AlsoPaisleyCat 🇨🇦@moiety I understand why the community is relying on GitHub but there needs to be another way for the broader Mastodon community to engage in dialogue on features and the UI.
Nik@AlsoPaisleyCat @moiety There is. Donate, and join the Discord server.
I understand you mean to be helpful, but I’m feeling that you’re not getting the question of barriers at a fundamental level.
Discord is another proprietary service. We shouldn’t have to go one to be able to register feedback on updates to a FOSS one.
And given that this is an issue about accessibility of a FOSS federated platform to persons with visual limitations or differences, sending people to another platform with its own accessibility challenges is doubling down on barriers.
Why should I or any other fediverse user have to learn how to surmount or cope with GitHub or Discord’s accessibility challenges in order to give basic feedback on issues with the UI in Mastodon’s updates?
And how can we have an unbiased understanding of user experience if we oblige those with the most challenges with user interfaces to invest the ‘spoons’ or financial resources to communicate issues via another platform?
Mastodon has tools to survey its own users and they are likely already donating to support the platform via their instances as means permit.
UI is very much fundamental issue for the very large Blind/Low Vision community on Mastodon and also many who are neurodiverse. Choosing another platform to engage with us on, that presents its own barriers, simply Isn’t authentic or unbiased engagement.
‘Nothing about us without us’ is the principal and it doesn’t seem to have been as effectively considered as it could have been.
@AlsoPaisleyCat @moiety "Why should I or any other fediverse user have to learn how to surmount or cope with GitHub or Discord’s accessibility challenges in order to give basic feedback on issues with the UI in Mastodon’s updates?"
Because the people you want to provide the feedback to have decided those are the venues to provide that feedback.
You may disagree with their decision, but providing feedback elsewhere is unlikely to be effective.
@AlsoPaisleyCat @moiety And because of the decentralised nature of the Fediverse, you also have the opportunity to use a server that runs non-Mastodon software, or where the server admins have customised the UI.
You also have the choice of different web UIs as well (eg, Phanpy) that you may find work better for your needs.
I get it, and in fact my own instance had the option of a UI that’s less bad for me.
But we’re talking principles on a FOSS platform with a very large community that cares about UI for accessibility reasons.
It’s not just about me personally or what barriers I might be privileged to have the resources to be able to overcome.
If the developer community really wants input, privileging those who have the means - whatever those might be - to go beyond the platform is inherently systematically biased against fair representation and inclusion of those who most need adaptive and accessible interfaces.
Agreeing to a platform for feedback that inherently excludes members without offering a workaround within Mastodon is the fundamental problem.
#a11y #Accessibility #Disability #Blind #LowVision #Neurodivergent
@AlsoPaisleyCat @moiety How is using GitHub excluding people from participating on the grounds of accessibility?
The thread I was replying to didn't discuss accessibility, the only concern appeared to be having to have a GH account to create/comment on an issue.
Every platform has its own accessibility challenges, including GitHub.
Compliance doesn’t mean that there isn’t an investment of time and effort to learn how the adaptations and flexibilities of any platform work best for a person’s needs.
I have certainly used it elsewhere, in other aspects of my life. And I even have previously done the work to populate GitHub to document fails in accessibility on a new UI.
Does that mean that I want to make the investment to get a new GitHub profile set up for my needs just to report how Mastodon isn’t meeting my needs? Not really. And my barrier isn’t as high as for someone for whom GitHub or Discord are unknowns.
So, that’s a friction that means that persons with disabilities will self select out of engaging, it will mean that there will be more self selection bias in feedback.
And all the other critiques stand - one shouldn’t have to leave a platform to provide UI feedback.
@AlsoPaisleyCat @moiety so contact them using any of the Mastodon accounts or email addresses at https://joinmastodon.org/about.
There's only one of you, but they're receiving orders of magnitude more feedback than you would be sending.
So don't be surprised if they ask you to assume some of the burden - to make it easier for them to manage that feedback - by redirecting you to their preferred services for managing support and feedback requests.
@nikclayton the thing is that there’s not just one of me, I am seeing many comments in my feed about visual issues with the new UI.
The thread has bifurcated but that’s where it all started.
@AlsoPaisleyCat @moiety Huh?
You bifurcated the thread by complaining about having to use GitHub to send feedback.
I've listed three other mechanisms you can use (Discord, Mastodon, email), and you're still complaining? What are you actually hoping to achieve?
Is your underlying complaint that FOSS software should not use commercial services like GitHub?
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
@AlsoPaisleyCat We are talking past one another because I am solely responding to your statement:
"I understand why the community is relying on GitHub but there needs to be another way for the broader Mastodon community to engage in dialogue on features and the UI."
There are multiple other ways, including on Mastodon. I'm not the development team, if you want to effect change your other points should be addressed to them, through whichever of those other ways is most comfortable for you.