/r/blind community migrates to Lemmy

AdventuringAardvark@lemmy.one to Technology@beehaw.org – 392 points –

Image Text:

Since the news broke regarding the forthcoming changes to reddit's API and the ippact that will have on the third party apps and tools many of us rely upon the mods here at r/blind have been working on an accessible option for those who either cannot or will not be staying on reddit. As talk of alternatives like mastodon, lemmy, and the like have increased we decided that it would be best to reveal what we have been working on, hence this post. Several days ago we shared this with those of you on our Discord server and have been asking for feedback. This project is by no means finished or polished, and is currently operating on development backend code and a beta UI to allow for access to still unreleased features that our community needs such as up/down votes displaying state changes, and nested comments, read this as there are and will be bugs and outstanding accessibility problems. However, the advantage of this platform is we control the servers, the UI, and can fix accessibility concerns ourselves instead of relying on a for profit company or the generosity of app developers to do it for us, not that the latter is unappreciated. So please be understanding of the above and we hope those of you who decide to join and see what we have done so far for all of us, and please report problems as you find them. https://rblind.com/

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This post is inaccessible to anyone who is blind.

So here's the content of the original post on /r/blind:

Announcement !!Open Alpha!! RBlind - A community on Lemmy, brought to you by the moderators of the /r/blind subreddit.

Since the news broke regarding the forthcoming changes to reddit’s API and the ippact that will have on the third party apps and tools many of us rely upon the mods here at r/blind have been working on an accessible option for those who either cannot or will not be staying on reddit. As talk of alternatives like mastodon, lemmy, and the like have increased we decided that it would be best to reveal what we have been working on, hence this post. Several days ago we shared this with those of you on our Discord server and have been asking for feedback.

This project is by no means finished or polished, and is currently operating on development backend code and a beta UI to allow for access to still unreleased features that our community needs such as up/down votes displaying state changes, and nested comments, read this as there are and will be bugs and outstanding accestsibility problems. However, the advantage of this platform is we control the servers, the UI, and can fix accessibility concerns ourselves instead of relying on a for profit company or the generosity of app developers to do it for us, not that the latter is unappreciated.

So please be understanding of the above and we hope those of you who decide to join and see what we have done so far for all of us, and please report problems as you find them.

https://rblind.com/

The submitter on /r/blind also had the following to say:

There are no plans currently to close the sub, but several mods may have to leave reddit, leaving only a couple BVI mods, the website does not have a slash, and we do have another domain that will be being set as a landing page for the reddit, lemmy, and discord of ourblind.com (that's O U R).

There's something ironic about this being a screenshot of text that talks about accessibility.

Image text: Announcement

1!Open Alpha!! RBlind - A community on Lemmy, brought to you by the moderators of the /r/blind subreddit.com

Submitted 11 hours ago by user DHamlin Music (flair: Bilateral Optic Neuropathy)

Since the news broke regarding the forthcoming changes to reddit's API and the ippact that will have on the third party apps and tools many of us rely upon the mods here at r/blind have been working on an accessible option for those who either cannot or will not be staying on reddit. As talk of alternatives like mastodon, lemmy, and the like have increased we decided that it would be best to reveal what we have been working on, hence this post. Several days ago we shared this with those of you on our Discord server and have been asking for feedback.

This project is by no means finished or polished, and is currently operating on development backend code and a beta UI to allow for access to still unreleased features that our community needs such as up/down votes displaying state changes, and nested comments, read this as there are and will be bugs and outstanding accessibility problems. However, the advantage of this platform is we control the servers, the UI, and can fix accessibility concerns ourselves instead of relying on a for profit company or the generosity of app developers to do it for us, not that the latter is unappreciated.

So please be understanding of the above and we hope those of you who decide to join and see what we have done so far for all of us, and please report problems as you find them.

https://rblind.com/

Reddit's API concessions were clearly not enough for the Blind community.

Spez didn't care, it was just a small negotiation so he doesn't come across as "fuck disabled people". It didn't work though, he has been a PR disaster.

How is lemmy in terms of accessibility? I hope it goes well for them.

