I do not like that this needs to exist, but I'mma boost it until it's not. Do likewise, as you will.

Did you know that the De Gasperis family Ford is carving up the #Greenbelt for is the same family he sold the Foundry to? Share & help us pressure Ford to reveal what really happened when he tried to demolish the Foundry #OnPoli #TorCen #SaveTheFoundry #RespectLocalPlanning #Ontario #DougFord #Toronto

Fascinating and disturbing finding on how AI co-writing can influence opinion from Maurice Jakesh thesis research (h/t @natematias ). Jakesh had people write short essays using an AI tool like Google Autocomplete on whether social media was good or bad. When the tool pre-generated language supportive of social media (top bar), people were more likely to write essays with that opinion and vice versa (bottom bar).

Despite denying that #Bill124 worsened the health care crisis EVERY TIME New Democrats pointed out the obvious, Ford Govt internal documents show that suppressing health and public sector wages paved the way for our current crisis. #OnPoli #RepealBill124
📰: https://globalnews.ca/news/9340310/health-care-ontario-bill-124-ford-government-documents/ #Ontario #Toronto

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! 😘