Please boost for reach: One of the reasons that I pay $20 per month to @podcast is that Jonathan doesn't back down from saying what is right, and what a lot of us, I feel, are afraid to say. On the last episode, he talked about how he wasn't able to get Living Blindfully Plus onto Apple Podcasts because of accessibility issues. After contacting Apple, they replied with something like "These things take time." And Jonathan said something that I'd not put much thought into, that if a sighted podcaster had encountered this issue, it would have been fixed in a day. He'd been waiting close to a week for something to happen. And I think that some blind people, particularly in the Android communities, don't want to push these big companies, or these #foss foundations and communities, so they justify to themselves and their communities that they should just wait, that programming takes time, that there are only so many people on the accessibility teams. And that's usually where the discussion ends. But I want to push it further. Why is it that we should have to accept rampant discrimination? Why should we have to wait until everyone else's issues are solved first? Why is there only a few people at companies, foundations, and in communities willing to help us? I want you all to think about that. It's taken Google 3 years to support a new Braille HID standard that was released around 2018. Even now, there are no intentionally accessible Apple Arcade games. It'll take Fedora and KDE 5 years or so to make their desktops/OS accessible to blind people. We've yet to hear an appology from the Gnome foundation for how a blind, nonbinary person was accused of spreading misinformation about their personal experiences with the Linux desktop. I ask you all, do these things really take so much time? Or is time simply used as an excuse to not do the work? Anti-ableism isn't a badge you wear, it's work you do.
@devinprater@podcast The tech powers won't even listen to their own employees. I have stories from my career where I was explicitly forbidden to spend time and money on accessibility features, even as the director of technology in a software company.
Waiting for them to care cannot be our answer, because they never will.
@devinprater@podcast A lot of the time, it’s Stakeholders, Product Owners, even Scrum Masters, and other people in less technical but higher-up roles on the team than the developers who’d add these features.
We argue A LOT in favour of such things and get told “it’s not in scope for this release”
This is why we have to try and sneak a lot of our work through.
It remains an educational issue among that level of roles. They need to listen to us.
@KaraLG84@philsherry@devinprater@podcast Testing is a beaotch, but the other things don't take a significant amount of time, but they do take some time. And at any but the most enlightened software companies (like I'd like to think anywhere Joel Spolsky is involved for example), a developer's time is not their own. Their time is owned by the product manager and whatever form their roadmappy backlog of feature tickets are.
@KaraLG84@philsherry@devinprater@podcast Now, an enlightened, enabled and facilitated team can (and should) fight for time reserved to do these things. And an enlightened product owner and management who "get it" will support this as these things only contribute to code/product quality.
But at the end of the day, if Innitrode gotta ship on time, its do the thing we say or find another jorb. So sometimes the right things to do gets shoved by the wayside.
@KaraLG84@philsherry@devinprater@podcast Having said that, a supposedly "woke" company like Apple for example should be falling overthemselves to maintain accessibility support for everything. Throwing out good accessibility (like localization but not to the same extent) is such an inexpensive way to lock in entire customer demographics, its really a no brainer.
4/
@KaraLG84@philsherry@devinprater@podcast And its not like they're crunched for cash and they must ship an extra few billion SLOCs this quarter... not with $100Bn in profit last year. If the executive wanted to make accessibility a priority, they have the capacity to do it easily, they just don't wanna. So really its a shareholder thing. Shareholders don't want to care about accessibility.
@tezoatlipoca@KaraLG84@philsherry@podcast Oh my goodness, SLOCs . That's awesome! I thought I was the only one not impressed with Apple's CPU speed, or at least how it resolves to in the experiences, especially when using VoiceOver.
@devinprater@KaraLG84@philsherry@podcast Of course Apple doesn't care about code efficiency. They have a locked in consumer demographic who either doesn't want to switch, doesn't know they can switch, or think that switching out of the Closed Fruit Ecosystem Continuum is prohibitively expensive.
Also, I am very curious to know how your screen reader pronounces SLOCs. Does it say it like "schlock" (is schlock in its lexicon as well?) or did it spell out the acronym?
Let’s say I join a established team who are at least midway through some enormous GANTT chart. They’ve had all of their designs signed-off by this point and the client has a keen eye on the rapidly-approaching deadline.
The first thing I do is check lots of accessibility points of failure. These usually all fail. Every time. I’m never surprised.
@tezoatlipoca@KaraLG84@devinprater@podcast The next thing I do is ask why things have got this far, who signed-off on agreeing to make the site or app inaccessible, and how did they decide which disabilities they didn’t care about.
It’s at this point I’m usually labelled a troublemaker and told “we have to be careful…” about deadlines, the stakeholders, how accessibility isn’t a priority for the initial release.
