Problem was that I usually only discovered the issue when I went to read the book lol

I never did that, my connection was too slow to want to take up someone’s DCC slot for like a day to get an entire movie. Remember all the frustrating idiots who would share .lit files, but forget to remove the DRM from them?

Ah, good to know. Back in my day, when we had to walk a hundred miles to school in the snow, up hill both ways, IRC was the only place to get ebooks. I’m guessing it’s just the old users clinging on now.

Man, I’m getting flashbacks to my days running omenserve on undernet. I had no idea people were still doing this! How does the content compare to places like Anna’s archive these days?

Good to know; thanks! I’ll keep an eye on it.

I was having issues with outgoing federation to Mastodon on 0.19.0. I just did the update five minutes ago, so we’ll see if that fixes it. If you’re seeing this comment I guess it’s working at the moment.

I run the RBlind.com Lemmy instance at Accuris Hosting. Decent Virtual Machines, easy IPV6 support, and everything works fine. Prices are a bit on the high end, but it’s worth it to me to use a provider located in my country, where I understand all of the associated laws and can pay in my own currency via my local bank. Also, I’d rather not give money to big tech if I can help it, and support local business instead. This isn’t sponsored or anything, I’m just a mostly contented customer.

Also, of course, the fact that the control panel is screen-reader accessible is super important to me, though I doubt anyone else cares. But unfortunately that’s not yet the case with most of the larger cloud providers like AWS. And if they do deploy an inaccessible update, the company is small enough that I can send an email and get an answer from a human who has actually read what I wrote, rather than a corporate AI.

It's just as long and incomprehensible as Google's and Microsoft's. So I have no idea.

That's what worries me. When companies get desperate for cash, they tend to do pretty terrible things.

So who are they sending our product browsing data to in order to provide this service? At least I know what Microsoft and Google are doing with my data (nothing good). But Pocket and cloudflare and there VPN provider and whatever other random companies Firefox partners with? Who knows! How do I opt out? Who knows! How secure are these companies? Who knows! At least using Edge or Chrome I only have to hand over my data to one evil corporation, instead of several. Plus I actually get things I want in return (for me: automatic image descriptions, reader mode, read aloud, and AI based page summaries). Nothing I get from the companies Firefox works with are things I even want.

Based on the links you gave, it seems that captions default to off when new servers are created.

Ah, good to know! I don’t use meeting platforms that aren’t accessible by default for everyone. Looks like the problem, at least in Jitsi, is that enable captions defaults to off. It would need to default to on before I could use it.

How many of those support captions?

That was me, and my bad. As a blind person myself, I’ve never tried to post an image. I knew including alt text was possible, but I didn’t realize the method was undocumented, and Lemmy doesn’t prompt for it. If I had, I would have offered help, not just snark.

I’m so happy to hear this! If you’re looking for a full-time IOS screen reader user to test, drop me a message. I’m happy to help out.

Honestly? Encourage people to describe images. Here, on Mastodon, wherever. Alt-text/image descriptions make a huge difference. Blind people don’t want to just engage with other blind people. If we can normalize alt-text the way it has been on Mastodon in more places, that alone will be a giant accessibility win.

Thanks for the offer! But we are doing fine for now, and we are not comfortable asking anyone for money until we have demonstrated that we can build our Lemmy into a stable and accessible home for our community. Speaking personally, I’m a self taught hobby sysadmin learning as I go. Right now the focus is on leveling up our mod team; not only do we need to be good moderators, we also need to build digital infrastructure that our community can trust.

There were issues filed by screen reader users at the Lemmy-UI github, and a lot of them have already been fixed with pull requests. However, the 0.7 releases don’t have grate accessibility. rblind.com, a community created by the moderators of /r/blind is in open alpha, and is running development code directly from the github, in order to get our community the most accessible Lemmy we can, as quickly as we can. We recognize this is terrible devops practice, and we intend to move onto stable releases when possible. In the meantime, we’re taking regular backups, and warning our community to expect frequent bugs and issues. We’ve chosen Lemmy for our community, largely because the documentation and support around deploying an instance was better. While we hope blind folks will be welcomed at all instances across the fediverse, no matter what software they’re running, it’s important to us to have a place where the former /r/blind community can keep together, and we can begin making custom changes to the themes to create the most accessible Lemmy possible. We will, of course, make all of these changes open, and contribute them to the main version of Lemmy. But running our own instance frees us from waiting for other instance owners to make changes for us, while still allowing us to post to any community on any instance.

The IAAP is currently the industry standard, with the CPACC being the best place to start.

So do I!