So one thing I notice about #blind Internet culture: even back on Twitter, and now here in the #fediverse, 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 #accessible, 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.
@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?
@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.
@fastfinge@chris The ones who post interesting things themselves I keep, but when I am finding their normal posting to be some combination of irritating, offensive, or spam like I unfollow.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic Yup, hide boosts of people is such a great feature. And that's not even against the person I mute the boosts of. Feel free to boost what you want, I mean I could totaly get why you'd turn off my boosts as well. But some people just post interesting stuff while boosting stuff I couldn't care less about.
@jonathan859@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic I like boosts of articles and things, but I'd much rather read written posts and click on a boosted link once in a while.
@fastfinge@chris That's exactly it. If I see a post from a #blind person that I think is interesting, I will often look at the replies. Although I can usually see all of the replies unless the person has their privacy settings to followers only. So then I might want to reply to a reply like I did here, that includes a couple of people and then somebody else might want to reply to my post and it also include those people. I don't often get drawn into those kinds of threads because while they are interesting in the beginning, chances are that eventually I'm going to get tired of the conversation and just end up muting the thread because the discussion is going to change from the original topic and I'm not going to be interested anymore.
@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.
@fastfinge Sadly, I have not. I really don't know anything about baseball. I suppose I could get ChatGPT to give me a summary of the game so that I could follow it, but I have been tuning into the CBC News live thread to watch developments in the game. 18 innings, I can't believe it! Even if the Jays lose, and I'm thinking it's probably likely, damn they put up a fight and I'm proud of them.
@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.
@lynessence@fastfinge Balls are good, you can have 4 of them and walk. Strikes are bad. You get 3 and you're out. And yes, baseball can be boring for long stretches of time... and then it's very exciting for a few seconds.
@fastfinge@mcourcel I really wanted to be the one to do it, but because I'm female I'm probably not supposed to be the one to make a juvenile joke so thanks Sam. 😘
@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!
@fastfinge I mean, I understand the basic concept of how baseball is played, but I don't understand a lot of the terminology. Also, it's not really a super fast paced game like basketball or hockey, so I feel like I would get bored.
@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.
@fastfinge I agree it is the perfect beer drinking game, but I don't like beer. I only drink hard liquor, maybe the occasional glass of wine. I'd be sauced way before the ninth inning if I drank hard liquor like people drink beer during baseball games. 😂
@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.
@lynessence@fastfinge And I'm gonna be one of those multiple people in a thread people because yes, that game was freaking nuts. If my sleep schedule becomes a casualty to baseball... I will absolutely enjoy the hell out of it.
@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.
@fastfinge@lynessence The only player on either team who didn't play last night is Toronto's starting pitcher for tonight. It's gonna seriously suck to be Ohtani.
@fastfinge@quanin@lynessence Have you considered firing him and putting AI in charge? That seems to be the hot new thing that definitely will not go wrong.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence Hmmm, I don't actually think instance admins do all that much fu...nope. I've hit my teenaged boy joke quota for the day.
@fastfinge These lengthy discussions, sometimes lasting several days, also took place here in the Fediverse. That only changed with the Musk wave and the arrival of a large number of Twitter users. Long discussions were cut short or conducted with a different attitude, one that was more black and white, followed by the blocking of the user.
In my 15 years here, I have not blocked a single user. People's attitudes have changed, unfortunately.
@crossgolf_rebel I don't know if people have changed, or if there are just more people worth blocking. I have about 50 spam accounts blocked, for example.
@fastfinge Could one reason for this be our desktop clients? Threads may not show up particularly well on the web/mobile clients that the majority of sighted people use. Also I find it time consuming to do the 1/n thing in a thread purely on splitting the posts. Someone who is sighted can probably work out the best length for the posts just by looking at the text and making sure each post is of a similar length visually.
@andrew Also, I think there might be clients that will automatically split long posts into 1/N without them doing anything. And an accessible interface that's better than the visual one? Impossible! LOL JK
@fastfinge I think it might be related to the tooling being reasonably comfortable for following threads (TW Blue and friends) and not having the overwhelm from "text walls" sighted people seem to get sometimes.
