Note by @fastfinge

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

Sometimes there's no excuse for blind people spelling. "What's the NVDA addon for raping with shortcuts?" they ask plaintively. First off, it needs another p. And then we can worry about the missing w. But honestly, maybe you should just stick to dictation.

Timothy Wynn @twynn@mas.to

@fastfinge Uh.... That's a horrifying add-on. That was said in exaggeration, i.e., a made-up example to prove a point, right?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@twynn No, it was not. It was an iMessage I got on my actual phone from someone I met at a blindness gathering.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@twynn@mas.toThey wanted the screen wrapping addon, so NVDA would go back to the top of the page when they pushed a key like h and were at the last heading.

Spacedog @spacepup@mastodon.stickbear.me

@fastfinge hey it's at least better than adding an extra p, Rapped? Lol

David Dunphy @startrek2025@mastodon.stickbear.me

@fastfinge I've seen dictation make a mess of writing though too. @technocounselor

Gina @NightDrake@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge Just wow. But I'm not at all surprised this is even something we need to talk about.

Tamas G @Tamasg@mindly.social

@fastfinge looool so amused omg. If there's one good thing you can give AI it's that it would probably call that out if they were to say, take the 30 seconds to run the e-mail through it for the spell check and structure.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge I feel like some of it is just pure laziness and lack of willingness to invest in learning, likely related to the general sense of entitlement demonstrated by certain blind folks.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jcsteh And some of it is probably due to secondary mental illnesses, that get completely ignored because everyone was focused exclusively on their blindness growing up. But I suspect the vast majority of it comes from the dreadful state of disability education. Far too many blind people (and too many sighted people for that matter) have no idea how to actually learn anything. But it's far worse if you're blind, stuck into a special education classroom with everyone else, have no teacher who knows Braille, and are pretty much just left to sit by yourself in the corner; the staff are just happy you're not causing them anymore problems and will just leave you to your own devices. This is, in general, not a criticism of the usually under-funded, under-resourced, and under-trained teachers and staff. But in a class of 40 third graders, the blind student isn't going to get much attention. Or you could go to an underfunded blind school, where they teach you in grade nine what sighted students get in grade four. Sorry, you touched a bit of a nerve. Obviously blind folks have some responsibility for our own destiny. But by the time you're old enough to realize you should be responsible, it could well be too late for you.

Tamas G @Tamasg@mindly.social

@fastfinge ha you're reminding me of when I first came to the US at age 9. Because I didn't know English, and am blind, the teachers just figured, they can have me playing Arthur games all day. They gave me the mouse and said, "here, click around." I kid you not. I would do this day after day until my family moved school districts, and that latter one finally gave me a Braille teacher. They still put me back into the 1st grade instead of 3rd, and it wouldn't be until 6th grade that a US school kept me with the same grade level I was expected with for my age. Thinking back to it it's astounding because as a kid I didn't feel like anything was wrong with me playing Arthur storybook apps during schooltime. @jcsteh

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Tamasg So what you're telling me is that you have Arthur to thank for your entire career, and he should really get propper credit in the TGSpeechbox repo. LOL JK

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge Yeah, that's fair.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge I am of the unpopular opinion that you don't necessarily need braille as a blind person to become fully literate. It is possible to learn how to spell even when using speech with a screen reader if you are encouraged (or required, or incentivised, whatever) to do so. It's certainly a hell of a lot easier/more intuitive if you can use braille, though.

Tamas G @Tamasg@mindly.social

@jcsteh yeah agree with this too. I like audio players that allow someone to move by word or phrase and spell it, some of my Daisy players at school did this, so even though I was learning English through speech I could pause at that phrase level and get the word spelled out that was just read. Tools that include that as a feature probably can help speech-only learners get quite profficient provided they use it. @fastfinge

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@Tamasg To be fair, it requires extra, intentional, conscious effort, whereas a print or braille user can just intuitively pick it up by sheer absorption and exposure. @fastfinge

