A group of Reddit volunteers who transcribe media from around 100 subreddits are shutting down their community, partly due to the company’s controversial API changes…
A group of Reddit volunteers who transcribe media from around 100 subreddits are shutting down their community, partly due to the company’s controversial API changes…
The mods of r/blind spun up their own instance:
https://rblind.com/
At the very least they’re confident enough in being able to get it where they need it to be with time and from what they’ve said, the devs seem more than willing to accept their PRs. The great thing about Federation though is that even if Lemmy devs tell them too fuck off and refuse to work with them, they can still maintain their fork and stay in contact with the rest f the lemmy/kbin instances while retaining their accessibility improvements.
Reddit seemed to actively be going out of their way to make things difficult, so I have to imagine it’s a nice change of pace to have some control over their future community, even if it isn’t as good as Reddit was.
ETA: The biggest hurdles for both KBin and Lemmy right now seem to be moderation at all, let alone moderation via apps, which is one of their big concerns. Again though, at least Lemmy devs want to get there and aren’t just trying to IPO and make a quick buck.
I’m sorry, what?
Old Reddit is more accessible than new Reddit for instance, from what I’ve read.
On iOS the official app doesn’t even have up/down vote buttons labeled properly.
They’re whitelisting a few apps only, that they’ve identified as assisting disabled access, but those apps are lacking in moderation tools.
They’ve met with some of the r/blind team, but only to TELL them how things are going to be, rather than to get their actual input on the situation and are currently refusing to even define what an accessible app would include.
At some point, it stops being ignorance and starts becoming malicious. At the very least, u/spez just doesn’t care, at the worst he seems to almost actively want them gone, but doesn’t want to deal with the PR fallout
Ah, the “if we don’t have any vision impaired users anymore, we can save money on implementing accessibility; they won’t give us ad revenue anyway” gambit.
The only thing I can figure that makes any sense at all is maybe native web functionality that will help the blind will also allow for a alternative app to be built around it (ie a wrapper) and they don’t want to see that happen.
Ernest on KBin at the very least opened up a screen reader and played around to ensure it at least functioned for the blind (and this was before the first Reddit migration!)
Lemmy devs seem to have built to standards, so that helps a lot and at least allows for basic functionality to work, even if it’s not optimized at all.
And both KBin & Lemmy aren’t companies with thousands of employees! Just one guy & two devs respectively and they’re at least attempting to do what they can while simultaneously being overwhelmed with requests!