It's not great. The people running rblind.com have forked Lemmy and hope to remerge upstream at some point in the future. Their own fork has a number of outstanding issues: https://rblind.com/post/569070

Thank you. This is what I was thinking of. Lemmy/kbin is great but idk how mature they are in terms of accessibility. I wish them luck.

In general, Lemmy isn't as developed as Reddit. People are hoping that tools developed for Reddit can be easily reconfigured for Lemmy, but that isn't guaranteed.

With that being said... Lemmy is still a huge win for the /r/blind folks. Being able to fork the project puts the power to be better into their own hands. It's also another glowing endorsement to the power of federation that blind community members will be able to browse any Lemmy/Kbin community while still enjoying the benefits of their fork's accessibility enhancements.

The current state of the fork is already a better screenreader experience than browsing either version of the Reddit website. The fork has been running for 8 days compared to /r/blind being founded 15 years ago. I repeat my previous statement: their fork is already a better in-browser experience. What more needs to be said?

On that note, the developer of the iOS lemmy app mlem has said that he's focusing on blind accessibility every step of the process during development and will be hiring accesibility consultants to make sure he gets it right.

I have much more confidence in Mlem developers than Jerboa developers right now. And I have much more confidence in Jerboa developers than Reddit management right now.

Lemmy advantage is that it's both open source and federated. Someone can make a version with accessibility feature (which will likely be integrated into main version) and deploy an instance for blind users. Blind users will then have access to the whole fediverse.

At least Mlem, the app for iOS is explicitly compatible to all accessibility functions in iOS. They wrote in their latest changelog that they have someone auditing their app to be compatible with this stuff.

It wouldn't have made any difference long term anyway. They would've made a teeny tiny change to the official app, proclaimed it as proof they were working hard on it, then cut off API access for the accessible 3rd party apps. Kudos to r/blind for knowing this and taking proactive action.

They are way passed being able to do anything.

Reddit staff have no idea how their platform works or how their users actually interact with the site. It's completely embarrassing and unprofessional to the point of straight up incompetence.

How scummy of a company do you need to be to purposely make it so blind people can no longer easily use your service

They tried to walk it back by only cutting deals with app developers that blind people rely on, like RedReader with its screen reading functionality. But that just highlights how selective reddit is being at working with third party developers. So fuck spez and reddit. I hope the blind community gets everything they meed from their Lemmy instances.

Plus, they made it so only non-commercial accessibility apps could use the API for free. So basically, reddit is saying: you can do our job for us and fix the shit we should have fixed on our end over 8 years ago, but you can't get paid for it.

Most blind iOS redditors were using Apollo I believe.

It's pretty crazy that "Reddit refused to define the term “accessibility-focused app”. How are they going to determine which apps have free API access without this definition!?

They have a definition, they just won't tell the users because it's not a realistic definition and they plan to pull the rug out later on.

If third-party apps were only 3% of total traffic and reddit was willing to destroy its image and massively increase the viability of its only competitor just before IPO over it, I'm sure they'll have no problem getting rid of whatever percentage of blind people who can't see the ads reddit wants to serve anyway.

They have the same problem with moderator-focused tools. Lots of third party tools are useful for moderation, but aren't necessarily composed only of moderator-specific functions. Analysis of what public activity a specific user has engaged in, like where they're active and what kinds of comments they tend to make, are helpful for moderators to decide how to handle a report that a particular user is a serial harasser, a troll, a spammer, or a bot.

So which tools get an exemption from the API fees/rate limits, if they're useful for both moderation and just plain old people watching?

How are they going to determine which apps have free API access without this definition!?

If there's one thing that I've learned from this trainwreck, it's that they're not going to define it publicly. If the internal definition is fluid, it can serve as a moving target to be whatever is most beneficial to them at the time.

It's so impressive to see how the whole community is coming together to basically rebuild Reddit, but open source, and with all the feature everyone needed.

I'll stay here forever if we keep it up.

This shitty website calls itself frontpage of the Internet while it can't even do accessibility right

This is exactly the beauty of the open source software movement! I’m glad they made the move and took the changes on as a community.