@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.
@fastfinge I feel the same way, in fact I still use IRC for that very reason. I do think the modern chat apps are really heavy and unresponsive with typical accessibility tools and have bad usability, often because they're web-based. But then I may also be old and cranky.
@modulux@fastfinge As someone who works on the accessibility of Slack, I'm both dismayed and completely unsurprised people feel this way about it. It's probably a drop in the ocean but if there's ever something specific I can pass along, even if it's usability related rather than a strict accessibility problem, please let me know.
@jscholes@fastfinge I haven't tried slack myself yet, haven't had the need. But matrix (specifically through Element or whatever it's called now) and Discord I find really annoying to the point I don't use them except in dire need.
@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.
@jscholes@modulux@fastfinge I love Slack on mobile. And it's gotten a lot better on Windows. Glad to hear a familiar voice is on their team and in their space.
@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.
@fastfinge@Rosalyn@jscholes I'm bad with mobile. I don't find the interface comfortable (data entry is a big part of it, but just exploring the screen and such seems like a waste of time). So I haven't really attempted to chat on mobile. The closest I do to that is WhatsApp, and I try to avoid groups; just use it like I might have used SMS in the past.
@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.
@fastfinge@modulux@jscholes Oh geeze. Most of the time, I'm using BSI and no headphones. From time to time, I use a trifold BT keyboard that fits in my purse, + airPods. But that case is cute and tiny.
@Rosalyn@jscholes@modulux I tried for months to get on with BSI. I'm still faster on the on-screen keyboard than I am with BSI. Brailling without some kind of mechanical feedback just doesn't work for me at all.
@fastfinge@jscholes@modulux Interesting. Did you know that iOS 26 added keyboard clicks. So I now have my typing feedback set to words. I wonder if that would help at all. But also, I'm using a 15 Pro Max in tabletop mode. So I may be having a different experience.
@Rosalyn@jscholes@modulux I have the key clicks on. It's something about my fingers just hitting a flat screen, without any downward pressing motion, that throws me right off. It actually took me quite some time to get used to the Braille Lite when I first got it; I wanted to slam the keys like I would a manual Brailler. But I managed to adjust to that just fine in a few months. But an unmoving screen seems to be my limit.
@modulux@fastfinge@jscholes Interesting. I find it easier to find things on mobile because I remember the general orientation of frequently used items on screen. This thread just got me thinking about the differences between how blind people navigate even with great skill and knowledge.
@jscholes@modulux@fastfinge I didn't know you worked for Slack. Just so you know, I have reported a few Accessibility bugs to them within the last year since I've started using it, and they have always been super responsive and usually fixed my bug within one or two releases. Out of all the chat apps that I have used, I am the most impressed with Slack.
@Jage@fastfinge I am still trying to figure out which client it is that adds people who boosted something to reply off the boost, because I keep having this happen.
@dhamlinmusic@Jage@fastfinge The behaviour is annoying enough, before replying to a boosted toot I open is as a thread so I can reply to the original poster alone. (Yes, I could also edit the reply but that's sometimes unreliable for me to know which to remove if there are more than two usernames involved.)
@fastfinge this is really interesting!! as a sighted person i think i don't really do this because anyone who i would have an extended conversation with is probably already someone i have added on discord and i could just message them there, and i don't know the rest of my mutuals on fedi very well. i find discord's ui a bit less clunky to use for back and forth chats than a fedi thread - it's easier for me to find the conversation, faster to load, supports more conversation features like replies and reactions, takes less time for me to reply, etc. i wonder if part of the difference you're noticing could be that blind people on fedi are a particularly strong community and might as a result interact with each other/get to know each other more?
and i also find the 1/n thing really annoying, i wish everyone would just move to instances without character limits!! i use the bluesky bridge and my posts very frequently get cut off over there because they exceed the bsky character limit
@b Yes, the blind community is quite strong, and almost all of us moved over from Twitter when they discontinued the API and broke accessibility. It wasn't like in sighted communities where some percent is on Mastodon, and some is on Twitter. Nearly a hundred percent of the blindness community who was active on twitter was forced to move.
