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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
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.
:drgn_heart@not.an.evilcyberhacker.net:1
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Marijke Luttekes @mahryekuh@hachyderm.io
7mo
@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.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
@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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