dankeck

“Where are you from?” Hanna asks between bites.

“Columbus, Ohio,” the family guest says.

Hanna built the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium into one of the nation's best. He then captivated national audiences on David Letterman’s late-night talk show, "Good Morning America" and a number of his own Emmy-winning animal series that still run in syndication. He traveled the globe as a leading animal conservationist promoting Columbus. It was his home for decades. It’s even where he once said he wanted his ashes spread whenever he passes away.

But in this moment, none of that history feels familiar.

Hanna pauses, then asks a question. “Have I ever been to Columbus, Ohio?”

This article is two years old but still relevant to social media in 2023.

One of the biggest barriers is the assumption that blind people just won’t be interested in visual media. “Just because they’re visual doesn’t mean that they’re immediately not attractive to people who are blind or low vision,” says McCann. “I think that’s one big misconception: ‘Oh, well, they don’t care about pictures.’ But we do.” When culture is molded on social networks, it sucks to lose out on a shared social language because you can’t see the images everyone is talking about.

Christy Smith Berman, a low vision editor at Can I Play That, responded to a TT Games tweet that announced the delay of Star Wars Lego with text on an image. When she replied with a request for alt text, Smith Berman was met with responses from people expressing disbelief that blind people would even be on Twitter to begin with, let alone care about video games.

No posts yet? Well, here's a post from 2017 with some sweet graffiti at Griggs Reservoir Park by the Scioto River.

Via @[email protected]:

…consider tools like GitHub Copilot, which claims to be “your AI pair programmer”. These work by leaning on the code of thousands and thousands of projects to build its code auto-complete features.

When you copy broken patterns you get broken patterns. And I assure you, GitHub, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, stacks of libraries and frameworks, piles of projects, and so on, are rife with accessibility barriers.

Are you unfamiliar with how blind people use computers? Are you new to the concept of screen reader software?

NVDA is free, open-source software for Microsoft Windows used by many blind users to interact with their PC through non-visual senses. While NVDA's foundation, NV Access, subsists on donations, the software has become the second most popular screen reader in the world.

This half-hour documentary by ABC News serves as a great introduction to NVDA and the stories of its creators. This show won't tell you how to use NVDA or how it works, but instead will tell you why it exists and why it needs to exist.

(Also, follow NV Access on Mastodon!)

Via QuantumBadger:

It has been agreed that RedReader falls under the exemption for non-commercial accessibility-focused apps, due to the work that has been done to optimize the app for screen readers, and the app's high level of usage within the blind community.

...

I still have concerns about Reddit's current trajectory, and plan to expand the range of sites RedReader is able to access in future.

...

Over the last week I've been in touch with the developers of Lemmy, who indicated that they would prefer a slow ramp up of traffic rather than a sudden influx. Similarly, the major Lemmy instances are struggling under the sheer number of Reddit refugees right now.

...

We will continue to prioritize accessibility in the app, while also continuing to serve the userbase as a whole.

Via the Accessibility Matters newsletter:

Game streamer Lance Carr, who goes by the name GimpyG and whose rare form of muscular dystrophy has left him unable to use his hands, was in the middle of streaming a Hearthstone session when a fire started in his garage. He was able to vacate before it spread to the rest of his home, but unfortunately, the gear that let him enjoy his favorite pastime — his head-tracking mouse and gaming PC — had to remain behind and was destroyed.

Replacing this stuff isn’t cheap. Head-tracking mouse gear can cost multiple hundreds of dollars, and that’s to say nothing of his gaming setup. Google’s new software aims to remove one of those costly barriers.

The company says it worked with Carr to design a piece of software that would allow anyone with a webcam to control their computer with head movement and gestures, all translated to the screen by the Windows-only software.

Project Gameface on GitHub

Via @[email protected]

Lesser was born in Poland in 1928. Most of his family were killed by Nazis. He moved to the United States, became a realtor, and has spent much of his life trying to "prevent the world from developing amnesia."

I named my foundation "Zachor" which is the Hebrew word for "remember" because every generation must re-learn the consequences of hatred and bigotry.