@tezoatlipoca@KaraLG84@devinprater@podcast I’ll then pull up some code and open a screen reader for a screen share. Then I’ll spend 20 seconds amending the code and run the same code. “We have time to do this. We’ve already spent more time talking about it than it would take to just do the work”
This is my battle on almost every team I join. I up-skill every team member, every time.
@philsherry@KaraLG84@devinprater@podcast You're fighting the good fight. Keep at it. I too get the exhausted. But someones gotta knock these knuckleheads into shape.
@tezoatlipoca@philsherry@KaraLG84@podcast Just a stray thought, maybe bring in a blind person and show how they can't use the inaccessible version. I know, a dream, but if it ever becomes possible...
@devinprater@tezoatlipoca@philsherry@KaraLG84@podcast That's only part of the battle. Showing it's broken for one person doesn't answer the question of why they need to focus on that one person over the billions of other people with other problems. They don't know how many users are in the universe... partially because we don't want them collecting dempgrahpic data on us, but mostly 'cause they just don't care.
When building accessibility in from the beginning, this can… still end up being the very unfortunate truth, but at least we got a few bits in before they took us down and we went down fighting.
@devinprater@tezoatlipoca@KaraLG84@podcast I’ve taken entire teams on user research days out to a blind charity in Birkenhead before now (I’ve a family link, but I make sure we pay them). It’s always the first time they’ve watched a blind person use any assistive tech and it blows their minds.
I’ve advocated for the hiring of many disabled people to form an accessibility team. I continue to do so until I get what I need.
@devinprater@philsherry@tezoatlipoca@podcast Seconded.
I've often thought a group of blind people should get together and go round these companies and cause trouble. Show the higher ups to their faces how inaccessible their stuff is. It probably wouldn't achieve anything but I can dream.
@philsherry@tezoatlipoca@KaraLG84@devinprater@podcast LOL you do that and then they go "hey cool great you solved this for us thx! Now you get to keep doing that. Forever. Hope your boss thinks it's cool 'cause otherwise no promo for j00!"
@philsherry@KaraLG84@devinprater@podcast heh. initial release. And let me guess, in the next release its at the bottom of that increment's backlog with a "get to it if time" label.
But funny how each program increment has a habit of filling up and it keeps getting bumped. #alttext
@philsherry@devinprater@podcast This is 100% right. I laugh the laugh of a hollow, jaded man whenever I hear someone say "the accessibility team at <x> really needs to solve <y>!" As if every product has a crack team of experts in their back pocket they can deploy to solve everything. I wish this was the case!
I don't expect the developer will ever admit that was a bad thing to do, nor will the lead of the project react in another for mthan telling the people who try to report the issue including myself, to shut up and stop causing problems. It's how this entire society operates. Most people are just too blind to see it.
As for the podcast of mister Mosen here, yes I agree this is extremely disrespectful and disgusting. It's also something I've come to expect from the world in general. I'm jaded enough to expect society to do its worst before it bothers doing the right thing these days. I get a very nice surprised feeling when it isn't the case, which is rare enough. And if not, then only a vague sense of detachment and knowing I was right all along.
I've come to understand that I'm a second class citizen, nothing more. Not to accept it.
@Fragglemuppet@devinprater You nailed it. We need to continue to be, ahem, entitled as other Blind people like to call us. I did this with RoboDescription a few days ago when saying I just won't watch Tubi because they have robo description on their brand new originals and someone said I was entitled because I write audio description and am just mad that we get more description instead of less description. I just told them to get out of my way, then, because you can think I, or anybody else, is entitled all you want, just shut up and get out of my way, then. But basically, we need to continue to be loud and ignore the pick me's in our community.
@devinprater@podcast thanks for sharing, looking forward to listen to it! Can you recommend any other podcasts with disabled hosts or around the topic of (web) accessibility?
@devinprater@podcast Kinda reminds me of something I remember hearing a while ago, that VoiceOver only came to be because the NBF filed a lawsuite against Apple. If this is true, it really goes to show where Apple's loyalties lie.
@seedy@devinprater@podcast I don't know if that's entirely true, I think they were working on it well before NFB had any involvement. Back in the macOS 8/9 days another company had developed a screen reader called Outspoken so Apple didn't feel the need to work on anything themselves, but when Mac OS X came out, Outspoken could no longer be supported so I believe that's when they started working on VoiceOver. It was pretty bad especially in the early days, but they improved it very rapidly and by 2007 it was really quite good. I think the company has definitely changed over the years however, and I do question how much they really care about accessibility these days. Overall though, I don't think it can be argued that they're still one of the best when it comes to overall accessibility and usability, Google doesn't even come close. Microsoft is doing a pretty good job as well, but Windows is a mess and has been for quite a while. Apple does need to do better though, especially when it comes to their online services. I'm really struggling to understand how they did not test for accessibility when rolling out podcast subscriptions which were released about a year ago at this point, makes no sense how that could've slipped through the cracks and I hope they are addressing it quickly and efficiently.
