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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
4mo
@jscholes @lynessence No, there microphone was working fine! The fact that you didn't have pulsaudio configured correctly so couldn't hear them was user error.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@lynessence @dhamlinmusic @quanin That guy? Call you? He pretty much treats everyone as though he owes them money, and if he dares talk to them, they might suddenly remember. ROFL
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@jscholes @lynessence Sure it is. You can tell because the people who talk about Linux audio would never admit that it's complicated at all.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@lynessence @mcourcel Wait, on a network composed of 50 percent blind people and 50 percent transexual furry puppygirls, you're going to reenforce gender norms? Gasp!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @dhamlinmusic @lynessence Yeah, my instance admin banned me the other day! Stupid jerk. I really don't like that guy.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@mahryekuh @jscholes I would, but I've got like four hours of baseball to listen to before I sleep.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@mcourcel @lynessence Yeah, I was wondering if you worded it that way to set up the cheap shot for me. Haha.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@dhamlinmusic @lynessence @quanin Eh, this is Mastodon. The only rules are the rules we make for ourselves. BE UNGOVERNABLE!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@mcourcel @lynessence I'm not sure I could walk if I had four balls, actually.

There we go: I almost made it through an entire day without making a childish and juvenile joke about a male body part. It felt unnatural!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@hallen Less text, anyway. But video games do tend to have dozens of moving things all on screen at once.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@quanin @lynessence Tonight is gonna be interesting, with them all exhausted. And I'm happy we've managed to turn this thread into exactly what I was talking about. You know, as an example for anyone who hasn't noticed the phenomenon.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@mahryekuh @jscholes Not even international users. What about deaf users? If they've read "hors d'oeuvres", would they understand what I mean by "or dervs"?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@lynessence It's the perfect beer drinking game, though. Anyway in an entirely unrelated matter I accomplished almost nothing at work today due to circumstances that were entirely beyond my control.

I think it might help that I've been to a lot of live games, I've walked the bases, I've played softball and beep baseball, I've met some jays players, etc. So visualizing the action is easier for me. Whereas I find basketball impenetrable.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@mahryekuh @jscholes I wouldn't say it's higher. I think it's just different. In blind writing, if it sounds okay, it's fine. Just pick whatever there/they're/their you're in the mood for tonight. Whereas for sighted folks it's about either looking better, or being shorter, or both.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@lynessence Haha it's not that complicated. {The next 10,000 characters badly attempting to explain the rules of baseball have been removed for everyone's sanity} Okay, well, maybe it is a bit complicated.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@lynessence @chris A mastodon thread going off topic and forgetting to remove the other people who were included? Never! Anyway, have you been staying up for these Bluejays games? I was up until 3 AM last night.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@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
4mo
@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
4mo
@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
4mo
@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