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jcsteh I used to agree with you a lot stronger until I went into journalism at university. They had a required "spelling and punctuation" exam that every other student past on the first try. It took me three. Without reading Braille, you just don't notice things like God needs a capital g, LORD is in all caps in some cases (and YHWH always is), titles that go after a name (esq, phd, OBE, etc) are capitalized differently from titles that go before the name (mr. mrs. and so on), not to mention all of the non-obvious homophones; everyone gets there/they're/their, but what about pail vs. pale? When should you write the number 5, and when should you spell it out? When should a word be a compound, and when should it be hyphenated? How and when should words be split across lines? What types of subheads can go in the middle of a page, and what should always go at the top of the next page? When is it okay to skip an accented letter at the end of a word, and when is it not? What is the difference between dashes, Hyphens, and em-dashes, and when should each be used? When does punctuation go inside the quotes, and when does it go outside? There are three types of quotation marks; when is it appropriate to use each one? These are things any sighted person picks up naturally, just by reading, well enough to pass this sort of exam. Whereas I mostly used speech for everything but math and science, so I had to study for several months to squeak a pass. Because none of that is stuff you'd think to pause your text to speech reading and check, or even realize was a thing unless someone directly told you.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jcsteh And that's not to mention things that even Braille readers can't learn, but authors/writers are absolutely required to know. For example, are you aware of drop caps and why/how they're used? That was another thing I constantly got marks taken off for forgetting when I submitted certain documents.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge Fair, and I wouldn't be required to know those things, so I'm not exposed to that requirement. I always found that kind of styling stuff to be ridiculous, but that's more just a personal opinion and obviously I'd have to deal with it if I were an author or a journalist.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge To this day, there are certain words - everyone has them I think - that I struggle to rememer the spelling of. And the easiest way for me to resolve that is to picture how the word feels in braille. So yeah, I'm not at all saying braille isn't necessary; on the contrary, I think any blind person who has the capability to learn it should absolutely learn it. But I also find the "you're illiterate as a blind person unless you know braille" argument made by some pro-braille folks to be quite offensive. There are some people I know that really, really tried to learn braille, but for whatever reason, their brains just couldn't process it correctly.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jcsteh I think it's more about removing the stigma around being illiterate, honestly. I know some sighted folks who, for one reason or another, are functionally illiterate. But they would never, ever come out and say it, even if reading a menu is a fifteen minute struggle. Some people's brains just aren't set up for reading fluintly, either in Braille or print. It's not a problem unique to Braille.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge True, but there seem to be some unique quirks related to braille; e.g. I know some people who can read braille with one hand just fine, but could never get their other hand to interpret it. Maybe those same folks would have had similar problems learning print; maybe it's the same mental pathway. Of course, we'll never know.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jcsteh Also, remember that billions of dollars and years of manpower have been spent helping people who struggle to read print do a better job of it, so they can read signs and billboards, even if they would never willingly pick up and read a novel. In comparison, almost zero resources have been spent on helping people who struggle to read Braille. They're just told to give up on it.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge Fair, and I think that's getting worse rather than better. In my schooling, braille was considered to be super important and I was given whatever help I needed to learn it. With some of the blind kids I see coming through now, it's like no one cares. "They can just use a screen raeder with speech; it's fine."

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jcsteh I wonder how all of the social media bans and age verification requirements and things are going to affect that? As they remove computers from the schools, and kids aren't allowed to use Gmail or Google Docs until they're 16, will Braille make a comeback? Or will the kids just be left to wrotte because "Well, they can just use a screen reader when they're old enough". As I understand it, Australia decided that github qualifies as a social network. So technicly a 13 year old student is legally not allowed to download NVDA there.

Timothy Wynn @twynn@mas.to

@fastfinge I never got fast enough with braille to make it my daily driver, but I do find it sometimes useful to slow down. Not out of deliberate choice, mind, but because there's a difference between ingesting information at a comparatively slower pace and your brain summarizing the information received from fast speech. All this to say I'm sure I am missing out on the many associations made from reading instead of listening, though folks who do have native access to written material can have far worse spelling and grammar even with that advantage, so the correlation is a bit of an unfair one even though practically you have a fair point. @jcsteh

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge Don't get me started on the social media ban. To be clear, I don't allow my kids to use social media; I think commercial social media is pretty harmful for adults a lot of the time, let alone kids, and I think a lot of parents are super irresponsible in their lack of supervision or understanding regarding it. But such a ban was never going to be feasible to implement cleanly in law and it was always going to have problematic side effects, and that's not even getting into the issues around age verification for adults.

Jason J.G. White @jason@jasonjgw.net

@jcsteh @fastfinge Only policies that undermine the "attention economy" (i.e., address the business model that drives commercial social media) are interesting proposals from my perspective. I'm not sure competition law is enough, as it isn't clear that having hundreds of commercial social media outlets motivated by the same incentives would be less harmful than what we have now.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jason @jcsteh I think social media should be handled the same way we handle TV in Canada: no ads or sponsored content for children. If your website shows ads, it either needs to be adults only, or it needs to show zero advertisements to children. Then all of the incentives for the social media networks to capture children’s attention the way they have are gone, because they can’t make money at it. And places like Mastodon can just keep doing what we’re doing.

Martin @mcourcel@allovertheplace.ca

@jcsteh @fastfinge I have a friend who works in the government. She writes with no punctuation. It irks me and I know she doesn't use punctuation in communication within the organization she works in. I've tried telling her, but she won't do anything about it. She's been there for 30 years, so I guess they don't care? She also hasn't been promoted, so there's that I guess.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge Some of those are subjective and depend somewhat on the particular style guide you're using, but your point stands. I am lucky enough to have been taught and read braille from a very early age. I don't use it as much now, but I am still very grateful for it and find it invaluable in certain situations.
Interestingly enough, although my general spelling is pretty good, my spelling of foods and medicines isn't great because I never learned those at school or university. Those are the kinds of things you pick up when you, say, go to a shop or see ads or whatever. Of course, I try to learn the spelling of those things as they come up, but it's not as intuitive as seeing them over and over again in braille.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jcsteh Yes, but most style guides are major enough that they're easy for sighted readers to learn. If you grew up in Canada, almost every newspaper article you read probably follows the Canadian Press Book of Style. Same for US news and AP Style. So for sighted writers, it's just "do the natural thing". For blind folks who don't read Braille daily, it's just a giant pile of a few thousand rules to memorize.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge Yeah, fair. That certainly applied to me somewhat when I did a year of psychological science at university. Learning that stuff was just so tedious, braille or no braille.

