James Scholes / is on Nostr

Digital #Accessibility Engineer/Analyst, #ScreenReader user, and occasional #software developer. #a11y

Last Notes

2025-05-25 20:08:26

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@nprofile…m8mr @nprofile…8ne4 This is a fundamentally inequitable and illogical stance. If blind users cannot install the OS without help, there will be fewer of them to benefit from a robust accessibility implementation, and what blind users do exist today are the subjects of survivorship bias.
It also continues to perpetuate the exclusionary belief that disabled people should need to "plan" (your word) to carry out tasks that others can do on a whim. They do not have an army of helpers available on demand to pick up the work that a project isn't prioritising.

2025-03-17 19:11:30

Today I learned: If you use #Chrome and are annoyed by those "Sign in with Google" dialogs stealing keyboard focus on certain websites, you can disable it at the browser level.
In the address bar, type or paste in "chrome://settings/content/federatedIdentityApi" (without the quotes. You should land on the "Third-party sign-in" Settings page.
On that page, there'll be two radio buttons: "Sites can show sign-in prompts from identity services", and "Block sign-in prompts from identity services". Set it to the second one, and you should find that the problematic dialogs are no longer present.
#accessibility #screenReader

2025-01-09 19:49:02

I really want to give a positive review to the host of an Airbnb Experience I attended recently. Unfortunately, I'm not sure which of the unlabelled links in their email to choose. Maybe "t3s6S0VG" means five stars? Then again, it could be "fxq2V6ci", "Sc2yVOPh", or even "sABCEL6T". And I'm sure one of those will report them and get them banned. #accessibility

2025-01-09 04:25:15

Amazon has added a new (to me) image/video gallery thing to product pages. For #screenReader users, it's a list of seven buttons that all say "Submit". Hope the team got a big bonus. #accessibility

2024-12-27 23:54:24

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@nprofile…6h3y That's okay, I checked out as soon as I read "stakeholders with disabilities".

2024-12-21 19:44:41

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@nprofile…6h3y And is he okay?

2024-12-12 23:52:50

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@nprofile…gffv As someone who doesn't use a mouse, today I learned that their drivers are apparently extremely bloated.

2024-12-11 18:56:38

Heard a compelling recording of a clearly independent #blind person dealing with a destination dispatch elevator system this morning.
For someone who can independently walk to the station and elevator, and doesn't have to rely on the badly designed #accessibility option, I'd imagine the total time for choosing a floor and boarding can be measured in single or low double-digit seconds. It took this person over two and a half minutes, which is entirely a reflection on the system, not them.
Imagine this "#disability tax" adding up throughout your day. That's assuming you can even use the pseudo-accessible interface, which relied on audio of numbers spoken in English. If you're deafblind, or require another spoken language, it moves from being a disability tax to a stone cold barrier.

2024-12-05 15:33:31

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@nprofile…m624 Absolutely. Although in the really early days, screen readers used hardware speech synthesisers connected over serial, so there were also other bandwidth/processing limitations in the mix. And a lack of understanding about user preferences, which we now have more of after decades of real-world usage.

2024-12-05 15:08:17

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@nprofile…m624 If markdown is rendered as HTML in a browser, screen readers will read it like any other webpage. That is, loaded into its own virtual buffer, utilising the screen reader's own cursor.
At that point, my SR settings for web navigation come into play; I personally use a line length of 250 characters in that context. The underlying wrapping of the Markdown isn't relevant anymore, because that raw content isn't what I'm reading.
It's in an editor/IDE that the hard wrapping can be wearisome. Because there, it's a screen reader's job to just read the lines of the file as they were written, not interpret them.
If a screen reader interpreted lines of a text/code file to reflow it, I wouldn't be able to accurately respond to e.g. someone telling me there was an issue on line 55, or report such problems myself. But shorter raw line lengths means more keyboard navigation/strain on my wrists, and doesn't result in each line taking full advantage of auditory processing. @nprofile…jk0n

2024-06-19 21:56:25

Infrequent reminder that avoiding #JavaScript at all costs is not #inclusive, and is instead a performative exercise in dogma. Or, to put it another way: that #CSS-only component probably isn't what you say it is. #accessibility

2024-05-17 14:59:17

Yesterday was Global #Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD). Today, some companies will be considering switching away from #Slack to a less #accessible alternative due to #AI bullshit.