I just want to say that I’m sorry for the current status of the web; I’ve worked on making some apps accessible to blind people and I bet most of them are horrible to use for a person with visual impairments.
Were you born sighted? Or did you go blind over time?
I was born blind.
I’m sorry to hear that. I had a friend in college born without eyes. I talked a lot with him about concepts like shapes and colors. He was able to tell how much battery the electric carts on campus had by the sound of the motor, it’s quite interesting. I guess you might have an easier time than someone that lost their vision. I now have a friend that went blind after a car accident, he gets a lot of help from neighbors. He try’s very hard to do things himself, but often needs help. I hope you have a good support network for the things you need in life.
I don’t see anything political anywhere these days. Whenever I very rarely do, I just block the user or community in Boost. Similarly for regular feeds like my phone’s builtin Google News, I just started marking them as “Don’t Show Content From [Source]”.
If enough people do this, perhaps publishers will learn that spamming people with misleading ragebait is a losing strategy. Probably not, though.
I actually didn’t know you could block users on Lemmy until now. I’ve been blocking all the big communities so my main page isn’t clogged with stuff I’m not interested in.
Yes, politics is here, because Spez pushed a lot of it out, due to Elongated Muskrat.
I don’t mind politics. Just wish I, who’s never set foot in the US, could come in here waste my time as usual and not have US News & Politics make its way into my feed every time through some non-US News & Politics community.
Maybe I need to make more use of a skill most USians lack, knowledge of other languages, and find myself more non-US stuff. Not exactly easy, but would pay off easily.
There’s some great stuff in English, but I wouldn’t miss it much if it means no more US news & politics. There ought to be good shit in other languages. I just need to find the good stuff, and where it be
Try a multingual lemmy instance. On sh.itjust.works I get German and French posts in my feed all the time from various communities when I browse Local.
I do get some posts in different languages here and there, but I don’t really know some of these, so not useful lol. If I could, like, idk, filter or something.
I’d be down to getting languages I don’t understand if I could get rid of English. As an experiment, a trial. Or at least a similar amount of every language. Boost other languages.
At this point, I think I’m better taking breaks from Lemmy, or leaving altogether. Not sure it adds all that much to my life
Maybe I’m crazy for this, but I don’t like the term politics, I feel like it hides what people are actually talking about. Think about the difference between the statements:
“I’m not interested in understanding politics, it’s too crazy”
“I’m not interested in understanding who gets to decide what my rights are, it’s too crazy”
Or maybe:
“It’s annoying seeing politics in my feed all the time”
“It’s annoying seeing people discussing the implementation of mass surveillance in my feed all the time”
In both cases, do you see how the first one feels like a pretty standard perspective, but the second one feels insane?
When someone says “I don’t like or follow politics” my reply is something alomg the lines of “well, that’s your choice, but you know who does take an interest in politics? Your boss, their boss, your bank, your landlord… So go ahead and choose not to care about politics, just shut the fuck up with your whinging about the state of the world you’ve just told me you opt out of having a say in.”
Or something
I don’t know if you realize this, but when people say things like “I don’t talk about politics” that’s just a short form of what they really mean, which is often:
I don’t want to talk about politics here.
I don’t want to talk about politics with you.
I don’t want to talk about politics right now.
I don’t want to talk about politics like that.
Surely you have to have seen the changes over the past 10-15 years in online discourse that has resulted in politics invading every available space. It used to be quite easy to avoid political conversations online. And still, a lot of people don’t come online for that and that’s okay.
They aren’t insane. They’re trying to tell you to calm down. Please take a hint and change the topic when someone says something like that.
Imma pull a classic middle of the road …thingy. Sometimes people use “I don’t talk politics” to mean “I’m personally happy with how this part of the system is working so stop complaining” which is kinda shitty when they’re not the one on the ass end of it. It’s also cool to just have some crochet groups where the biggest drama is that I hold the hook like a knitter. Gotta decompress sometimes. Have the strength to do both and all.
Filters
Do you have a stable work? And what do you do
I admin an instructional data center at a community college.
