🧵 Even before I formed @ucaccessnow, I persisted through campus channels trying to get them to acknowledge that cycle racks ALSO have to be accessible, not car parking spaces. After months of brick walls with UC and my union, I got a meeting with the head of UC Davis TAPS, who
proposed that instead of making all cycle racks accessible, I give them a list of my classes & they'd install accessible racks with "blue badges" at each bldg I had a class in.
I told them this was not a sensible solution. Not only would my classes likely be in different bldgs each quarter, making an inefficient use of funds & labor doing bespoke installations, but abled ppl (often NCAA athletes!) 2/? #UCAccessNow#Accessibility#Cycling#CycleParkingAudit
with upright bikes these racks were ostensibly made for, prefer the end spaces and take them first. They prefer the end spaces because these racks aren't even good for the bikes they prioritized: narrow upright bikes for typical-sized adults.
The inaccessibility of the cycle infrastructure at UC Davis was only one of many ableisms here & I went on to form UC Access Now, release the Demandifesto, and #UCAccessNow#Accessibility#Cycling#CycleParkingAudit
launch a form so coalition members & supporters throughout UC could pressure the Governor, the Board of Regents, and every UC chancellor to finally make the University of California accessible to the public that built it - including disabled ppl.
UC has stonewalled every step of the way. It has cherrypicked ideas from the Demandifesto and from our activism, implemented them without working with us
Worse, non-activist disability groups within UC are pulled in to give it the veneer of being UC just happens to be doing for the disabled community at UC and some folks within the disability community have been happy to take credit for UC Access Now's work and put UC's approval on their CV.
This is UC strategy. Ableist power does not want student-led activism to get credit or it will beget more.
Rationing out the space is both ableist and car-centrist. It says that disabled people's needs are "special" and must be rationed & policed by the university's Disabled Students Center & Disability Management Services and UC Davis TAPS...not that UC has multiple legal and moral obligations to make things accessible by default.
It also says that space must be maximized for drivers -
not only untold square yds of dedicated single story auto parking space, but UC Davis driving employees parking on sidewalks blocking egress to & from bldgs simply because the abled drivers of air-conditioned vehicles want to park them in the shade of trees or don't want to walk 15 feet further to legal safe parking.
This is the 3rd installation of more accessible (but still not the equitable solution) cycle racks at UC Davis that I know of.
IT IS DUE to work I & later UC Access Now did.
UC Davis TAPS has never notified me when these are installed nor credited my work as the impetus. They would not have installed these without a lot of hard work (including the damage to my health) from me.
I'm asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application....
I think a good approach could be to think about how you could reach users of different platforms.
A lot of Mastodon users follow hashtags, so including relevant hashtags (#accessibility and #blind seem like good starting points) might be a good idea. Tagging groups, such as @accessibility, might also help.
I think Kbin/Mbin might be better suited for this than Lemmy, as it integrates better with other federated networks. You can follow microbloggers and boost content, which in turn makes them likely to follow you back and creates a community beyond which Lemmy community you choose to post in. Your Mastodon followers will see your posts, but it won't matter to them which community you post it in.
It's hard for content to make the jump from Lemmy to Mastodon as Lemmy does not make itself discoverable, but as soon as content reaches Mastodon users nothing stops them from interacting with it (by boosting or replying).
Sadly Kbin.social lacks sufficiently active moderation these days, so you might be better off with an mbin instance. I also have no idea how accessible Mbin is to blind users.
Edit: I over-emphasized the point about reaching a broader audience. If you want to discuss a narrow topic but you don't want most ActivityPub users to see it because you don't value their input, I guess Lemmy is as good as it gets.
A lot of Mastodon users follow hashtags, so including relevant hashtags (#accessibility and #blind seem like good starting points) might be a good idea. Tagging groups, such as @accessibility, might also help.
As I've already said, for someone who is not on Mastodon, it's pretty much worthless to try and discuss Fediverse post accessibility as applied on something that isn't Mastodon with people who are on Mastodon. And Guppe is practically exclusively used by Mastodon users.
One example: Many Mastodon users have stuck in their heads that you can't post more than 500 characters in the Fediverse. For even more Mastodon users, "alt-text" and "image description" are 100% mutually synonymous and mean the exact same thing. Image descriptions, no matter what they contain, always go into the alt-text. It's like a law of physics, deviating from which is unimaginable.
If you talk about describing or explaining something in the post text body, whoosh, it flies over their heads. No matter how much sense that'd actually make.
Not to mention that you have to keep every post and every comment at 500 characters or below, otherwise a large number of Mastodon users will pretend you aren't even there or mute or block you outright. I know that from personal experience. And there are things that simply can't be discussed in glorified tweets.
Also, Mastodon seems to only know two kinds of pictures. One, screenshots of social media posts. The stuff that requires transcripts. Two, simple real-life photographs, especially cat pictures.