@fastfinge So you're saying that's why I'm comfortable reading a 197-comment GitHub thread when everyone else has decided reinventing the solution—and problem if necessary—elsewhere would be easier?
@fastfinge Speaking on my behalf only, here are my two cents:
I’ve heard screen readers go at an astonishing number of words a second, much faster than I could read myself or process audibly.
To me, this indicates that it’s easier for a screen reader user to read larger texts than a “regular” reader, and thus can dive into longer threads in the same amount of time.
I have also noticed on Fedi that blind folks do not divide their texts into paragraphs.
While a screen reader needs no paragraphs, it is hard for (some, most?) visual readers to process a big blob of text without newlines.
As an ADHD person with information processing issues, I rarely even begin reading such walls of text.
Sighted users might also be less focused on retrieving information from text alone, but that is speculation on my part.
Perhaps it comes down to different ways of processing information, leading to various types of threads on Fedi.
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.
@mahryekuh@fastfinge FWIW, screen reader (and Reddit for some reason) users not using paragraphs is also quite annoying for me as another screen reader (and Reddit for some reason) user. I'm personally trying to be better about it.
I feel like it maybe wasn't as much of a problem on Twitter, particularly with the original character limit. People got used to writing posts that way and also reading them as single chunks of text because of how the most popular accessible clients usually work.
it's when someone has 5000 characters to play with and doesn't insert a single line break that it becomes infuriating.
@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
@fastfinge@jscholes In both your defenses, there are also plenty of sighted users writing big blobs of text, as the average writing and reading skills are in the ground.
(Also, Reddit is generally a disaster, so there is that.)
With screen readers, the bar for proper spelling and writing good-quality prose feels higher than for sighted readers.
If blind folks are better at spelling and use words as the good Merriam-Webster intended, then perhaps that helps any reader better understand and engage with the copy.
What I do find funny is that the characteristics Samuel describes feel close to my heart, as it's more my way of writing (and ADHD side-questing). You don't usually notice that in my texts, as I use Grammarly to refine my copy, and it usually cuts half my lines.
It is a pity that my brain stops functioning after reading a stream of text, or I would love to engage more with "blind style" threads, as you describe. But that is my disability, and not necessarily a representation of sighted reading standards.
PS. I appreciate that your response to me has paragraphs. Thank you for adding those.
@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.
Picking whatever sounds right might actually create a new accessibility problem for international users: these words change the meaning of a sentence, making the text harder, or even impossible, to translate by a machine.
(Although I do not rule out that AI will fix that, eventually.)
@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"?
@fastfinge@jscholes Absolutely! I don't know why that slipped my mind there; maybe it's the time (00:45 AM).
I also heavily rely on subtitles as I have "wonderful" ADHD auditory information processing issues. I would probably also have to puzzle for a moment, or even fail if the subtitles are not in Dutch or English.
@mahryekuh@fastfinge The paragraph thing might be, in part, due to Mona, one of the more popular clients at least for the Apple platforms, seeming not able to actually accept new line commands. There is no "Enter" key on the on-display keyboard, the usual command in the Braille Screen Input mode also doesn't seem to be working. I'd love to break my huge walls of texts into smaller walls of texts. haha
@johann@mahryekuh@fastfinge Thanks, that helped. Strange though, that seems to affect BSI as well. This could mean that hardware keyboards would be affected too and as long as this setting is on, you cannot insert new lines. Maybe I'm wrong.
@Piciok You can also type a new line in Mona without disabling the social keyboard by switching to Numbers, which makes a standard Return key appear. @johann@mahryekuh@fastfinge
@fastfinge If I had to guess, the UI and how people use social media is more of a slow mode (slower than live chat). Unlike Discord, in threads it is probably easier to find the thread you want using notifications. I personally find Discord's interface very cluttered (if you're in a lot of servers, channels, even with notification settings off) but social media's UI is static and doesn't change size - it's not dependent on number of channels, notifications from randoms, etc. What do you think?
@travisj I think that might be some of it, yes. That and a lot of blind people write lengthy messages even when chatting, and those can struggle to fit into a more realtime chat.
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