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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@modulux @jscholes @Rosalyn A lot of the time these days I find myself using my phone with a full-sized mechanical bluetooth keyboard. On mobile, because there's less screen space, interfaces tend to be a bit simpler and more task oriented, making them easier to use. As well, mobile apps these days tend to be more up to date and feature complete, and better tested for accessibility. But by the time I've connected my full-sized keyboard, and my over-ear wireless headphones, my phone is pretty much a desktop running a different operating system from my perspective; I'm not looking at the screen, after all.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@Rosalyn @jscholes @modulux That's an interesting point actually. I do like Discord, Slack, Zoom, Teams, etc, much better on mobile than on Windows. Maybe because IRC isn't a mobile first experience? And the modern chat apps are, with notifications etc, so they feel more awkward/unusual to me on the desktop as a cranky 37 year old who's first internet connection was a 14.4k modem.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@modulux @jscholes Slack is yet another Electron app, it's true. And yet...Apple Music is a web app. YouTube and Spotify are web apps. I use dozens of electron apps daily, but it only really bothers me in the case of chat. So I have to assume that it's something about chat, and my personal preferences, rather than something about electron/web apps. But I can't put my finger on what, exactly. Maybe it's that IRC puts unformatted text first? All the other chat apps offer text, formatting, images, audio, reactions, emoji, videos, calls, etc. That might contribute to the feeling of...heavyness we're experiencing. Especially when compared with IRC.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@jscholes @mahryekuh Also, blind people write to each other in a way that's quite different from how I might right to a sighted friend. For example, I would never! use an exclamation mark like that to emphasize the word "never" to a sighted friend; I'd just use italics or bold. But I do when addressing other blind folks.

The problems happen when people who spend all day every day only interacting with other blind people start internalizing the "blind writing style" and can't write any other way. It might be useful to define "blind writing style", not to criticize it, but to differentiate it from other writing styles, and give it a defined place in the world.

The characteristics I notice are:
* formatting (line breaks, paragraphs) used where a conversational pause might happen, rather than to separate ideas
* punctuation used to modify intonation, rather than for any grammatical purpose
* more conversational and stream of conscious: blind folks tend to leave in interesting digressions and asides that sighted folk would edit out to shorten the text
* different care about spelling and grammar: whereas lazy sighted people would write "u coming w/ ur gf 2morrow m8?" lazy blind people will leave in dictation errors, or spell phonetically rather than looking it up
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@modulux I used to think it was something about Discord. But other than IRC, I can't think of a single chat app that I enjoy using. Discord, Matrix, Slack, Teams, I find them all terrible! This either means that all modern chat apps are bad and broken, or that I'm old and cranky. Or maybe both.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@dhamlinmusic @chris Personally I either mute them, or hide boosts from them. That way I can still keep them followed so I don't miss conversations, but I don't have to read quite so many posts.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@mahryekuh These are all good points!

Also, We talk so much about alt text for blind folks, but I'm realizing that there isn't a good resource/guide on how to make my posts more accessible to sighted followers.

The fediverse is probably the largest concentration of blind folks interacting with each other online, so it would be nice to make the community and culture we've established more welcoming and easier for sighted people to jump in.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@jscholes Or perhaps because we listen to TTS at 800 words per minute reading all those comments doesn't feel like a giant undertaking to us.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@chris That actually makes me think of what could be another reason. The online blind community is quite tight, and highly interconnected. So if I reply to one blind person, odds are a lot of other blind people follow us both, so will read the conversation and jump in. Whereas if you only follow one or two blind people, you would miss out on that conversation, because I think Mastodon only shows you replies to people you follow?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
So one thing I notice about Internet culture: even back on Twitter, and now here in the , blind people tend towards having discussions in giant threads, sometimes with as many as 10-12 people in them, that can often stretch on for days. I rarely (if ever) see sighted culture do this. I wonder why? It's not a criticism, it's just interesting to me. Maybe because Discord and other chat apps were historically less , so blind culture tends to use the fediverse more as a discussion platform? Or maybe it's something UI related that makes it easier for blind folks to track giant threads of doom? The few times I've been involved in this style of discussion with sighted folks, they've become confused and begged for everyone to move to Discord or Slack or somewhere. On the other hand, I rarely see blind people do a single, lengthy post broken up and threaded the way sighted people do, with (1/N) at the end. We tend to just move to instances with longer character limits, or put our long form thoughts on a webpage or something.

Edit to add: I'm pleased to say that this post has now become a perfect example of the thing I was talking about; my last post in the thread included the phrase "transsexual furry puppygirls". It makes me happy that people unfamiliar with what I'm talking about need do nothing more than look at the thread on this post.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@jscholes @Fragglemuppet @simon You're welcome, Jason!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@jscholes @Fragglemuppet @simon Yeah, that's a really interesting theory, Geoffrey. LOL JK
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@dentangle Yup. Chat GPT for image descriptions, or if it decides that the image might have breasts or something else too scarry for the AI to describe to me, one of the open source LLMS. Whatever LLM Zoom uses to take meeting notes for me, so I don't have to listen to my screen reader and the meeting at the same time while I try to take notes. Gemini to describe YouTube videos, when something critical is on-screen that the presenter doesn't describe. Claud to examine inaccessible screens where the controls are unlabeled and/or not keyboard accessible, to describe the screen to me and then click the mouse where instructed. Kagi assistant to save me time when searching the web for basic information so I don't have to fight with inaccessible ad covered websites to get a single fact from a page.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@simon @Fragglemuppet People can mess up even the most common of names. Speaking from personal experience as someone who's been called Sampson, Simon, Samantha, and in one notably bazaar email, Smamuleel. In that last case, I assume...the...backspace key wasn't...working...or...something? You can see they tried, but...I don't even know!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
transfobia An excellent and : Harry Potter and the Lunar Princess, by psistarpsi: "Princess Luna encounters a dream like no other after Harry Potter’s third year at Hogwarts and Harry Potter’s life is forever altered. Rated M for battle sequences, violence, and implied adult themes. Harry Potter plus Cartoon force = BAMF Harry." archiveofourown.org/works/66130705/chapters/170429845
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
transphobia @jscholes Yup. She's forever marked as a bigot and a transphobe, now.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
transphobia Wow, I'm quite surprised: Arabella Stanton is going to be far better than Emma Watson as Hermione in the Harry Potter audiobook and TV Show. Sad that taking the role is going to ruin her career for the rest of her life at just 11, though.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@evilcookies98 Also, yesterday I discovered that headphones won’t work if they’re unplugged! That’s ten minutes of trouble shooting wasted.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@matt @nick @quinn to be fair, it's not something you should do in an enterprise environment. In general, updates for things that aren't your hobby need to be deployed to staging, tested, and only then pushed to production. Watchtower just does an in-place update of the containers. But that's fine, and probably even better, for hobby projects.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3mo
@nick @quinn You could also run cosmos-cloud.io. It'll run and update your dockers for you, configure your reverse proxies, manage your SSL certs, etc. But the nice thing is it uses the standard methods to do all of those things, so unlike other server management GUIs, you can do stuff via the command line or via cosmos-cloud and it doesn't matter.