Edit: I over-emphasized the point about reaching a broader audience. If you want to discuss a narrow topic but you don’t want most ActivityPub users to see it because you don’t value their input, I guess Lemmy is as good as it gets.
Ideally, I'd discuss this topic with people from all over the Fediverse. And I want these people to discuss it with each other within the comments section. Mastodon users who really care a lot for accessibility, who want everyone's needs to be catered to, and who are shooting for WCAG level AA, just as well as users of Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey etc. etc. who have much higher character limits in their post and users of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) who do not have a character limit.
I don't just want a bunch of one-on-one discussions between myself and someone else. I want to discuss such matters with Mastodon users and non-Mastodon users, and I want the Mastodon users and the non-Mastodon users to read and reply to what the other side has written.
I want people on non-Mastodon projects to tell Mastodon users who only know Mastodon what things are like on other projects. I want Mastodon users to tell non-Mastodon users how important accessibility is and which aspects of accessibility is how important. And I want to learn from this discussion.
I want to read opinions and ideas from all over the Fediverse. And I want users from all over the Fediverse to read these opinions and ideas.
And in particular, I want to discuss with them edge-cases in accessibility that go far, far beyond Twitter/Mastodon screenshots and cat photographs.
I'm looking for benchmarks.
For @mucConf we want to provide accessibility information online.
Please send me links to events/conferences that did a good job communicating accessibility information!
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How much thought do you give to public drinking fountains? @sean_hollister has been pondering them more than most. For @verge's "Button of the Month" feature, he wrote about their history and future, construction, how a bubbler turns into a dribbler, and what the Americans With Disabilities Act says about them.
At least 3 things missing from UC's Global Accessibility Awareness Day event:
The idea that there's any accessibility issues beyond the type digital technology tools could potentially help with
and
Actual diversely disabled UC community leading the event.
Statement up front as to what accessible options are available for this event.
Keeping the emphasis on digital tools allows abled people to continue their hegemony by simply training to be "experts" on accessibility, keeping jobs & control in abled hands. It allows UC to keep refusing to hire human captioners, human notetakers, as well as keep NOT addressing making things as accessible as possible as the default at UC.
@WelshAdventurer asks about cycles that may help somebody with a mobility disability get exercise and get around:
Q6. My partner is disabled and can’t walk far due to problems with her foot and back. She is getting frustrated with not being able to exercise and get out of the house. She is looking at getting an electric bike. Does anyone have experience of them? Particularly of using them with a mobility disability? We are in the UK.
👐The Open Web Community track welcomes anyone & everyone passionate about leveraging #OpenSource technology to make web more innovative, accessible & equitable.
Nearly 34 years post-ADA, University of California and many other institutions still flout ADA. Yet UC Davis Health and others rush to adopt AI, showing how quickly they could have made themselves accessibility.
Just to show you how accurate and worthwhile this thing they're rushing to adopt is, FindHealthClinics (an AI tool not associated with UCDH) is listing UC Access Now as a health clinic. We were a loose coalition of anti-ableist students, staff, and faculty at University of California.
Over the past few years, mail-in voting has been at the center of controversy, largely due to skepticism fueled by Donald Trump. Now, in 2024, the GOP is attempting to rebuild trust in mail-in ballots among their base. But as Trump raises even more doubts, is it too little, too late? Head over to The Big Picture for a deep dive into this critical topic. https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/trump-mailin-vote-republican-party
@kevinrj@georgetakei Weirdly this is one of the very few areas where I agreed with Trump, but for different reasons. Voting by mail is a disaster for #blind and other #disabled citizens. Its long past time for an accessible online election infrastructure with reasonable security measures in place. #accessibility
It is sad to see Jakob Nielsen going from an advocate for accessibility (treat your disabled users as people) to a pessismist (nothing has changed, only AI can help make things better for users with a disability).
Man, do I disagree.
But I alm also worried. His stance really shifted 180 degrees. His latest articles don't sound like him. Either he is being impersonated or these are true signs of dementia.
@bookstodon@bookwyrm
If you read large print or dyslexic font paperback books do you prefer this to be indicated on the cover (say on a banner at the top) to help you identify the accommodation?
I compiled a quick poll based on different perspectives I've read.
➡️ Please consider sharing to help me reach more readers.
It seems like to be another compliance-focused approach rather than proactively trying to be an accessible, equitable university for all of us.
Despite UC claiming it did this "proactively", it actually did it in response not just to our activism and other grassroots activism, but likely because of rising pressure from Dept of Education Office of Civil Rights due to complaints.
"“The scope of the work for the SOCR will be focused on policies that pertain to protected categories, as defined by state and federal law,” said Rachel Zaentz, senior media relations officer from the UC Office of the President, in an email.
The SOCR will house three subunits: the existing Systemwide Title IX Office — which prohibits gender discrimination in any federally funded education program or activity — a new Systemwide Anti-Discrimination Office and a new Systemwide Disability Rights Office."
For discussing Fediverse accessibility, where would you recommend me to go? Or stay here?
I'm asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application....