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Blind
I have a friend in Indiana that's currently going blind (he's legally blind and has a degenerative condition, I honestly don't know the exact specifics of his diagnosis). He's currently worried about losing his job, financial security, etc. I get the feeling that he's really not planning ahead - everything I hear from him is regarding the impending loss of his house, who will care for his dogs, and how there's no help in his area. I've looked up resources in Indiana and found a lot and sent them to him, but part of my (admittedly uninformed) advice has been to move to an area that's more walkable (he still has his drivers license but shouldn't be driving as he has almost no peripheral vision) and an area with a lower LOC (he says rent is around 2-3k for an apartment, in my area it's closer to 1k for a small house), things like that. His job is remote, but he's worried about losing it as his sight degrades, since he has to see the screen at the moment, but I'm advising to look into screen reader assistive tech for that (which the company should provide). I guess my question is: how realistic is my advice versus his concerns? I feel like he should be looking for a new location RIGHT NOW while he isn't forced to make a decision, I feel like there are more resources than he realizes, and I feel like his area is pretty expensive compared to some of the lower COL locations in the country. If anyone has any experiences in this sort of situation I'd appreciate your take on what he should be planning for, or really any sort of advice to give him.
Anyone try several of the Lemmy IOS apps? Which ones work the best with Voiceover? I just tried memmy and it's generally usable but the downvote and upvote buttons aren't accessible and the edit boxes for creating new posts are not as usable as I'd like. I did submit some feedback on this but obviously it's a new app and the developers are going to be busy for a while.
So apparently http://rblind.com has been created as a lemmy instance by some refugees from r/blind, which is awesome. There is a lot of discussion already in the main sublemmy, so !main@rblind.com or, alternatively http://rblind.com/c/main might be interesting to anyone who reads this. I think it's very exciting to have a blindness focused instance, so we can have subcommunities within the context of blindness. I also want to mention that I originally created !blind@lemmy.world because I wanted to discuss some screen reader issues, and there was no other place at the time. If the r/blind mods are interested in having mod access to this community, just give me a heads up.
So by default the feed on the home page auto-updates, suddenly making new posts appear. This causes various issues with screen readers. Here's a post explaining how to turn it off with a workaround. https://lemmy.world/post/390268 So to tl;dr, what I had to do is: On the home page, (e.g. http://lemmy.world), select any of the sorting options (e.g. subscribed only) by tabbing into the radio select item and hitting space. This then changes the address bar to something like https://lemmy.world/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/Subscribed/sort/Active/page/1 Changing the 1 at the end to a 0 will bring up the same page, without auto updating. I also found that honestly the URL is a more convenient interface to the sorting options, at least for me. Hope anyone finds this useful.
So I just came over from reddit and I figure this would be a good place to accumulate some experiences with screen reader navigation on lemmy. I myself use orca on arch linux. The site seems usable so far. Posts are level 5 headings, and though I wish they would have used the paragraph tag for navigating posts with p, I can use o to jump to large objects, which will read out posts. The biggest problem I encountered so far was during community creation, where the language multi-select list did not indicate which languages were selected/deselected. Still trying to figure this out atm, as the edit community button also doesn't seem to be selectable with keyboard. This problem seems to repeat when making a post. Selecting a community when making a post is also a little tricky. I was able to do it by clicking (with numpad) on 'Community', which opens a combo box with a list of many communities. I then hat to hit 'tab', orca will say 'Combo box collapsed', and I could type in 'blind'. The list of selections then changed to a list with only 2 options, this one and one other. Selecting 'blind' with the arrow keys and hitting enter selected the 'blind' community successfully. I think this could be much improved. Anyways, I'll probably edit the post when more comes up. Would be glad to hear other's experiences. Both problems and workarounds.