A couple of weeks ago, a colleague told me they were too young to have used Nuance Talks. Which made me feel both old, and sad that they'd never experienced one of the best #ScreenReaders ever made. #accessibility
Not sure whether this has been already brought up here but someone has created an #Accessibility assistant app for the VoiceMeeter application for Windows. VoiceMeeter is a bit like Audio Hijack for Mac where you can chain different inputs on a virtual soundcard, let it run through different outputs and route the audio of other programs to it just like you could with a physical mixing board. Currently I have set it up so that my microphone runs through it as well as any other app i route to it and it is all played both for me on my headset and to the world wherever I decide to stream it. The microphone is muted on my end so that I don't have to hear myself but others can hear me still. It is early days and many options aren't supported by the accessibility addon but the fact I could create an optimal config for myself is already great. Let's tell the dev how important their work is, send feedback and suggestions. Happy testing! https://github.com/onyx-and-iris/nvda-voicemeeter ##Blind#ScreenReaders#A11y#Audio#Radio
So, there are so many sites and books where programming code is syntax highlighted. And that's cool, I wouldn't want to take that away from anyone. But if you read it with what I like to call "object readers" like VoiceOver and TalkBack, you'll find that, because they move one element at a time, and will treat anything different than plain text paragraphs as a separate element, you'll need to swipe a bunch of times to get through even a simple code snippet. Imagine having to scroll past a huge screen full of just "def", or "console" "." "log". Thankfully, screen readers where there are blind developers , and they use their own screen reader, like NVDA and JAWS, don't have this issue, and hopefully reading with just the arrow keys on VoiceOver for Mac gets around this. But eventually, I hope that VoiceOver developers can confront this and just say "okay, if this isn't another paragraph, or an interactable element, just have all this on one element." Or even more cool, "Okay so this is wrapped in a <code> or <pre> element right? So let's do with code what we've already done with math. Show it in computer Braille if the user likes that (optional please dear God), and allow the user to drill down into the code. Also if this paragraph has spans and divs and CSS that looks like code, offer the same thing." No, it's not perfect. But it's a hella better than what we have now. I mean shit it even happens in the Books app. That Learn to Program by Chris Pines? Yeah, I hate reading it on my iPhone cause it's just one word at a time, and line numbers repeat because of course they do. And even though Brailel can now show text formatting, it's still a pain to read through code
Hello there. So, I never thought I'd ever be using Mastodon for this and its a longshot but I'm looking for a paid job. I'm a senior in College and I'm going to be graduating with a degree in business management in May and I want to be ready. For my skills, I'm well-versed in Microsoft products, particularly Microsoft Excel and Microsoft word though Excel is my prefered application considering I wish to work with spreadsheets. Yes, I'm totally blind but that shouldn't be an issue because of #screenreaders and #ADA#accommodations and #RemoteWork. So, if anyone is looking for a dedicated person who genuinely enjoys helping others and working with functions from #statistics to #financial functions using #appliedMath, I am willing to work for you so help me #GetFediHired. Resume will be sent apon request through DM's. Thank you, and boosts are absolutely encouraged.
This isn't an issue that bothers me particularly (It does look annoying but I can ignore it)...
...but it does raise a question about something that does concern me, particularly as a *Key user. How do screen readers cope with MFM? Are they reading out the entire code piece by piece? 😮
"AI can help by providing mostly accurate descriptions of images on web pages. This can be especially helpful when the image has not been provided with an text alternative, but is visible on the page."
question for anyone that uses alt text, or can point me in the right direction: when and how should someone use alt text?
with web design it's suggested to not add alt text to decorative images. is it better to add alt text to art that's purely decorative or not, and are there situations in general where alt text shouldn't be added?
are there any guides or tips around on writing good alt text?
Is it possible to make a graph #accessible for #ScreenReaders? I'm adding line charts to a web app, using chartjs.
I'm planning to include a summary like min, max, average, median etc., but that's not enough to describe the complexities of a graph. Is there anything more I can do? Would it be useful to include a full table of all the points of the graph?
Also I am already planning to consider color blindness and zooming in/scaling up, anything else to consider?
It has been brought to my attention that my suggesting use of Alt Text and nicely, politely educating people on how to use Hashtags in a way that doesn't wreak havoc on screen readers for those who use/need them to be included here, is something that won't help Mastodon grow.
I just want to point out that my concern isn't Mastodon being Twitter, it's not Mastodon being Facebook, or Instagram, or Reddit.
My concern as a user here and on Pixelfed, in terms of my use of both is to ensure i'm doing whatever i can to make sure everyone is equally included.
I take care to add descriptive alt text to both posts here, as well as on Pixelfed. I'm a visual artist who uses DSLR photography in my art. I value the fact that this platform and Pixelfed allow me to ensure i can add descriptive alt text to things i share.
My grandmother was blind most of my childhood. I think of her every time i add an image here and add alt text.
She bought me first computer in 1983, and told me 'the more you learn about these, the better off you will be later in life' and she was right. I went into tech later in life before becoming disabled.
I am not here to police any of you, you can add alt text or not, you can care about how to best post in order to make it easy for those using screen readers to help them or not.
But please don't tell me my caring about any of this and wanting to include people, as many do on Mastodon and other Fediverse options that i'm wrong for doing it and that i need to not talk about it because that will limit the platform.
If it means people who don't care about others go to Bluesky or somewhere else, so be it. I'm here because many people care about each other. I'm not here because i care about unrestricted growth at the cost of disabled persons not being included.
Thank you for taking a moment to consider my perspective and why i shared my earlier post attempting to be helpful.
Most of the issues I see people bring up about #screenreaders are honest to goodness #accessibility issues with the tech and Unicode.
Sure, you can (try to) change peoples behavior, but in some cases it's just straight up pitting marginalized groups against each other.
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
"I wrote an article in 2007 called Fieldsets, Legends and Screen Readers. It was my first post on the TPGi blog. I have been meaning to provide an update to it, for the last 15 years…"
Help! I have a student in my computer science class whose JAWS screenreader won’t read any output from the cmd prompt or Power Shell. (It works in my instance of JAWS as well as other students’). Relevant speech history is: ‘Unavailable’ ‘0’ ‘0’ instead of ‘hello world’. Has anyone else experienced this or do you have any tips? Is the answer to reinstall JAWS? They’re so frustrated and I don’t want them to hate computers 😢
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