If the blind community doesn't exist, no blindness industry can or could exist either. The marketing of products from that goes out all over and interest from the community informs and drives Government purchasing decisions on some very expensive technology. This has been happening since at least the 1960's and it is why TSI refused to sell to corporations any longer since blind employees learned to use its equipment went back to work and often had their employment terminated shortly after having had use of the equipment on the job. Of course, the corporations held onto the equipment. Some of us know a little history. Jude <jdashiel at panix dot com> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940) . On Fri, 27 Jan 2023, Linux for blind general discussion wrote: > Well, first I would say that I am not in "the blind community." Naturally, I > belong to some communities that include or are specific to people who are > blind or visually impaired, but "the blind community" taken as a whole largely > does not exist, nor would I be interested in joining or starting it. Twitter > itself is a very large community, but all users are not blind, therefore, it > is not a blind community either. > > > On the other hand, there are most definitely alternatives to Twitter that are > usable by people who are blind or visually impaired, and are also good for > starting or joining various blind-friendly communities if that is your thing. > Most notably, I have been running [Friendica](https://friendi.ca/) on my > server for about 3 years and find the web interface to be mostly accessible to > Orca using Firefox and Brave. [Pleroma](https://pleroma.social) is another > that is already usable with Orca, and is actively developed and is > specifically working to improve the accessibility of its default web > interface, though other web interfaces exist, along with API's that allow > applications of all kinds to access accounts and public timelines. Both > Pleroma and Friendica are largely Mastodon compatible, so many third-party > clients will work with either. > > > I have noticed, probably because I used to see my tweets in the more > accessible Friendica web interface, as Twitter's new owner didn't break > accessibility, it already sucked hard eyeballs long before he bought it, that > Friendica's database on my server has grown completely out of control, upwards > of 10GB. I have heard that Pleroma, though maybe a bit less easy to set up, > can run on more hardware, and is much lighter on resource usage, so I may be > playing with it as well. There is another fairly new web application called > [Honk](https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk) that is very easy to get up and > running on just about anything. I have played a bit with it, and I believe it > aims at Mastodon compatibility as well, but I have only played a little with > it at this point. The terminology is a bit laughable, but the ease of setup is > what got me started banging on it just a bit. As I recall, the web interface > works with Orca pretty well, and runs very fast, though I haven't yet done > enough with it to slow it down, nor did I have enough of a timeline on it to > really test it thoroughly up to now. > > > If you're not looking to run your own server, even at home on a Raspberry Pi, > look for either a Friendica or Pleroma server that is already up and running. > These are both more compatible with ActivityPub, the primary protocol used to > allow Fediverse servers to talk to each other, than Mastodon is, and neither > suffers from the same heavy-handed moderation that will cause a Mastodon > server to be blacklisted if one user said something that the Mastodon admins > disagree with and the server mods let it get by. Unless the operator(s) have > made extensive modifications that break things, both work very well with Orca > and both Firefox and Brave, and both are compatible with the growing number of > Mastodon clients that exist on various platforms and operating systems. If it > is kept updated, Pleroma is as I mentioned working specifically to improve the > screen reader accessibility of its web interface, so finding a Pleroma server > that is kept updated or starting one is probably the best option at this > point. > > ~Kyle > > _______________________________________________ > Blinux-list mailing list > Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list > > _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list