Technology

The submitter on /r/blind also had the following to say:

There are no plans currently to close the sub, but several mods may have to leave reddit, leaving only a couple BVI mods, the website does not have a slash, and we do have another domain that will be being set as a landing page for the reddit, lemmy, and discord of ourblind.com (that's O U R).

Image text: Announcement

1!Open Alpha!! RBlind - A community on Lemmy, brought to you by the moderators of the /r/blind subreddit.com

Submitted 11 hours ago by user DHamlin Music (flair: Bilateral Optic Neuropathy)

Since the news broke regarding the forthcoming changes to reddit's API and the ippact that will have on the third party apps and tools many of us rely upon the mods here at r/blind have been working on an accessible option for those who either cannot or will not be staying on reddit. As talk of alternatives like mastodon, lemmy, and the like have increased we decided that it would be best to reveal what we have been working on, hence this post. Several days ago we shared this with those of you on our Discord server and have been asking for feedback.

This project is by no means finished or polished, and is currently operating on development backend code and a beta UI to allow for access to still unreleased features that our community needs such as up/down votes displaying state changes, and nested comments, read this as there are and will be bugs and outstanding accessibility problems. However, the advantage of this platform is we control the servers, the UI, and can fix accessibility concerns ourselves instead of relying on a for profit company or the generosity of app developers to do it for us, not that the latter is unappreciated.

So please be understanding of the above and we hope those of you who decide to join and see what we have done so far for all of us, and please report problems as you find them.

https://rblind.com/

Spez didn't care, it was just a small negotiation so he doesn't come across as "fuck disabled people". It didn't work though, he has been a PR disaster.

How is lemmy in terms of accessibility? I hope it goes well for them.

Reddit has made it clear they don't care at all. The amount of lying and gaslighting is sickening.

They are way passed being able to do anything.

Reddit staff have no idea how their platform works or how their users actually interact with the site. It's completely embarrassing and unprofessional to the point of straight up incompetence.

They tried to walk it back by only cutting deals with app developers that blind people rely on, like RedReader with its screen reading functionality. But that just highlights how selective reddit is being at working with third party developers. So fuck spez and reddit. I hope the blind community gets everything they meed from their Lemmy instances.

They have a definition, they just won't tell the users because it's not a realistic definition and they plan to pull the rug out later on.

If third-party apps were only 3% of total traffic and reddit was willing to destroy its image and massively increase the viability of its only competitor just before IPO over it, I'm sure they'll have no problem getting rid of whatever percentage of blind people who can't see the ads reddit wants to serve anyway.

They have the same problem with "moderator-focused tools." Lots of third party tools are useful for moderation, but aren't necessarily composed only of moderator-specific functions. Analysis of what public activity a specific user has engaged in, like where they're active and what kinds of comments they tend to make, are helpful for moderators to decide how to handle a report that a particular user is a serial harasser, a troll, a spammer, or a bot.

So which tools get an exemption from the API fees/rate limits, if they're useful for both moderation and just plain old people watching?

How are they going to determine which apps have free API access without this definition!?

If there's one thing that I've learned from this trainwreck, it's that they're not going to define it publicly. If the internal definition is fluid, it can serve as a moving target to be whatever is most beneficial to them at the time.

If you're really serious I would first recommend you familiarize yourself with the needs of blind users generally. Like try using the internet with your eyes closed and a screen reader to understand how a blind person would interact with a website. Maybe you can ask around or Google some tips for getting started with that.

I had a former coworker who was a UX designer and he taught himself to use a screen reader for this reason since he was required to ensure anything he designed was accessible.

First one that comes to mind for me is RedReader, but I'm not blind so idk if that's their only tool or if they have others they prefer.

It's kinda tricksy. You need to visit the comm from within your own instance. The easiest way is to click Communities, then All, then search for it - however you have to know what you're looking for, and you can't filter or sort by instance.

In this case, searching would be hard, as the comm is called "main". There are probably lots of other mains in different instances.

For you, try beehaw.org/c/main@rblind.com. However, it could be that it's too new for your instance to know about it, in which case I'm not sure but you may just have to wait until beehaw federates with it.

I think there's also a generic way to format links such that anyone can click them from their own instance and get their instance's version, however I haven't learned that yet. Something like !main@rblind.com. Also, things can work different on apps vs the website - for example Jerboa only lets you browse comms you're subbed to.

I haven't been able to get it to work for jerboa for new instances I've had to go to the actual site and search it