Re: [sc-users] sc-users is closing down

[mlang@xxxxxxxxxx]

scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

> I'm very sorry to hear this. It's disheartening to hear that someone is made
> unable to access the community resources for any reason. In my long-ish history
> in the software world, I've seen basic accessibility for visually impaired users
> fall off the end of feature lists again and again... It's infuriating for me to
> watch, and I'm sure a hundred times more infuriating to experience.

It is.  And it is a structural problem.  ROI is dominating the
commercial world, and this attitude is spilling over into open projects
as well.  It all boils down to accessibility being a chunk of work, and
the number of users who actually benefit from that work is miniscule.

Also, the walled-garden attitude is adding to the problem.
Whenever a service is moved from a open protocol to a HTML interface,
pardon the expression, a blind child dies of grief.

Even if some of the accessibility problems of a particular site are
fixed, the underlying issue remains: The user is forced to use a
particular client (a modern web browser) and looses basically all
ability to customize the client.  In my particular case, I am still
deliberately using a text console to do 99% of my computing work.
From email to coding, everything is done in a single emacs -nw session.
So if I have to go to a modern web browser to participate in a
particular community, that means I have to boot my Windows PC and launch
Firefox or Chrome.  Now everything I do here is foreign to the way I
work.  I suddenly rely more on speech synthesis then braille output,
which is what I normally do in a text console.
This automatically makes it hard to actually read code.
Scrolling is inherently slower.  I basically feel like in one of those
dreams where you have to run away but can only make slow wobbly steps.
And I also work on a different platform.
So cut and paste is suddenly no longer possible.  I
have to send myself an email and open that up with outlook to get chunks
of text across.  Yeah, I could maybe also scp things from the windows
host onto my linux machine on the local network, but I guess you still
get the problem.  Even if I had a network shared drive, its still
a pain to work with.

> Accessibility for VI users in the Discourse forum software is a very hot topic,
> and is seeing active work (some topics are being discussed right now on this
> thread: https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-with-a-screen-reader/178105/76),
> but it's I think still far behind where it should be. I'd like to do whatever I
> can in terms of configuration to make the scsynth Discourse forum more
> accessible. Also, we update the software very regularly, so any accessibility
> related improvements or bug fixes to the Discourse software should end up on the
> forum very quickly.

Good to hear your attitude, bad to see there is ongoing work, which
implies accessibility has (as usually) been treated as an afterthought.
Which, from own experience, means that it will never really catch up.

> If there are particular issues with the forum software, please feel free to
> reach out to me via email (scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) - I'm happy to do whatever is
> possible in terms of configuration to make the experience better. Also happy to
> bring up issues with the forum developer team / push for fixes in the forum
> software itself  - as I said, there seem to be developers that are actively
> working on and passionate about this are (and, it's open source, so we can also
> contribute patches ourselves).
>
> Finally - the forum also has a pure mailing list mode. I'm not sure how well
> this would replace the old school email list experience of sc-users, but it
> might be better than the website itself. If you already have an account, the
> setting is here: https://scsynth.org/u/my/preferences/emails (my mac
> screenreader says its "Enable mailing list mode checkbox").  If navigating the
> site is too much of a pain in the ass, let me know - I believe I can use my
> admin powers to make an account and sign you up for ML mode also :)

The first question I have is if I am supposed to be able to do basic
stuff like register an account and login from a plain old text browser.
When I go to scsynth.org with, say, lynx, I see the front
page with a bunch of articles, but there appears to be no link
to anything resembling a signup or signin.  I am suspecting most of the
links in the menu are JS only.  If thats true, I will have to resort to
a modern browser to interact with the forum.
And honestly, while I really like how supportive you are,
I am currently not sure if I am willing to go there.

On a real mailing list, I can subscribe by sending a *mail*.
Here, I need to setup an *account* with a password and all the yadayada.
Maybe even solve a CAPTCHA.
And since the mail interface isn't used by many, it will eventually
degrade in features and be removed "because almost nobody uses it".

I am well aware that this rant is reading like whining to some, and
maybe it is.  However, I cant resist and use the opportunity to give
people a glimps of what the modern web means to some select few.

I still keep newsgroup posting from the 90s, since the restricted nature
of things back then forced "normal" people to express complicated things
in text only.  Guitar tablature for instance.  Once the "world" switched
to nice web-based guitar tab viewers, I suddenly was no longer able to
access *any* new material.  So I keep the files I collected ofter the
years, because I *know by now* that we've been forgotten about largely
and modern technology is not bridging the gap.
I republished a "how to solve the rubik's cube" tutorial from the late
90s on my website simply to preserve it, as it seems to be the only
textual
description that is actually useful.  Try googling this topic today,
and you will only find videos and pages making heavy use of diagrams.

Heck, I even see blog articles where code examples are being placed in
images.  Presumably to do very slick syntax highlighting...

-- 
CYa,
  ⡍⠁⠗⠊⠕

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