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.
@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.
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