Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

annoyed by fedi only letting me scroll for a few minutes before i hit yesterday's feed and have to return to living my life and making stuff i want to make

This week, I've been thinking a lot about the downstream effects of AI on access literacy in blindness spaces. I've seen at least three bespoke email clients show up now, built with accessibility in mind and, at least in large part, with AI. Which is great! If you can make the thing that works better for you, why wouldn't you? Bespoke fixes for inaccessible software obviously aren't new. Screen reader vendors still write scripts for applications that otherwise work terribly. As an example, the built-in set of JAWS scripts is a veritable who's who of business applications. We've been fixing software from the outside for decades. The difference, I think, is where the fix sits in the stack. A JAWS script makes Outlook usable. Numerous NVDA add-ons exist to enhance other productivity apps, too. Ideally, the company fixes the problem themselves. Despite the accessibility issues--and usually because of the fixes--people are still using the mainstream solution. But now it's becoming practical to just make a different email client or word processor. (Yes, I know blind-centric word processors aren't new.) This is where my spidey senses start niggling a little. A lot of being a competent blind computer user is knowing how to deal with software that sucks. Finding the weird workaround, knowing enough about how a screen reader works to poke at something another way, using deductive reasoning to figure out what button is what when the obvious route is broken. These aren't skills we *should* need, but they are skills that make one effective in school and professional life. Until fairly recently, scarcity and necessity more or less guaranteed we'd learn them. Nobody had the time or money to make a bespoke accessible version of every piece of software they encountered. Even when somebody wrote a script or add-on to make something better, we were generally still operating in the same software everyone else was using. So, what happens to a blind person 5-10 years away who's been handed purpose-built tools whenever something is annoying or inaccessible, then gets a corporate job and is dumped head-first into Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, Google Workspace, and whatever random harebrained internal software dominates in that decade? 1/2

Without language to describe your experiences, it gets really hard to organize around them. The denial of our language is a powerful weapon, and has constant impacts on us.

#meme #anarchism #anarchyMeme #ableism #ableist #accessibility #anarchy