@nikclayton

Quite seriously, you genuinely seem to misunderstand my point.

The fact that you view my comments as those of others as a ‘complaint to file with the management’ is indicative of the misunderstanding.

The deficiencies in the new Mastodon UI that kicked off this discussion arises from the lack of a pre consultation within the Mastodon. Given the large presence of visually limited persons on this platform, and the commitment in the community to their inclusion, the introduction of new barriers with the new UI is a genuine failure in the development process.

The concern is that a new UI was put into place in the update that brings with it features that are of value to some users, such as notification bundling valued by journalists without ensuring that these new features were not creating new barriers.

Somehow, in the development process there was quite evidently insufficient polling or engagement with the disability community, and a broader scope of users who relied of the way the old UI is set up without necessarily seeing themselves as having significant vision impairments (e.g. people with astigmatism which is very common.)

Persons with visual limitations already, on a mostly voluntary basis, provide extensive contributions of time to assist developers making better UIs and reducing barriers that are imperceptible to them. You should assume that we’re already doing this in our work, school or whatever other environments whether or not they involve the digital/IT community.

Telling us to invest more of our resources to address deficits in the development process, that could and should have been averted with an engagement and inclusion plan as workflow mapping of the development processes from the start, by ‘sending a complaint to the management’ seems to miss that point entirely.

Telling users to provide feedback via a second platform with its own diverse barriers is doubling down on the implicit abelism (which is the point I was making about GitHub and Discord).

Since your profile indicates that you work in the field and are seeking to be principled, I have continued to engage. I’m not assuming that you’re not genuinely trying to be helpful.

At this point though, I would suggest that you spend some time following some disability advocates who are more articulate than I in articulating the impact of systemic abelism. @broadwaybabyto, @meganL & @Looping speak to movement and other barriers rather than focusing on the visual. They may nonetheless be better able to help you understand why you are I are talking past one another and what a principled commitment to inclusion might involve.

#Diasability #VisionLoss #Blind #LowVision #Mastodon #Accessibility #a11y #AccessibilitySolutions #Abelism #Validiste #Abelist #AccessibleUI

@moiety