@fastfinge

Admin

completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those.
keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ

Location Ottawa

Birthday 1987-12-20

Pronouns he/him (EN)

matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca

keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Bri @alexhall @alexchapman @jscholes Thanks, testing now.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@alexchapman @Bri @alexhall @jscholes Right, because I should bend over backwards for people with broken clients. Filtering it out would mean filtering out the words inaccessible, link, and a bunch of other things. Why is that suddenly my responsibility when it’s not my stuff that’s broken?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@alexchapman @Bri @alexhall @jscholes Right, because I should just put up with the endless complaints. Doing anything else is a dick move, apparently.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Bri @alexchapman @alexhall @jscholes Sure, because you’re not the only person in this thread.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Bri @alexchapman @alexhall @jscholes I didn’t. I only became hostile when two different people called me a dick and a jerk.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Bri @alexchapman @alexhall @jscholes @jdking92 @Rosalyn I offered. I even offered to make a PR, once you said what of four perspective solutions you preferred. But I never heard back. Because, as you have said repeatedly, this is not your priority.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@alexchapman @Bri @alexhall @jscholes @jdking92 @Rosalyn Right, but this is my point. “Want to” isn’t strong enough language. If you emailed someone, and they said, “Yeah, I want to follow the accessibility standards. I need to do that some day, if I can figure it out,” you would be furious, and rightly so. Thrive, and FastSM, and every other client using mastodon.py is not following the standards. In the same way that we as blind people will turn to a developer and say, “I’m sorry, that’s not my problem. You need to be accessible.” I can expect the same thing from my fellow blind developers.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Bri @alexchapman @alexhall @jscholes @jdking92 @Rosalyn Never said you were. I was responding to Alex. But you did say fixing it isn’t a priority. And that if you can’t figure it out, you’re not going to fix it. Meaning you obviously believe that following the standards is an optional, nice to have. If you can’t figure it out, I’ll just have to deal with endless complaints from your users, and blocking them makes me the jerk.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Bri @alexchapman @alexhall @jscholes @jdking92 @Rosalyn I’m sorry, but it completely is. I am sick and tired of being told that dealing with other people’s broken clients is my problem. And that I need to go out of my way to bend over backwards for people who have been told that they’re using an incompatible and broken client. It’s a bad look for blind people, who demand that everyone else follow W3C and WCAG standards, but then use apps that don’t do so themselves. And when I point this out, it’s my fault anyway, because I just shouldn’t use completely allowed and supported features that work literally everywhere else.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@alexchapman @Bri @alexhall @jscholes @jdking92 @Rosalyn Sorry, but if you’re so untitled to think that the entire world needs to avoid making standards compliant HTML formatted posts, because your client is utterly and completely broken, and you complain about it constantly, a block is all you deserve.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@alexchapman @Bri @alexhall @jscholes @jdking92 @Rosalyn No, I can’t. Because the complaints always come in the form of: “Your links don’t work and your posts are inaccessible. Fix it now.”

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@alexchapman @Bri @alexhall @jscholes @jdking92 @Rosalyn If you reply to every single post I make complaining that the link doesn’t work, and demanding that I fix it, even when it’s your client at fault, I’m blocking. End of discussion.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Bri @alexhall @jscholes @jdking92 @Rosalyn To be blunt, the standards all agree that content can contain HTML. You are responsible for handling that correctly. If you don’t, your client is broken.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Bri @alexhall @jscholes @jdking92 @Rosalyn Blocking is the only thing I can do to stop the endless complaints. I’m following the standard. I can’t fix broken clients. But too many users won’t accept that. If it doesn’t work with their clients, it’s inaccessible and obviously my fault.I can point to thee activity pub standard until I’m blue in the face. I can point at the json notes all day. But in the minds of most users, if their client is broken because the developers flatly refuse to abide by the standards, it’s my fault.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@alexhall @jdking92 @Rosalyn @Bri And links are just the thing that blind users are noticing, because they read a post talking about a URL, try to interact with it, and it doesn't work. But I could happily post formatted lists, bold, italics, blockquotes, and both FastSM and Tweesecake would strip them out silently, and users would never know they missed anything to even complain about. I get that we don't want an HTML viewer for posts. But accessible clients need to do better than just assuming that HTML is completely unimportant and throwing it all away. They could convert the HTML to markdown. Or show the plain text version of the post that the server provides them. Or something else. But they don't. I'm sorry for ranting, but this has been making me crazy in Tweesecake for years now, and I hate that it's the same in FastSM.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@alexhall @jdking92 @Rosalyn @Bri It's both. The libraries assume that the strings they return will be displayed in a web browser, or other HTML capable view. In fact, the content key by default contains spans and divs. However, all of the blind clients just stripped the html using a regular expression so it can be displayed in a text file, while making no attempt to account for anything that might be lost by that approach.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jdking92 @Rosalyn @Bri To make all of this so, so much worse, every single fediverse server provides a plain text, non-html version of the post. Tweesecake and FastSM and others just refuse to use it. But if you look in the JSON, you'll find that while the content key contains HTML, _misskey_content and source.content both contain perfectly formatted, plain text versions of post content. FastSM and other clients just ignore them and strip HTML themselves, breaking posts and resulting in constant bitching from blind people. browser.pub/https://fed.interfree.ca/notes/ah4xrewupfr5jqja

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Bri @jdking92 @Rosalyn Some can also just post HTML directly. Either way, when you strip the HTML, you get the link text, without the URL. Usually, the link text is the URL without https in front. But it doesn't have to be. GoToSocial, Akoma, Iceshrimp, Pleroma, Sharky, threads, Lemmy, PiFed, and literally anything other than Mastodon allow for text in the post that is a hyperlink, but does not contain the URL as the link text. Even though Mastodon doesn't allow posting like that, though, it can display that type of post. So because of the way FastSM strips HTML, it can only find links posted by another Mastodon server. Every other server type can post links that FastSM users can neither see 'nor interact with. Even Mastodon forks can do this. As someone effected daily by this issue, because it's completely and totally impossible for me to post links that tweesecake or FastSM users can interact with, no matter what I do, this is a huge priority for me. Only supporting logging into a Mastodon server account is one thing, and I get it. But the way FastSM is currently, you only support viewing posts by, and following, users who happen to also be on Mastodon. If you follow an account using literally anything else, links won't work. And it's impossible for a FastSM user to know they've followed an account on an unsupported server type. It's to the point where I avoid posting any links at all, because every single link I post gets multiple replies (sometimes as many as thirty or more) from blind users who do not understand that the client they use is at fault and in complete violation of the standards, not me. I'm one hundred percent following the standards as defined by the W3C and all of the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals. Clients that can't handle formatted links are broken. They need to be fixed. I've had to start just blocking Tweesecake users. I don't want to have to also do that with FastSM users.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@J3317 @stevenscott Yeah, we're getting down to minus 37 with the windchill tonight.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@SeveraSnape Hmmm, I can't even see news. So you're getting farther than me.

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