dankeck

“Where are you from?” Hanna asks between bites.

“Columbus, Ohio,” the family guest says.

Hanna built the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium into one of the nation's best. He then captivated national audiences on David Letterman’s late-night talk show, "Good Morning America" and a number of his own Emmy-winning animal series that still run in syndication. He traveled the globe as a leading animal conservationist promoting Columbus. It was his home for decades. It’s even where he once said he wanted his ashes spread whenever he passes away.

But in this moment, none of that history feels familiar.

Hanna pauses, then asks a question. “Have I ever been to Columbus, Ohio?”

School was pretty terrible. School is the hub of our communities, and I was segregated within school. So I was therefore segregated from my community. Within school for years, people talked about me like I couldn’t understand them. And even like I didn’t exist. I was easily controlled and manipulated by adults, restrained and secluded and made to complete repetitive tasks with the belief that I didn’t understand them or my surroundings. I was in a perpetual state of discomfort and dysregulation within my own body. There was so much I wanted to say, so much I wanted to add and so much I wanted to change that was all built up in my head.

(Note: Autism Awareness Month was back in April, but this is still a good article.)

This article is two years old but still relevant to social media in 2023.

One of the biggest barriers is the assumption that blind people just won’t be interested in visual media. “Just because they’re visual doesn’t mean that they’re immediately not attractive to people who are blind or low vision,” says McCann. “I think that’s one big misconception: ‘Oh, well, they don’t care about pictures.’ But we do.” When culture is molded on social networks, it sucks to lose out on a shared social language because you can’t see the images everyone is talking about.

Christy Smith Berman, a low vision editor at Can I Play That, responded to a TT Games tweet that announced the delay of Star Wars Lego with text on an image. When she replied with a request for alt text, Smith Berman was met with responses from people expressing disbelief that blind people would even be on Twitter to begin with, let alone care about video games.

Via @[email protected]:

…consider tools like GitHub Copilot, which claims to be “your AI pair programmer”. These work by leaning on the code of thousands and thousands of projects to build its code auto-complete features.

When you copy broken patterns you get broken patterns. And I assure you, GitHub, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, stacks of libraries and frameworks, piles of projects, and so on, are rife with accessibility barriers.

Are you unfamiliar with how blind people use computers? Are you new to the concept of screen reader software?

NVDA is free, open-source software for Microsoft Windows used by many blind users to interact with their PC through non-visual senses. While NVDA's foundation, NV Access, subsists on donations, the software has become the second most popular screen reader in the world.

This half-hour documentary by ABC News serves as a great introduction to NVDA and the stories of its creators. This show won't tell you how to use NVDA or how it works, but instead will tell you why it exists and why it needs to exist.

(Also, follow NV Access on Mastodon!)

Via @[email protected]

Lesser was born in Poland in 1928. Most of his family were killed by Nazis. He moved to the United States, became a realtor, and has spent much of his life trying to "prevent the world from developing amnesia."

I named my foundation "Zachor" which is the Hebrew word for "remember" because every generation must re-learn the consequences of hatred and bigotry.