What is the best way to offer you text-to-speech in my video game? Should I build it in myself? Or should I somehow make the text available to external screen reading plugins you already have installed?
What is the best way to enable text-to-speech? I'm trying to imagine how a blind person would find the toggle in a settings menu they can't see. The only way I can think of around that would be to enable it by default and have an option for users who don't want it to disable it at the beginning, but that sounds cumbersome. Is there a better middle option? Is there a commonly-used keyboard shortcut I can enable or something?
The case for AI in #accessibility is a hotly contested one but I do feel the baby's being tossed out with the bathwater just a tiny bit. Yes, it is bad that AI is being used to phase out hoomans in all sorts of pursuits. And yes, it is also true that at least at the moment, Ai-generated anything is generally lower quality than hooman-generated stuff. And yes, it is also true that we're seeing AI in places we really shouldn't be seeing it (MDN anyone?) and that people, just like always with a new toy, are going absolutely nuts with it and putting it front and center like it's Cthulhu's new miracle to end all toilet paper shortages. But it CAN, at times, actually be an enabler. It CAN, OCCASIONALLY, actually be used for good, and I don't think people who find this out and do this should be villified
If image generation gets good enough to make me Twitch banners, or blog featured images, or make small video edits for me, or write me CSS that actually looks good, you bet your glutal hemispheres I'm going to make use of it. Purely a matter of efficiency. We haven't had a decent video editor that's #accessible as long as I've been alive, I think i've waited long enough for hoomans to step up. If AI can do it, AI can do it. Screen readers can't tell me if CSS is doing what I want, so if AI can do it that just means I can be more productive as a developer. Again, I've waited for this situation to improve in #screenreaders for my entire professional career, so if what is for all intents and purposes a new tool can enable me to do this, I will happily make use of it. Summarizing articles in between all the newsletter popups, ads, images without alt text and silent videos? Absolutely. Just another #accessibility tool at this point. So yeah. Bad, but not all bad.
Sometimes, you might think that previous #accessibility wisdom has been superseded by new "facts". Maybe someone told you that #screenReaders don't work well with a particular design pattern, but you tested #ScreenReader X and it seemed to work fine. Perhaps you heard that an interactive HTML input doesn't persist with forced colours styling, but you tried a High Contrast mode in Microsoft Edge and it seemed to be there.
There are three considerations usually missing here:
How are you defining and evaluating the working state? Do you have a functional, accurate understanding of the #accessTechnology or accessibility feature you are asserting things about?
You tested one thing in relation to a statement about multiple things, e.g. a statement is made about screen readers, plural, and you only tested with #VoiceOver (it's always VoiceOver). Beyond posting on the web-a11y Slack, how do you propose testing more broadly, if you plan to at all?
Possibly the most critical at all: is this question worth its overheads? If answering it conclusively would require me to test ten screen readers with 45 speech engines, or seven browsers with 52 permutations of CSS properties, maybe following the advice is "cheaper" than determining whether the advice is still completely relevant.
Important disclaimer: this relates specifically to cases where following the advice would not actively make things worse for users.
TL;DR: when you know doing a thing won't make things bad, doing the thing is usually quicker than evaluating whether not doing the thing is also bad.
To what degree does NVDA actually have support for TUIs? When I look at TUIs (terminal user interfaces) for tools like Joplin, Vim, practically anything that requires using arrow keys/tab within a terminal, it almost always is a horrible experience. Are there things TUI developers can do to better accommodate NVDA? @NVAccess@tspivey
Do terminal-first tools like TDSR in a WSL2 shell improve this at all? #nvdasr#screenreaders#accessibility
Asking people who use #screenReaders: what is the best way to add #AltText to a QR-Code? Are the screen readers clever enough to recognise it as such and offer to read the contents or follow the link? Does putting the content of the QR-Code in the alt text help? or would it make it worse, especially if it is an URL?
boosts are welcome
(the whole point of the post that prompted this question was posting a QR-Code, so no, I couldn't have just posted the URL)
So @gnome is removing the x11 session, leaving just the Wayland one.
If this goes out before Orca, the GNOME screen reader, is fixed to work on Wayland, it will mean that people who rely on screen readers will have no way to use one on GNOME. And thus on the major Linux distributions.
So I’m hoping the plan is that this change will not land until GNOME has a working screen reader.
@nah@fvsch@sonny@matt But here’s the thing: Wayland would never have been made the default if, say, fonts didn’t render correctly. Not having a functional screen reader is as big an issue for people who rely on screen readers. So at some point, someone at Canonical decided that it didn’t matter that people who use screen readers would be excluded. And so they should be ashamed.
People who use #ScreenReaders, imagine a feature on your instance where you can automatically hide any post that contains images/videos without alt text.
If you reply with an opinion and YOU PERSONALLY don't need alt text for accessibility reasons, I will probably block you.
Hi all. Hope everyone is doing well. It's about to be 3:00 AM here, and I'm about to get some sleep, but before I do, I wanted to ask for #advice from those who might know more about #technology, creating #websites, and #accessibility than I do. My mom runs a #construction#business and has a website she designed herself with drag and drop on #GoDaddy. She owns the #domain it's on and wants to move the site for a few reasons: it keeps getting hacked and she's getting a lot of spam and scam messages, customer service is poor, and GoDaddy isn't very #accessible with #ScreenReaders, so I can't help her manage her website at all. I've done some research and seen that other recommended no-code website builders are #Wix, #Squarespace, and #Weebly, but I can't find a lot of information on their accessibility. I've seen posts on #Reddit recommending hiring someone to design your website, but we don't know anyone who could do that, and our budget probably wouldn't be high enough. My mom isn't great with #tech and really needs a no-code solution. Does anyone know about the accessibility of website builders like the ones I mentioned, or can you suggest another one that might work? Thanks. #blind@mastoblind
Be kind, take the extra moment. Fediverse has a solid reputation for inclusion, for thinking about others, we must keep it going. #Fedi#FediTips#new#Help#Newbies#Welcome
Ch.9 #AltText
When uploading images try and describe the images in the alt text box, this is good for people using screenreaders, blind, partially sighted etc. Try to remember to include ppl.
WOW, just checked out the #Tweesecake App on my Surface pro 8. How could I live without that one until now? Now I just need a very fast way of using Mastodon on my #Android. Tusky is unreliable when boosting. The others I tested were almost non-usable with #Screenreaders and split Toots up into their individual elements. That makes Navigating Toots really annoyingly slow. Suggestions and Boosts welcome! Thanks #Blind