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.

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.

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.

🇨🇦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.