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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/
How is lemmy in terms of accessibility? I hope it goes well for them.
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’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.
I think I saw that someone’s making a translation later of sorts so the Lemmy API is more like the reddit one, I suppose to help with easing migration.
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.