Can't believe the sycophants at Reddit thinking the issue with assistive apps is a done deal. Can't believe they fell or fit hook, line and sinker.

Finally a group of people that can appreciate the beautiful UI Lemmy has to offer!

https://browse.feddit.de/ This is a link to the lemmy community browser. It looks like there are 7 communities focused on the blind. I am still learning how to navigate through the fediverse but maybe this will help you find or link to what you are looking for. I used the link and just searched "blind" hopefully the link will show that or you can use it as a search tool to find what you want.

It takes a bit to load. Not sure if it is the search tool or just my Internet being throttled.

This might just be me being a noob, but how to I subscribe to this community? I tried typing !main@rblind.com into the communities tab (I'm using Jerboa) and nothing came up.

I haven't been able to get it to work for jerboa for new instances I've had to go to the actual site and search it

It's kinda tricksy. You need to visit the comm from within your own instance. The easiest way is to click Communities, then All, then search for it - however you have to know what you're looking for, and you can't filter or sort by instance.

In this case, searching would be hard, as the comm is called "main". There are probably lots of other mains in different instances.

For you, try beehaw.org/c/main@rblind.com. However, it could be that it's too new for your instance to know about it, in which case I'm not sure but you may just have to wait until beehaw federates with it.

I think there's also a generic way to format links such that anyone can click them from their own instance and get their instance's version, however I haven't learned that yet. Something like !main@rblind.com. Also, things can work different on apps vs the website - for example Jerboa only lets you browse comms you're subbed to.

Often, a quick way to link communities is by formatting a hyperlink like this [Visible-text-to-click](/c/community@instance.tld)

For a this example, formatting the text like [this link](/c/main@rblind.com) would create this link that most* people can click on that will bring them to that community.

*Kbin users will need to replace the /c/ with/m/

As a note for Jerboa users: the above link may instantly crash the app. At least, it does for me.

Yep, that's what I've found. I'm thinking of scrapping the app in favour of the website tbh, at least for now.

Ya, I've been told that it's a known bug that they're working on. I still like it as a reader, but to do any sort of adjustment to your account, such as finding communities and adding them, or interacting with replies to your posts, the website is more useful right now.

Hopefully it can catch up soon.

It would be nice if you could just type /c/community@instance. Or /m/ as required.

When you're writing a message on the web version, typing ! and the name of the community will bring up a suggestion box.

Typing !main and selecting the rblind.com instance autocompletes to [!main@rblind.com](https://rblind.com/c/main) but that links directly to the instance itself. It needs a bit of formatting though to get it to be instance-agnostic.

There's a big discussion on Github on how to handle links, because as mentioned, the /c/ won't work for kbin users.

I personally think it should link the instance directly, as it already does, and have a second link in the formatting we mentioned for the local instance link.

I think there’s also a generic way to format links such that anyone can click them from their own instance

Like this: /c/main@rblind.com, won't work when reading the comment on kbin, though. For people too lazy to click on "view source" (or unaware of it): [<link text>](/c/<community>@<instance>)

Making that stuff easier and more intuitive is on the dev's list.

Lol that just crashes my Jerboa.

What type of tools does the blind community use? I can code, I'd love to make a tool to help out.

If you're really serious I would first recommend you familiarize yourself with the needs of blind users generally. Like try using the internet with your eyes closed and a screen reader to understand how a blind person would interact with a website. Maybe you can ask around or Google some tips for getting started with that.

I had a former coworker who was a UX designer and he taught himself to use a screen reader for this reason since he was required to ensure anything he designed was accessible.

What I don't get is why people must 'migrate' to the Fediverse. All these companies managing multi-socials on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, sometimes even Instagram, but to use Mastodon and Lemmy suddenly seems to require them dropping a commercial one...

Don't get me wrong, people dropping the commercial ones are great for stopping monopolistic control, and I totally support the action, but I wish companies still remaining on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etcetera could just add Mastodon and/or Lemmy to the collection, yet it rarely seems to happen...

Can't believe the sycophants at Reddit thinking the issue with assistive apps is a done deal. Can't believe they fell or fit hook, line and sinker.