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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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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)
xmpp fastfinge@im.interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@alexchapman @jscholes @alexhall @Bri And once again. I only became hostile when people started saying I was doing things that made me a dick and a jerk, rather than actually engage with the issue. Similar to how blind people become hostile when developers tell us expecting accessibility is just too much, and we should stay quiet and deal with it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@jscholes @alexhall @alexchapman @Bri And before anyone says anything: I recognize we are all hobbyists. I recognize this is unpaid work on unpaid software. But I don't give sighted people a pass because of that if they develop inaccessible noncompliant software. Neither do I give blind people a pass if they develop accessible nonstandard software. For exactly the same reasons.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@alexchapman @jscholes @alexhall @Bri Fair enough. My issue was never with people needing to learn. That's something I do every day. And I, too, have giant bugs almost every day, in almost everything I do. But my response to not following a documented standard is not "Yeah, I'll see if I can fix it at some point. Not a priority. Anyone who's upset about this is a jerk, and they should really be bending over backwards to work around the issue, and blocking people who complain endlessly that they aren't doing nonstandard things to just make it work makes them a jerk."
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@Bri @jscholes @alexhall @alexchapman And for the record, I did file an issue to the mastodon.py library you are all using. But was told it's an issue on the client end, not in there library. So this is, in fact, a battle I've been battling for literal years.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@Bri @alexhall @alexchapman @jscholes Thanks, testing now.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@alexchapman @Bri @alexhall @jscholes Right, because I should just put up with the endless complaints. Doing anything else is a dick move, apparently.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@Bri @alexchapman @alexhall @jscholes Sure, because you’re not the only person in this thread.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@Bri @alexchapman @alexhall @jscholes I didn’t. I only became hostile when two different people called me a dick and a jerk.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.”
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1mo
@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.