Start simple, prove out the concept, and only after you know you’re on to something should you start tackling the problem in a way that makes sense.

Make tools serve your goals rather than cater your goals to a tool’s limitations.

#AccessibilityTip : Content Warnings

There are some posts here on Mastodon that get hidden behind a Content Warning “click on to display” screen. However… with a screen reader or braille terminal, those just appear as a blank message, offering no indication that there is anything to see.

While it would be wonderful if this gets fixed to at least tell people what the content warning is, or that it’s displayed, there is a setting that simply won’t hide those messages so you don’t need to blind click to see if you’re missing something.

There is a setting available in the WebUI under Settings -> Appearance -> Sensitive Content that will allow “Always expand posts marked with content warnings.”

You can still keep Media (images and video) blurred if you’re worried about not seeing NSFW content.

Seems like Intro posts are important around here.

So… hi, my name is Kalani.
I am a disabled software developer. My greatest hits are: I helped design local number portability, active noise cancellation, and some of the biofeedback and gesture recognizers for Kinect. Right now, I help make the O.MG Cable: a Wi-Fi Software-Defined USB HID implant built inside a USB Cable.

Most of my good ideas come from translating how I try to live in the world into how a computer could do it… Lots of people think that the stuff they do without thinking is part of being human, and “you must be at least this capable to ride”, and computers lack the fundamental understanding to differentiate between signal and noise.

It’s all learned behaviors, and something that requires task analysis to understand and translate into the steps to make it happen.

Getting rid of the background noise from sound recordings or focusing on just the guitar SOUNDS hard to do, except you do it every day by selective listening. By knowing what a guitar sounds like, you can listen for the resonance and with it pick out the other things like it. The “trick” for why we can do it now with computers is: the Continuous FFT to improve sampling resolution, a few rules around frequency progression analysis, inclusive filtering, and a reverse FFT.

Problems that seem impossible often have a shortcut, but relies on experience and perspective. Be willing to learn, to try, and to fail.

Twitter made it very clear today that I am not welcome on their platform, as they fired the entire Accessibility team.

Twitter has been a pretty great platform for low vision users, being well above most. However making something work for a screen reader or braille terminal is hard, and isn’t just a question of following a guide or copy/pasting an example. After all, that’s how you wind up with Password Managers that leak “hidden” data via Braille or Speech.

At some point you need to actually try those tools. And to be clear, they take a lot of time to learn!

If you don’t respect me as a person to say I am allowed to use the platform, I am fine learning something else instead. After all, I am used to struggling with barely usable shit simply to survive in a world that is rooting for me to fail.