[-] fastfinge@rblind.com 19 points 3 months ago

I wish I knew. I followed the link to the Matrix community, and it was just confused people and trolling NAZI's. No Nicole, no attempt at catfishing.

66
submitted 6 months ago by fastfinge@rblind.com to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

cross-posted from: https://rblind.com/post/3476242

As part of OurBlind's continued efforts to provide accessible online spaces for the blind and visually impaired community, we've developed custom themes for Lemmy, to use on our Lemmy instance on Rblind, and to make available for others, in keeping with the themes' license terms and the spirit of free and open source software.

If you're reading this on www.rblind.com and are not signed in, you're using RBlind-Dark. We hope you're enjoying it! If you log in, you can switch to RBlind-Light. Once logged in, go to your username, then Settings and, use the Themes dropdown to make your selection: we suggest RBlind-Dark or RBlind-Light at the end of the list.

Why these themes matter to us

We started this Lemmy instance back in 2023, prompted by the Reddit API protests. Reddit Inc., the company that controls the website our community r/Blind is on, had announced policy changes that made the apps most of us used to participate in the Reddit community impossible to maintain. During this time it became clear to us and many other online communities that a corporate-owned platform would always be subject to pressures that are contrary to our needs. We launched this site as our blind-friendly home base in the fediverse, a decentralized and often self-hosted social media platform.

The goal of having our own home server was always to be able to make our own decisions about the software we run on it. One of those decisions is that the visual styling should always be comfortable for low-vision users and other disabled people, as part of our core audience. That meant designing and providing themes that, within our technical limitations, conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

How we designed our Lemmy themes

OurBlind admins contracted Travis, a talented graphic designer from within the community, for this project. Check out his website here. Together we went over specific requirenments within WCAG and the site's usage, colors, layout, preliminary testing, and communication, to develop both the themes themselves and the framework for future work and sharing.

How these themes meet our goals

In short, the new themes ensure high contrast, colorblind friendly colors, readable fonts, and appropriately-sized and readable buttons and links.

Following are examples of the home feed using the new themes.

RBlind-Dark example

RBlind Lemmy homepage with Local selected in RBlind-Dark

RBlind-Light example

RBlind Lemmy homepage with Local selected in RBlind-Light

Time for testing and feedback

These have been audited by OurBlind admins, but that's only part of the validation process. If you're using this site and have low vision, colorblindness, a cognitive or a motor disability, consider providing feedback. Do they work well given your needs and use case? Do you like them? Does something not work quite right? Comment below or fill out the anonymous survey. Don't hesitate to comment if you're not a member of this instance or not disabled - we want these to be helpful to as many people as possible. Thank you!

We'll be collecting feedback and open to revisions until February 1st 2025. Even after that, we'll still be interested in your experience, but will take longer to respond and adjust.

How to use these themes on your own instance

As mentioned, this project is all about the value of free and open source software in ensuring control and autonomy. We're making this our home in the fediverse and we want to be good neighbors. We already offer the broader community a place for discussions around blindness, but we also want to contribute back.

These themes are licensed under GNU AFFERO General Public License and available at the Codeberg repo to be used or modified. Updates to the themes that come as a result of user feedback will be available there. Definitely give Travis a star and consider hiring for your own design needs, he's been a delight to work with.

The repo is also mirrored on GitHub for accessibility reasons.

Thanks, from RBlind

This community's journey has been long and thrilling, across three platforms and over a decade. Everybody on the admin and moderation team has deeply benefitted from and grown with the community. These themes are a humble gift to our members and our neighbors on the fediverse. May they make all our lives that bit more comfortable.

[-] fastfinge@rblind.com 29 points 7 months ago

All responsible server admins have them defederated. Hate speech and genocide denial, that is almost certainly against the law in Canada, Germany, and other places. We defederated lemmygrad for the same reason.

[-] fastfinge@rblind.com 11 points 7 months ago

Audiovault.net is the website you want. Made by and for blind folks, it has thousands of AD tracks in mp3 format. You should be able to just sync them with the video. Though blind folks never bother; we only care about audio anyway.

14
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by fastfinge@rblind.com to c/communitypromo@lemmy.ca

This is our attempt to explain Lemmy, without actually getting into federation, activity pub, Lemmy, and all those technical things that a lot of people find frightening and complicated. I thought some of you doing the hard work of building out your own communities and convincing people to move from other places might find it of use. Please feel free to edit to be less screen-reader specific, and perhaps add some screenshots, if you'd like to use it for your own servers or communities. Or just use it verbatim; either way is fine! We'd love a link, though. Also, if you know any blind folks who could benefit from Lemmy, don't hesitate to send them our way. Anyone who can use their screen reading software well enough to browse basic websites shouldn't have any trouble. Note: the original post was editted with suggestions from the comments. Please visit the link for the canonical version.

cross-posted from: https://rblind.com/post/3377057

Welcome to rblind.com, a community for blind folks and friends! This is one of the communities affiliated with the OurBlind network. Here, you can interact with both blind and sighted folks alike, in an open, friendly, environment. Just as with Reddit, you can, and are encouraged, to upvote and downvote posts and comments, post your own links and topics in communities, and participate in discussions with others.

