Re: Twitter alternatives for the blind community?

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Kyle,
Thanks for echoing some of my thoughts.
I honestly was confused, remain confused by the first posters question.
There is no such thing as a blind community, because blindness is not a uniformed experience for anyone, at all. References to quote the blind quote as a composite whole, speaking personally does more to dehumanize those who interact with technology differently than almost anything else. my concern though with your suggestions is the focus on a single tool, which itself cannot be applied across the board. Yes, the new Twitter owner fired the entire accessibility team, but how are these services defining accessibility? by its actual meaning regardless of technology used, works from the keyboard for example? You keep speaking of Orca, but what if one cannot, or chooses not to use Orca at all? If the goal are options that lets individuals, regardless of label, communicate with those they wish, and engage with the world as they desire, then the access is based on progressive enhancement design, or should be, not any specific screen reader if that resonates, speaking personally. Such is because software based solutions are subject to becoming noninclusive, where interaction based solutions, command line, works with keyboard, has basic HTML in the floor even is scripting is placed on top, work for the long term.
Just my own thoughts,
Karen



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

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