@ZBennoui@seedy@devinprater Apple developed VoiceOver because if they hadn't, educational institutions would have had to move away from Mac due to it not being accessible to blind people, therefore illegal to procure. VoiceOver for iOS became an issue when educational institutions started using iTunes U on iPhone which wasn't then accessible. The NFB of MA sued.
@ZBennoui@podcast@seedy Yep. Now even the school for the blind that I went to use iPad and ChromeBooks. Then they come to the training center for adults having little to no experience with a computer.
@ZBennoui@seedy@devinprater It is critical we understand and remember our history, because we fought like hell for what we have. We won't go further if the fight doesn't continue.
@podcast@ZBennoui@seedy@devinprater The timeline for Voiceover on the Mac is somewhat unclear at this point. Some Apple people have told me that Voiceover was under development for macOS X before the law suit, NFB's claims not withstanding. Jobs was opposed to seeding control to the underlying OS to third parties like Outspoken. VO was under development for two years before shoing up in Tiger.
@podcast@ZBennoui@seedy@devinprater Vo on iOS was planned right from the beginning. It took them more than a year to optimize it so that it was a pretty smooth experience. Before the law suit, I'd filed several Section 255 complaints against Apple as soon as the iPhone was released in 2007. I was told that it didn't go unnoticed. As per usual, they didn't comment until they did.
@devinprater@podcast Definitely agree with this. When it's a big company like Apple or someone with the resources to do the work, there is absolutely no excuse for discriminatory behavior.
I'm no dev, so I can't answer any of your questions. But I'm fully with you on this. Companies should generally create and test their products with as many people in as many circumstances as possible in mind.
In a capitalist society this doesn't happen because minority groups don't bring much profit, so they're pushed down the priority list.
@devinprater Well said.
I've had similar issues with my bank where they've taken 6 months to a year to fix accessibility related issues with their app.
@devinprater Yeah. There was a bug where if VoiceOver was started before launching it, The app crashed. Then another where random headings in the transactions view e.g. last Wednesday would say "today. The correct date was shown visually. sarc But ya know we gotta be grateful it works at all don't you know.
@KaraLG84 Yep. That's what I hear a lot from the blind android community. Your TalkBack speaks while you're trying to talk to Google Assistant? Ah well it works for me and I'm one of the trusted talkback testers so meh lol. I can't use talkback with my braille display? omg omg why can't blind ppl just be patient gaaa! I mean I ain't saying the applevis community doesn't have those types but it's way more on the Android side.
@KaraLG84@devinprater I'm not one to claim that apple is perfect, far from it... But at least for my usage VO works better than everything else I've used, and the experience on my iPhone is glass smooth, so to speak. So on that side I cannot honestly complain. That doesn't mean I agree with the way they treat blind people who want to make podcasts though, most definitely not!
@KaraLG84@devinprater Hahaha that,s fair. I wish I had known in advance what it would have been like to get android, and never actually made that mistake.
@xogium@devinprater The last time I briefly tried Android was in 2011 but I've read a fair bit about it from people that work in accessibility. As far as I'm concerned I'll give it a go when they're happy with it.
@KaraLG84@xogium Yeah, I wrote a blog post on it like a year ago, and it's improved a little but honestly not by much. TalkBack is a basic screen reader, and so is ChromeVox on ChromeOS.
@KaraLG84@devinprater Yeah. For me, it will probably be never again, unless google get their shit together, sorry for the language but that's really how it is.
3 years after adding the braille screen input equivalent to android, there's still only a few languages supported. French is still not one of them. Tick, tock, goes the clock.
@xogium@KaraLG84 So I just checked, and they have it now in talkback 13.1. Now, there are only two options, one just called "French," and one called "French 8-dot computer braille." So no French Canadian, or Switzerlandish French, just... probably Perisian French. Sad. Really, just... I don't even know what to say. They're using Liblouis braille tables probably, and they could just dump all the tables in there. But no. Just one French.
@xogium@KaraLG84 Hell, even Apple uses Liblouis, and they have have stuff like Unicode Braille input and output and even Esperanto Braille. It just makes me so tired how Google just... does these kinds of things.
@KaraLG84@xogium@devinprater Even though I'm a beta tester, I don't anticipate being happy with Android's accessibility for at least a few more years--happy as in willing to use it for a month without having to resort to my other device.
@KaraLG84@xogium@devinprater My bank's app hasn't worked with iOS while VO is running for over two years now. My complaints just go into some bin. It crashes if VO is running. And then, it just ignores inputs and all sorts of weird things. I'm lucky that the web site is mostly accessible or I'd be forced to switch my bank.
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