Signing Up

As with any community, the first step to participating is to sign up for an account. To do so, you can use the "sign up" link, located in the navigation landmark. You'll be presented with a form that asks for a username, email, password, and asks a question about why you want to join. You'll also be asked if you'd like to see NSFW (not safe for work) content.

Don't worry! We approve all accounts fairly quickly. There's no need to over-think the "why do you want to join" question. We do things this way in order to keep out the spammers, without having to use a captcha or some other inaccessible challenge.

Logging in and first steps

Once your account is approved, you can log in! The first thing you'll want to do is to visit the settings link, and go over the available settings. Once successfully logged in, you'll find the settings link in the navigation menu. Here, you can do things like set your display name, select what languages you'd like to see posts in (we strongly recommend keeping undetermined selected), enable two-factor login if you'd like, change the visual theme of the website, and more. After adjusting the settings, you can press save and the changes will be applied.

Finding Communities

Once you've gotten your settings the way you like them, it's time to find some communities to join! To do so, find and activate the "communities" link. You'll be presented with a page containing several controls and a table containing a list of communities.

By default, you'll be seeing what are called "local" communities. A local community is a community that is run by us here at OurBlind. You'll want to make sure that you're subscribed to blind main, and research. To do so, find the table containing the list of communities. Column four of each row will contain a button labeled "subscribe" that will allow you to subscribe to the community, or "joined" if you're already subscribed.

But RBlind is more than just a forum for talking to other blind people! It wouldn't be much fun if we were isolated in our own bubble, without being able to interact with the rest of the world, would it? That's why RBlind allows you to join other communities, run by other people. To list these communities, find the set of radio buttons above the table on the communities page. These radio buttons give you three options:

  • subscribed: only show the communities you're subscribed to
  • local: only show local communities run by us
  • all: show all of the communities that RBlind knows about

You'll also find a combo box that allows you to change how the communities are sorted, and a text field that will let you search for a particular community.

For now, set the radio buttons to "all". You don't need to click the search button, or do anything else. As soon as you change the radio button, the table of communities automatically updates.

Now, you should find a table with 50 rows. Just under the table is a "next" button, that will load the next page of communities. You'll notice that under the "community name" column, the names look a bit like email addresses. This is telling you what the community is called, and what website runs it. For example, Showerthoughts@lemmy.world is the Shower Thoughts community (similar to the one on Reddit), and it's run by a website called lemmy.world. However, you don't need to worry too much about that! You can subscribe to the community, and make posts and comments, just like you would in a local community. The only thing to be aware of is that just like on Reddit, different communities are run by different people. That means each community will have its own rules and customs. We at OurBlind only set the rules for the communities that show up when you set the radio buttons to "local".

Interacting with posts and comments

Congratulations! Now you've signed up for an account, subscribed to some local communities, and even found some interesting remote communities to join! It's time to start reading and interacting with posts.

To do so, find and click the first link in the navigation menu, directly below the jump to content button. Your screen reader will probably read it as "current RBlind" or similar. This link will take you to your homepage.

Your homepage consists of a list of posts, each marked with a heading level one. Above the heading for each post, you'll find an upvote button, the number of votes the post currently has, a downvote button, and perhaps a link (if one was included) or an expand button for images (if the post has an image). Under each post you'll find information about the post, like who posted it, where it was posted, and the number of comments it has.

If you found the post of value, you can press upvote. If it was off-topic, low-effort, or spam, you can downvote. If you'd like to view and participate in the comment section, you can activate the heading level 1 link. If the post has a link associated with it, you can cursor up once from the heading level 1 to find and press enter on it.

the comment section

Hopefully, after browsing your homepage for a while, you've eventually found an interesting post that you'd like to participate in. To load the comments, activate it's heading level one, and the comments section will load.

The comments show up in a set of nested lists. Just as with posts, they have upvote and downvote buttons. You'll also find a "collapse" button above some comments. If you're uninterested in a particular part of the discussion, you can use this button to collapse the thread of comments, hiding it. If you'd like to reply, you can press the reply button, and a text box will become available for you to type your comment. If you'd like to post a new comment, you can use the text box above the list of existing comments.

On this page you'll also find a set of radio buttons that control how the comments are sorted. "Hot" is the default, recommended option. However, you can also sort by "new" to see comments in order, "top" to see the most popular comments, and several others.

If someone replies to your post or comment, you can find this by visiting the "inbox" link in the navigation menu.

Making A New Post

Congratulations! You've read your feed of posts, interacted with some, and maybe even made a comment or two of your own. You're well on your way to becoming an RBlind expert! But what about when you have something you want to share?

