As someone who is completely blind, I pay for OpenRouter in order to have AI describe images to me. If more people bothered with alt text, I wouldn't have to. But it is what it is. I suspect there are models I could run locally that would do what I need; on IOS, apple handles all image descriptions locally on the phone, and they're perfectly adequate. But on Windows, nobody has created an easy way to get a local model running in the Open-source NVDA screen reader (https://www.nvaccess.org/) but there are multiple addons that work with OpenRouter. NVDA is open source and entirely written in Python, so it should actually be pretty easy to do. The main reason I haven't tried it myself is because I have no idea what local model to use. None of the benchmarks really tell me "This model would be good at describing images to blind people". Whereas the giant cloud models are semi-okay at everything, so everyone just uses those. But if we could use a smaller model, we might even be able to fine tune it for the specific use-case of blind people. Maybe someday!
Based on the links you gave, it seems that captions default to off when new servers are created.
Ah, good to know! I don't use meeting platforms that aren't accessible by default for everyone. Looks like the problem, at least in Jitsi, is that enable captions defaults to off. It would need to default to on before I could use it.
How many of those support captions?
I'm so happy to hear this! If you're looking for a full-time IOS screen reader user to test, drop me a message. I'm happy to help out.
Honestly? Encourage people to describe images. Here, on Mastodon, wherever. Alt-text/image descriptions make a huge difference. Blind people don't want to just engage with other blind people. If we can normalize alt-text the way it has been on Mastodon in more places, that alone will be a giant accessibility win.
Thanks for the offer! But we are doing fine for now, and we are not comfortable asking anyone for money until we have demonstrated that we can build our Lemmy into a stable and accessible home for our community. Speaking personally, I’m a self taught hobby sysadmin learning as I go. Right now the focus is on leveling up our mod team; not only do we need to be good moderators, we also need to build digital infrastructure that our community can trust.
There were issues filed by screen reader users at the Lemmy-UI github, and a lot of them have already been fixed with pull requests. However, the 0.7 releases don't have grate accessibility. rblind.com, a community created by the moderators of /r/blind is in open alpha, and is running development code directly from the github, in order to get our community the most accessible Lemmy we can, as quickly as we can. We recognize this is terrible devops practice, and we intend to move onto stable releases when possible. In the meantime, we're taking regular backups, and warning our community to expect frequent bugs and issues. We've chosen Lemmy for our community, largely because the documentation and support around deploying an instance was better. While we hope blind folks will be welcomed at all instances across the fediverse, no matter what software they're running, it's important to us to have a place where the former /r/blind community can keep together, and we can begin making custom changes to the themes to create the most accessible Lemmy possible. We will, of course, make all of these changes open, and contribute them to the main version of Lemmy. But running our own instance frees us from waiting for other instance owners to make changes for us, while still allowing us to post to any community on any instance.
Don't depend on this one, yet. The instance is still crashing every six hours or so for reasons I don't understand and can't make headway on.
These days I can do it all myself. Press control+windows+enter when Windows first boots, and the basic built-in screen reader that's part of Windows 11 comes on. It's good enough to get through set-up and install a better screen reader. Sadly, if I were on Linux, that wouldn't at all be the case. Though I do run multiple Linux servers via SSH, including all of the infrastructure for rblind.com.
I did manage to assemble my DIY Framework 16 laptop, and I'll upgrade the mainboard in it later this year, but that's pretty much hitting my limits when it comes to hardware. Soldering is right out, and Oh My God do I hate those damn ipex connectors.