision, age, interests, devices owned, etc.)

• Time constraints, if any (something that goes on sale for a short period of time or your favorite event that only takes place for a few months every 17 years)

Let's use this thread to avoid clutter, to make searching easier and to have a nice reference to build upon, for the future.--

heya people, anyone has a guide dog? any experiences? what I should know?

I'm an indie web developer that's finishing up an app I've been building over the past three years, a platform to advocate for Medicare For All. One of my top priorities is ensuring the app is accessible to everyone. It gets a perfect score on Google Lighthouse for Accessibility, but accessibility isn't just a checkbox for me; it's a practical representation of my commitment and I want to make sure there are no obstacles to use for the disabled.

I'd love to get feedback on the overall user experience from those who use screen readers or related technology. I do have one known issue to start with. There's a keyboard navigation problem on a particular element that I'm already working on. But in general I took great care building the app at every interactive or visual element with accessibility in mind, and even in choosing my development stack. If you encounter any challenges or have suggestions to make powerback better for the blind community, please let me know.

Thank you for your time and support, Jonathan

Not sure if anyone would be interested, but the Internet Archive has a huge collection of old time radio shows from the 1930s and 40s especially. These include dramas, mysteries, horror, comedy, etc. Unfortunately, the website isn’t super voiceover friendly, but it’s possible to use. Anyway, thought I’d toss this out there. https://archive.org/details/radioprograms

my friend, rapunzel wants approval of her account, as she created it and wants to use it.

I have no idea how well this will work in practice; see the recent discussion here about the infrastructural problems with Linux accessibility. But I do know that @matt@toot.cafe is an expert with years and years of #accessibility experience in the #a11y space. So it will at least be a step in the right direction: getting the right people on the problem is always a good place to start.

I am very curious and want to help to make Linux more accessible.

I wrote with some people and got some insights:

• everything text, like a read-mode-only browser or a plain Terminal is best for TTS engines.
• TTS engines are difficult, some are really good but need many resources, some are worse but save resources
• TTS needs to be optimized to be really fast in some cases, to keep up with the speed
• some apps are better, some are worse, but probably most apps dont really suit blind people, as the whole GUI concept makes no sense

I am really curious. How would it be best for you, braille vs. voice, voice input vs braille vs. gestures?

What apps do you find best, how do you browse the web, find media to listen, how do you use Document editors and what purpose do they have for you?

Thanks a lot!

Saw this online elsewhere and figured I'd share here for discussion

my dad is blind.

he used to use yahoo! chat and he REALLY enjoyed the voice chat feature. i think it's because it reminded him of party lines from his younger days. anyway he did honestly develop relationships with some of the people on that platform and when yahoo! shut down their chat platform, a diaspora happened. he followed some of them to paltalk.

i doubt most blind people have ever even tried paltalk: 10 years ago they started pushing an interface that seems actively hostile to screenreaders and keyboard navigation. more recently (the last year or maybe two), they totally disabled their "classic" interface and i got to learn just how hostile the new interface is to accessibility software. its actually impossible for him to use his microphone or read the text that appears in the text chat. this puts him in the awkward position of being able to listen to others and type out responses or quips (slowly, but he's getting quicker)

i am quite adept at keyboard based navigation as a result of his disability. i feel that i am supremely capable of learning and teaching software for the blind.

UNFORTUNATELY he is also a diagnosed antisocial narcissist, and absolutely resistant to change. i feel confident that i could learn discord well enough to give him some training sessions and the whole discord ecosystem would open up for him. but he insists his friends are on paltalk.

can anyone recommend software for him, or give me compelling arguments in favor of discord? i will say he primarily likes to chat with boomers about politics, if that's any help picking a suggestion.

ADDENDUM

this is just a little vent from me: he insists these people are his friends and i tell him if that's the case, they will give him their email address or phone number or just follow him somewhere that is accessible (i know they won't though and i think he's afraid to find out that's true). to compound this particular difficulty, one of the paltalk chatrooms he hangs out in has a rule (but it's more of an ethos) that you can't talk about other chat rooms or platforms, as though drawing people away from their channel is a threat to them. it feels like a fucking cult.

fin

I'm honestly not sure what I'm hoping to do with this post. Maybe just see if others have had similar experiences. I've needed glasses my whole life, ever since I was a little kid, and my terrible eyesight has always been a running gag. I thought it was normal for my eyes to hurt all the time and my sight to get blurry and in general to just have a hard time seeing even with my glasses. Turns out... that's not normal. Yesterday I had a vision test again and my eyes went from a -9 to a -9.5 in 5 months. They're referring me to an optometrist to see why my eyes are getting worse in such a short time. They also used that 20/200 vision test card on me which was a new one. My friends have been encouraging me to use visual aids and such but I get nervous because it doesn't feel like it's bad enough to count. I don't know if I count as visually disabled. Logically I know my eyesight has always affected me; I'm just so used to it at this point. I'm not sure how to feel about any of this.

As a blind man, I know I am usually attracted to the sound of a woman's voice. It's usually just the way they say a specific word or syllable, like "uh huh". However I find this almost never happens with people in the "real world". It only happens with voice actors, other performers, and people who are completely unavailable. I know that sighted people are usually attracted to one another by a person's physical appearance, at least initially. For blind people, attraction is based on voice or touch, and touch is a big no-no most of the time. The one time I dated a woman who was blind, we were touching each other toward the end of our first date, which was quite an eye-opener, figuratively speaking. Online dating has become so visual that I've all but abandoned it. I have felt starved for arousal as someone who lives on my own because of this. Have any other blind people found they rarely feel attraction in the real world?

I figured I should share some of my thoughts on this. Think what you will about my perspective or decisions and formulate your own - we should all get to act on our values.

Would avoid anything on that server where possible until we hear an all clear

Adding mention for Admins/Mods

@dhamlinmusic@rblind.com @dhamlinmusic@dragonscave.space @fastfinge@rblind.com @admin@rblind.com @Altrissa@rblind.com @OldManOnFire@rblind.com @noahcarver@rblind.com @rumster@rblind.com