Whoa, that’s mind-blowing. I always wondered what kind of jobs there would be for me if I suddenly lost my vision.
Filters are your friends. :)
Wait… You’re blind?
👋
Sí
I appreciate that you used a tilde. “Si” is an entirely different word.
What’s your favorite screenreader?
Probably NVDA for Windows. Microsoft has tried to flesh out Narrator but it’s still the MS Edge of screen readers IMO, you use it just to download another screen reader. The fact that VS Code is built around NVDA and not Narrator should show how MS feels about it.
I definitely agree that NVDA is the best on Windows. Narrator is eh (you described it well) and JAWS is somehow both costly and shit? I’ll give it to Apple too, VoiceOver is one of the best I’ve used.
What are your thoughts on AI powered screen readers?
Personally, despite being rabidly anti-AI, it seems like one of the few positive uses for AI since it can fill in the gaps where web a11y fails. I’m honestly curious about its development, but worried about the technology being tainted by capitalism (as is tradition)
Disclaimer: I’m not fully blind (though I do have my own complex eye disability), but I’ve done a TON of work on web a11y and appreciate the responses
What are your thoughts on AI powered screen readers?
One of my biggest gripes with AI is that it requires a cloud connection most of the time, and I’m all about my PC being my personal computer.
In terms of usefulness I can see it maybe for image description.
Easier said than done, it seems.
How do you pick up your dog’s poop?
Guide dogs have bathroom breaks at set times, and in my experience if their diet is healthy they’ll drop a duce at the same time each day. In any case, the dog is kept on a leash and given a command to relieve itself. It’ll usually sniff around, then stop to do the deed. Straight back means pee and arched back means poop. The posture can be seen if the handler has sufficient vision or felt with a hand if not. If poop is indicated, you find the dog’s south end and use your foot to mark ground zero. When the dog is done it’s a simple matter of bagging it using your foot as the landmark.
Dogs are amazing.
Interesting! As a seeing person who used to walk the family dog, I can attest to the technique of using your foot as a landmark - it was invaluable in order to not lose track of the pile among similarly-colored fallen leaves while I was getting the bag ready.
Sounds like poopy shoes but I guess it’s all about practice…
Just stomp on it barefoot.
It would be great if my existence and the existence of my friends and family weren’t considered “political.”
But here we are. Sorry that our not going quietly into the camps inconveniences you.
Did you miss that OP mentioned they’re blind?
Here is that image you posted, but with manually-written alt text added.
(I don’t usually do this when adding alt tags but in this case I also added the same text as a title/tooltip to make it also easy to read for users without a screen reader. Apologies to screen reader users that this probably causes you to hear the description twice.)
They did not say what you’re implying them saying. There is a world between not caring about people getting arrested by ICE, and not wanting every other post being about Trump’s antics or US politics.
Plus, if they are blind, I guess it’s harder for them to decide “at a glance” what they’d want to check or not. It doesn’t suffice to see someone’s face to decide to skip, they have to read what the post is about.
You know you’re in a discussion with a blind person, and you included an image without alternative text.
Please learn what alternative text is.
Nobody is sending anyone to camps bro.
Might help if your talking points were delusional conspiracy nonsense.
I’ve helped a visually impaired person find their dogs poop so they could pick it up via the “Be my eyes” app. They activated their camera and I used it to direct them to the poop
You are now a poop sherpa, thank you for your kind service.
I’ve been logged in for years, and I just got my first call last week! I was so excited. Lady’s laundry machine had stopped with the clothes still wet, and I read off the dial settings and LEDs to determine why it had stopped the cycle and what to do. Took about 5 min.
The calls are few and far between that’s for sure. I’ve only had four or five in total
I think it rings several sighted people simultaneously to speed up the connection. Twice it’s rung but I was not able to pick up, once I was too slow and the other I just wasn’t available. Super frustrating because I was really looking forward to it.
Hopefully now that I’ve answered a call I get prioritized somehow.
Username checks out.
**American politics
This is the important part. I enjoy reading political news and discussions. But in the country I live in, not American politics which forced into each conversation.
