🦕 Kimbo 🍍🍕💛 @bykimbo@social.cleverlibre.org

So, I'd like to thank all the sighted people here on mastidon who take the time to describe pictures to us blindies. Most people on other social media sites wouldn't do that. I appreciate it so much #ThankYouForHavingPatience #ThisIsSoAwesome

Well, I realized one of my retirement ambitions this morning as I listened to the traffic report on the radio, looked out at all the snow, and went back to bed.

#introduction I came on here in order to be a new and better person to the one I was on Twitter, more open and respectful, less preening and rude. Lol, no, I came on mastodon bc I was doing a feature for the Guardian on mastodon, but in the course of it I realised I could stand to be less preening and rude. Hi everyone. I'm nice now.

OK #Mastodon. I've seen several toots on #accessibility for #screenreader users, however, I've not seen one from a screenreader user (as far as I know). I've used ZoomText, Outspoken, JAWS (AKA JFW), Supernova, NVDA (Windows), and VoiceOver (both on Macs and iPhone). I don't have experience with Windows Narrator or TalkBack. I would like to rectify and clarify a few small things.
First off, any awareness of accessibility issues, and endeavours to make things more accessible is great. Keep going!
But…
Blind/low-vision people have been using the internet as long as everyone else. We had to become used to the way people share things, and find workarounds or tell developers what we needed; this latter one has been the main drive to get us here and now. Over the past decade, screen readers have improved dramatically, including more tools, languages, and customisability. However, the basics were already firmly in place around 2000. Sadly, screen readers cost a lot of money at that time. Now, many are free; truly the biggest triumph for accessibility IMHO.
So, what you can do to help screen readers help their users is three simple things.
1. Write well: use punctuation, and avoid things like random capitalisation or * halfway through words.
2. Image description: screen readers with image recognition built-in will only provide a very short description, like: a plant, a painting, a person wearing a hat, etc. It can also deal with text included in the image, as long as the text isn't too creatively presented. So, by all means, go absolutely nuts with detail.
3. Hashtags: this is the most commonly boosted topic I've seen here, so #ThisIsWhatAnAccessibleHashtagLooksLike. The capitalisation ensures it's read correctly, and for some long hashtags without caps, I've known screen readers to give up and just start spelling the whole damn thing out, which is slow and painful.
That's really all. Thanks for reading! 😘

if you hack a mastodon server does that mean you’re rootin’ tootin’?

A fun game to play is to put on your dressing gown and slippers, run out into the street, grab passers-by and ask them in befuddlement "WHAT YEAR IS THIS?!".

Today's picture from my Flickr albums is a bowl of my home made Hungarian style chilled sour cherry soup. I have a Morello cherry tree in my garden that produces a lot of fruit most years. I preserve a lot of the cherries, and make jam, but usually have some left over. This soup is one of the best things I've found to make with them. It's sweet-sour, silky smooth, and really gets the taste buds going.
#photography #CherrySoup #food #cherry #Hungary
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jim_easterbrook/48157992297/

A picture of my Rabbit's nose.

A Snoot TOOT!

John Fetterman looks like me whenever a parent says:
"Here's the thing about vaccines"

This was mad! Here's what my street in #Marrickville #Sydney looks like.

Ta Prohm, one of the Temple’s at Angkor in Cambodia. Photo by David Bleeker.

Agonizing over the #Writing of a story (ack—what else is new?) and thinking perhaps for the millionth time about my favorite visual/literary depiction of the task.

Pretty sure New Yorker cartoonist Ethan Kanin lives inside my head.