[miki123211]

This same exact thing happened to the blind community, of which I'm a member of. Blind Twitter was pretty vibrant before Elon took over, but that changed almost completely around November/December of last year. The killer change for us was the death of third-party clients, on which blind people relied almost exclusively. The whole community is on Mastodon now, mostly concentrated around two instances, though there are plenty of people elsewhere.

[contingencies]

Glad to hear a new home was found. My child and I began to analyze random public braille the other day out of random interest and found it was surprisingly easy to pick up a few letters, apparently being both alphabetic and potentially conceived as some kind of semi-derived state from regular roman shapes which provides a handy memory reference for we sighted people. I'd be very interested to hear what the best braille interfaces are. How long does it take to learn to use it for input? How do totally blind people handle the presumed need to switch between typing (on a regular keyboard, I would assume) and "input" (fingers on a braille generating device) modes at once? I suppose the staccato nature of this type of interaction harks back heavily to the old days of Unix, limited baud terminals and early micros.

[themoonisachees]

Braille screens are prohibitively expensive. Most blind people on the internet either have enough sight to navigate a heavily vision-optimized interface (high-contrast, large text) or use a screen reader, or both.

As far as input goes, braille keyboards are more affordable, but many users can touch-type (and have their screen reader read back). Dictation is also a mature option at this point.

Blind people need 3rd-party apps because these apps can be more compatible with screen readers, or can be themed in an easier way allowing for blind-friendly presets. In general, official apps tend to be heavily obfuscated to prevent automated scraping and puppeting. Since blind users often need to basically puppet their devices by not using common interfaces, this puts them at odds with corporations who do not care about them and would ban them if allowed. The alternative is of course not to use big tech products but just because you have a disability shouldn't mean you are abandoning at least half the current web.

[contingencies]

Understood. What do you feel the tipping point would be on price and features for an open source braille display? In particular, what is the required number of rows / columns for English to make it very useful?

[throwawaymobule]

Is anyone suing them for ADA violations, or does the site work 'well enough' with accessiblity tools to avoid it?