MostlyBlindGamer

How are we doing these days? Any cool success stories? Not so great moments? Lessons learned?

Feel free to share and discuss.

As part of OurBlind's continued efforts to provide accessible online spaces for the blind and visually impaired community, we've developed custom themes for Lemmy, to use on our Lemmy instance on Rblind, and to make available for others, in keeping with the themes' license terms and the spirit of free and open source software.

If you're reading this on www.rblind.com and are not signed in, you're using RBlind-Dark. We hope you're enjoying it! If you log in, you can switch to RBlind-Light. Once logged in, go to your username, then Settings and, use the Themes dropdown to make your selection: we suggest RBlind-Dark or RBlind-Light at the end of the list.

Why these themes matter to us

We started this Lemmy instance back in 2023, prompted by the Reddit API protests. Reddit Inc., the company that controls the website our community r/Blind is on, had announced policy changes that made the apps most of us used to participate in the Reddit community impossible to maintain. During this time it became clear to us and many other online communities that a corporate-owned platform would always be subject to pressures that are contrary to our needs. We launched this site as our blind-friendly home base in the fediverse, a decentralized and often self-hosted social media platform.

The goal of having our own home server was always to be able to make our own decisions about the software we run on it. One of those decisions is that the visual styling should always be comfortable for low-vision users and other disabled people, as part of our core audience. That meant designing and providing themes that, within our technical limitations, conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

How we designed our Lemmy themes

OurBlind admins contracted Travis, a talented graphic designer from within the community, for this project. Check out his website here. Together we went over specific requirenments within WCAG and the site's usage, colors, layout, preliminary testing, and communication, to develop both the themes themselves and the framework for future work and sharing.

How these themes meet our goals

In short, the new themes ensure high contrast, colorblind friendly colors, readable fonts, and appropriately-sized and readable buttons and links.

Following are examples of the home feed using the new themes.

RBlind-Dark example

RBlind-Light example

Time for testing and feedback

These have been audited by OurBlind admins, but that's only part of the validation process. If you're using this site and have low vision, colorblindness, a cognitive or a motor disability, consider providing feedback. Do they work well given your needs and use case? Do you like them? Does something not work quite right? Comment below or fill out the anonymous survey. Don't hesitate to comment if you're not a member of this instance or not disabled - we want these to be helpful to as many people as possible. Thank you!

We'll be collecting feedback and open to revisions until February 1st 2025. Even after that, we'll still be interested in your experience, but will take longer to respond and adjust.

How to use these themes on your own instance

As mentioned, this project is all about the value of free and open source software in ensuring control and autonomy. We're making this our home in the fediverse and we want to be good neighbors. We already offer the broader community a place for discussions around blindness, but we also want to contribute back.

These themes are licensed under GNU AFFERO General Public License and available at the Codeberg repo to be used or modified. Updates to the themes that come as a result of user feedback will be available there. Definitely give Travis a star and consider hiring for your own design needs, he's been a delight to work with.

The repo is also mirrored on GitHub for accessibility reasons.

Thanks, from RBlind

This community's journey has been long and thrilling, across three platforms and over a decade. Everybody on the admin and moderation team has deeply benefitted from and grown with the community. These themes are a humble gift to our members and our neighbors on the fediverse. May they make all our lives that bit more comfortable.

I got a new Mac with an M3 SoC and ran fastfetch, add one does on a new computer. It listed swap as being disabled.

Activity Monitor shows 0 bytes in swap. top and htop show 0 of 0.

I got on a call with Apple Support and the best I could get out of them was that “new Macs don’t use swap,” which is absolutely not true. People are still reporting heavy swap usage on M3 Macs.

So… any ideas? It’s a very hard problem to research, since half the internet wants to disable swap to save their SSDs.

For what it’s worth, this machine has 16GB of RAM and I haven’t pushed it past that, but I’d expect it to behave quite catastrophically if I did.

I’m looking for any possible insights, really.

Trigger warning: animal cruelty adjacent

A friend of mine was gifted an 18g bag of Kopi luwak and asked me to brew it for them.