Well, that's also easy! First, find and activate the "create post" link in the navigation menu. The create post form will load. In this form, you need to enter a title and a body for your post. You can also optionally select a language, add a link, an image, and a thumbnail. You also need to select what community your post will be part of. When you open the community combo box (by cursoring down on it), you'll be given a long list of communities. However, you can also shift tab to a search box that will allow you to filter the list. For example, if you wanted to find our main community, you could type "blind" in the search box, tab back to the list, and select "blind main".

Mobile Apps

Now that you're an RBlind veteran, you might want an app to better use the website on your phone. Currently, the app we recommend is called "thunder for lemmy". It's available for free in both the IOS and Android app stores. When it asks you what server you want to log into, you need to make sure and enter rblind.com. We also recommend going into the Thunder settings, and adjusting them to your taste.

Thunder is also available for users of Mac OS who have arm-based macs. However, currently those of us on Windows and Linux are best to use the rblind.com website.

Can't I post from Mastodon?

Yes, sort of. Currently you can make new posts to rblind.com from Mastodon, and reply to existing ones. However, you can't upvote or downvote posts, see how many votes a post or comment has, or subscribe to other communities. So we do recommend making an account on rblind.com directly for most purposes. However, if you want to interact from Mastodon or other "fediverse" software, the usernames to interact with are @main@rblind.com and @research@rblind.com.

Conclusion

We hope this brief introduction to the RBlind website has been helpful to you! If you have any questions, feel free to post to blind main, post in the comments here, or reach out to us for support.

[-] fastfinge@rblind.com 10 points 7 months ago

There's also a list here, though last updated in 2020: https://distributedcomputing.info/projects.html

Most of those projects remain active in some form.

[-] fastfinge@rblind.com 14 points 1 year ago

Ah, good to know. Back in my day, when we had to walk a hundred miles to school in the snow, up hill both ways, IRC was the only place to get ebooks. I'm guessing it's just the old users clinging on now.

[-] fastfinge@rblind.com 22 points 1 year ago

Man, I’m getting flashbacks to my days running omenserve on undernet. I had no idea people were still doing this! How does the content compare to places like Anna’s archive these days?

[-] fastfinge@rblind.com 15 points 1 year ago

It really depends on your use case. If you want something that sounds pretty okay, and is decently fast, Piper fits the bill. However, this is just a command line TTS system; you'll need to build all the supporting infrastructure if you want it to read audiobooks. https://github.com/rhasspy/piper

An extension for the free and open source NVDA screen reader to use piper lives here: https://github.com/mush42/piper-nvda

If you want something that can run in realtime, though sounds somewhat robotic, you want dectalk. This repo comes with libraries and dlls, as well as several sample applications. Note, however, that the licensing status of this code is...uh...dubious to say the least. Dectalk was abandonware for years, and the developer leaked the sourcecode on a mailing list in the 2000's. However, ownership of the code was recently re-established, and Dectalk is now a commercial product once again. But the new owners haven't come after the repo yet: https://github.com/dectalk/dectalk

If you want a robotic but realtime voice that's fully FOSS with known licensing status, you want espeak-ng: https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng

If you want a fully fledged software application to read things to you, but don't need a screen reader and don't want to build scripts yourself, you want bookworm: https://github.com/blindpandas/bookworm

Note, however, that you should build bookworm from source. While the author accepts pull requests, because of his circumstances, he's no longer able to build new releases: https://github.com/blindpandas/bookworm/discussions/224

If you are okay with using closed-source freeware, Balabolka is another way to go to get a full text to speech reader: https://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm

[-] fastfinge@rblind.com 74 points 2 years ago

I don’t block anything. I work in accessibility, so it’s important to me to know what the experiences are like for my fellow users with disabilities. I also don’t want to recommend sites or apps that are riddled with inaccessible ads. I’d rather not give them traffic at all. Though even though I let them track me, I still get ads in a language I don’t speak for cars I can’t drive. What’re they doing with all that data?

[-] fastfinge@rblind.com 28 points 2 years ago

Surprised nobody has mentioned my two favourites:

  • Behind The Bastards: Robert Evans (formerly of Cracked fame) talks about the worst people in history for hours.
  • Oh No Ross and Carrie: "When they make the claims we show up so you don't have to." Maybe start with the series on scientology, it's some of the best work they've done.

Most of the other stuff I listen to is either industry specific or fandom/hobby specific.

[-] fastfinge@rblind.com 16 points 2 years ago

NVDA. Without it I literally couldn't use my computer every day, or do my job.

[-] fastfinge@rblind.com 21 points 2 years ago

That was me, and my bad. As a blind person myself, I’ve never tried to post an image. I knew including alt text was possible, but I didn’t realize the method was undocumented, and Lemmy doesn’t prompt for it. If I had, I would have offered help, not just snark.

[-] fastfinge@rblind.com 9 points 2 years ago

I really don't love this. Couldn't we extend the mastodon blocklist to cover Lemmy somehow? I don't like automated blocking. I'd much rather find a list of trusted admins, and defederate with whatever 60 percent of them defederate with.

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fastfinge

joined 2 years ago