Fedora: “The Fedora Quality Team is joining Week of Diversity with an Accessibility Test Week!
Much like other Test Days, the goal of this week is to put Fedora through its paces and catch as many accessibility related issues as we can for our disable users.”
Me: Fedora, your screen reader is broken.
Fedora guy: Patches welcome 👍
Me: reaches for block button
From the actually-what-you’re-referring-to-as-ableism-is-GNU/ableism department
Background: It’s not just Fedora. Every Linux distribution that ships with Wayland by default – and that’s almost every major Linux distribution – ships with a broken/unusable screen reader at the moment.
(Read that again until it really sinks in. Yep. I know. Uh-huh. Really.)
The Fedora Quality Team is joining Week of Diversity with an Accessibility Test Week!
Much like other Test Days, the goal of this week is to put Fedora through its paces and catch as many accessibility related issues as we can for our disable users. If you want to put your advocacy to action, consider participating!
The Accessibility Test Week runs from Jun 19-25, starting tomorrow.
@aral We are aware of the unfortunate issue with the screen reader for installs in Fedora 40. That should be fixed for Fedora 41 and future, but there are challenges with getting it resolved in current isos.
That issue has prompted more collaboration from the Accessibility Working Group with our Quality Team (this test week is the first step in that). We're also working to communicate more downstream and with our edition/spin working groups.
This is great but can we please also have Fedora (& Ubuntu, etc.) acknowledge they started shipping operating systems without a functional screen reader when they switched to Wayland and that that’s still the case?
This is not to name and shame. Unless we acknowledge this as an error on par with shipping without monitor support and unless the culture is altered to make accessibility a showstopper, it’ll happen again.
I'm looking for benchmarks.
For @mucConf we want to provide accessibility information online.
Please send me links to events/conferences that did a good job communicating accessibility information!
>>
@alttexthalloffame My much older brother tells the story, from his childhood in the 1950s, of my mother driving the car through the countryside and narrating what she saw so that her blind (from diabetes) husband could enjoy the view. My brother would lie down on the back seat, close his eyes and see the world the way his father saw it.
I think of that every time there’s a request here to include ALT text descriptions on Mastodon. It’s such a small ask with such a huge upside.
A Tumblr post by DracuDyke. I honestly do not know how applicable this is outside of Tumblr, particularly on the Mastodon/Misskey/Pleroma, etc. side of the Fediverse. I do know that most such instances don't provide the requisite character count to pull this off. Heck, I had to break up the screenshot because there wasn't enough room for all of the alt text if I left it intact. (Yes, I know the character count for toots vs alt text are entirely unrelated to each other. There's no way I could make this a single toot on my main account.)
Also, does anyone know what "PT" stands for in this context?
Is only Alt Text enough?
[PT: Is only Alt Text enough? End PT.]
If you post something and include an image description in the alt text, that's great! But it would be even better if you included a description in the body of the post as well. Alt text doesn't always work, especially on a platform as broken as Tumblr is. An image must also load fully before the [ALT] button shows up, so people with Internet issues won't be able to see it for a long time. It also requires pressing on the small [ALT] button, which may be difficult for people with motor issues. The point I'm trying to make here is that the ability to access and read alt text is conditional, not a given. Putting the image description in the text of the post helps it be accessible to everyone.
"Okay, well can I at least put it under a readmore?"
[PT: "Okay, well can I at least put it under a readmore?" End PT]
No! If your blog or the original post is deleted, that readmore is gone forever! It also presents an extra step, another thing to push. This can be difficult for a number of reasons! I have also heard that readmores are difficult for some screenreaders, but I can't remember for sure.
"Can I at least make it pretty?"
[PT: "Can I at least make it pretty?"]
No! If you write the image description in small text, italics, bold, colored text, or other fonts that makes the description harder to read! That defeats the purpose! It can also be hard for screenreaders to read certain kinds of text, especially unicode or other fonts.
TLDR: Please include your image descriptions in the body of the post as plain text. It's the best way to make sure your post is actually accessible to everyone!
@FediTips@raineyday Also, other Fediverse apps use the alt attribute for media as well, so best to make sure they all at least have some standard metadata they can use in their own way if they so wish. Like I said, other projects, not Mastodon, are entertaining the idea of letting admins/ and or users disable media without descriptions in the metadata but nothings happened in this space yet, but they can entertain the thought because other projects can pull from that metadata, the alts.
"49% of adults in Canada have below high-school literacy levels, and 17% are unable to follow written instructions or read maps."
"Half adults in the U.S. struggle to read a book written for eighth-graders."
If your first instinct is 'why are people ‘dumb’?’ you are elitist and not inclusive. There are plenty of immigrants and others. As web professionals it should be your job to include everyone
This piece is worth reading if you’re in tech criticism or infosec/cybersecurity and are being asked for commentary on IoT and smart home devices.
People aren’t foolish for using IoT or for wanting things to be easier in their homes. This tech makes positive and meaningful change for people of all kinds of abilities. It’s valid to worry about the privacy or security issues that IoT is riddled with, but don’t draw a direct line from there to blaming the user - some people have no alternatives that don’t involve giving up independent access to their own homes and lives. Everyone deserves to live in ways that fit their needs.
Instead, join the push to hold manufacturers and providers to account for poor security and privacy practices. Advocate for better, more respectful and accessible default configurations. Help people understand how to anticipate and mitigate the worst of these issues when they’re setting things up, and give them power and agency over their home systems.
We all deserve to have tech that works for us, in all the ways that matters.
Are there freelance #accessibility people or those who have time to work on a possible audit? If you're a beginner in the field and haven't done this kind of work, let me know as well. I'm willing to mentor. Please DM.
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.
@aral GNOME folks are well aware of the problems with Orca on Wayland, and actively working to fix them. There's even funding for this work, thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund. I'm personally working on a new Wayland-native accessibility stack that aims to eventually replace AT-SPI and support sandboxed apps, but there are also efforts to fix problems in the existing stack in the short term. cc @sonny