James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge I think these conversations invariably overstate the degree to which literacy itself just sinks in for many people, let alone a conscious awareness of styling quirks in various forms of media.

I know you don't literally mean that all print readers know what drop caps are or can name it as a technique. But if you got a hundred people in a room to look at a newspaper article without them, I think you'd get a mix of "looks fine," "it's missing something but I don't know what, "it doesn't do that thing, you know, the thing! With the first letter!" and so on.

Plus obviously one guy who'd treat the room to an unsolicited history of the technique, ensuring nobody would remember what a drop cap was afterwards. But that's a different matter. @jcsteh

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jscholes @jcsteh Right, but everyone in the room would notice...something...was different about it, even if they couldn't articulate what. The same way even though I can't play a single instrument, I can tell if someone else is playing an instrument poorly. Even if I can't explain what they're doing wrong.

James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge That's another example of something a notably large segment of the world's population would not or could not do, but maybe you're right. Below a certain point, there's knowledge you can't articulate to a significant degree for it to be useful. @jcsteh

Cleverson @clv1@mementomori.social

@jscholes @fastfinge @jcsteh the perfect solution for spelling, for blind and sighted people, would be for all languages to adopt phonetic spelling.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@clv1 @jscholes @jcsteh The perfect solution would be for everyone to just learn a language that already does, like Korean. The world only needs a single language, and then we can get rid of AI translation services, and save the environment! I mean, as long as we’re all dreaming impossible dreams…

Cleverson @clv1@mementomori.social

@fastfinge @jscholes @jcsteh Or Esperanto!

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@clv1 @jscholes @jcsteh Why? It uses the Latin alphabet, a silly and flawed writing system. If we are forcing everyone to change why keep it? And why keep a language designed by white Europeans to privilege themselves? It’s no easier or neutral to learn than English for Chinese or Japanese speakers. Leave it to die with the other outmoded 19th century ideas that inspired it.

Cleverson @clv1@mementomori.social

@fastfinge @jscholes @jcsteh Maybe all languages could adopt IPA.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@clv1 @jscholes @jcsteh Just as soon as someone invents an ipa keyboard that doesn’t require three hands with seven fingers each.

Cleverson @clv1@mementomori.social

@fastfinge @jscholes @jcsteh I recall having read about a kind of keyboard called chord keyboard, which as far as I've understood, is an aproach similar to braille, where you type several keys at once instead of one per character, but for everyone, i.e. sighted persons as well.

patricus @patricus@gts.posix.live

@fastfinge @jscholes @jcsteh @clv1 that won't ever happen because the world needs to fucking unite and that requires a functional brain which the world powers don't have

Jason J.G. White @jason@jasonjgw.net

@fastfinge @jcsteh I remember that in first-year law school (also my first year as an undergraduate student), I was presented with a style manual that was expected to be followed in writing essays. As I recall, citations and references were the most substantive component of this guidance. The style guide was transcribed into braille for me, which I am sure helped in applying it correctly. Of course, I already had writing and formatting skills firmly in place, reinforced in part by braille reading, which is obviously your point here.

Kara Goldfinch @KaraLG84@dragonscave.space

@jcsteh @fastfinge Same here cince I'm just too slow at reading braille.. I nearly always get my screen reader to spell unfamiliar words etc but I'll be the first to admit it took me longer than it probably should to realise that waist and waste are two different words. Practise and practice still get me though and I have to use spell check on them by shoving ing on the end to see which is valid.

miki @miki@dragonscave.space

@jcsteh @fastfinge Using a synthesizer that speaks a different language from the one you're actually reading is certainnly one way to do it. It's how I did it, and I do a better job than most blind people who are native speakers.w

MostlyBlindGamer @MostlyBlindGamer@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge @jcsteh this is why I didn’t develop blindness skills as a kid: the path for blind kids was known and as you describe, so I got just enough assistance to power through the sighted way.

In return I got a bad neck and bad wrist from craning and panning with magnification, and an advanced education. Only to deal with discrimination I’d been sheltered from and depression.
That said, my class in school was capped to fewer students, so I could get some extra teacher time, which I’m sure helped. And my brand of autism made me very likable to teachers.

All that to say education is still an afterthought for disabled kids and the quote “success stories,” if you wanna call them that, are driven by localized privilege in family circumstances, how well the kids can contort themselves into abled society and, as is the case with education across the board, socioeconomic status.

Kara Goldfinch @KaraLG84@dragonscave.space

@jcsteh @fastfinge Honestly I feel like entitled just gets bandied around with no clear meaning of what it means. Sometimes I think I'm entitled and also feel like proudly wearing it on a T-shirt.

James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge Yeah but... what's wrapping with shortcuts?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jscholes They wanted the screen wrapping addon. So when they pressed h on the last heading, it would wrap back to the top of the screen.

James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge Oh. Right.