I would never buy it myself. The bag makes claims of being “processed naturally in the wild,” which sounds just like the thing where caged chickens that briefly touch dirt are basically well treated.

I will be educating my friend about this, but the bag was gifted to them and they take that very seriously. The way I see it is this is going to be brewed either way and I have some change of showing it’s just coffee and this should be a one-time thing that only happened because it was a gift.

With all that said… I’m thinking AeroPress no-dial recipe. I could conceivably make two 9g brews to have a second chance or I could take my chances on the 18g.

What should I expect in terms of roast level? Would this generally be a hard coffee to brew? Is the AeroPress no-dial recipe a safe bet or is there a new option out there to get it right on the first and only try?

For gear, I have a Eureka Mignom and a Hario Skerton Plus. I’m not above asking my friend to chip in on a better hand grinder if that’s what it takes. I have an expresso machine, which was my friend’s original request for a method, but that’s just out of the question, obviously.

There you go. I didn’t expect to find myself in this position, but I am, and I’ll like to make the best of it.

Thanks for reading.

Did you notice we were gone for a few days? Twice?

Yeah, sorry about that.

We’re working on understating the issues with the provider, and on mitigations and the path forward.

If we’re down again and users need to do something, we’ll have an update on https://ourblind.com/.

We’ll also post on here, but the issue with that is obvious.

I’ve been using full screen magnification on computers since Windows 7 came out. I could have been doing it earlier on macOS, but there you go.

The problem

Since then, I’ve had my settings locked in: using the mouse or trackpad to pan, not allowing the zoom window to follow keyboard focus, because the snapping makes me dizzy.

I was rewarded for my efforts with a generally comfortable desktop computer experience, and chronic wrist pain that stopped me from really learning the guitar or playing serious FPS games. Mind you, the closest I’ve gotten to a diagnosis for this is “oh, that does make sense, maybe that’s why.”

I’ve been trying to get used to using keyboard focus following, but it just hasn’t worked for me. Until today, that is.

The solution?

Did you know on macOS you can adjust the speed at which the zoomed in screen follows focus? And that you can have it only move when the cursor reaches the side of the screen? I sure didn’t!

I already have a collection of ergonomic mechanical keyboards, but I already have to complement them with a trackpad. I’ve considered throwing even more money at this problem and getting a trackball. I guess I don’t have to?

Next steps

I’m going to try to get used to this on my personal computer. I may need to create new keyboard macros or adjust settings further. I’ll have to get used to a whole new workflow that’s very different from what I’ve been using for 15 years, but the potential advantages are huge.

I need to be as quick navigating the computer this way as I am with the trackpad, but I always use a lot of typing for actions - Spotlight search, Raycaat, the command palettes on VS Code and Rider - so I think it’s doable.

Takeaway

I, at least, accept that there are takeoffs when accommodating for and dealing with my disability. In this case I’ve practically been accepting developing a new disability in exchange for being able to work with one I already have. Gotta keep that shareholder value ticking up.

You may or may not be doing the same, but chances are you’ve figured out what works for you and gotten into a local maximum of efficiency, like I did. Alternatives similar to this are worse, so I that this was as good as it got. I had to experiment with what I knew wouldn’t work for me to have the opportunity to find something that works even better. Maybe that’ll be an absolute maximum in efficiency for me or maybe I’ll learn something better later on.

The bottom line is experimenting and trying different approaches is always a good idea. Worst case scenario, you confirm you’re doing the best thing for you.

Do you have any experiences like this? Finding out your perfect setup wasn’t so perfect after all?

Communities like this (rblind.com) and r/blind are focused on serving the blind and visually impaired community, including friends and family. They’re also valuable as an opportunity for people outside the community to learn about the blind experience.

That brings us to the question: sighted friends, what have you learned that you’d like to share?

With global warming (and other factors) affecting coffee production and prices, I’ve noticed a couple of interesting patterns in marketing strategies for household and white label brands.

Everything is extra intense, high intensity, intensity 11 (probably comes with a free Spinal Tap record)… Robusta roasted past 5th crack, no doubt.

I also spotted a bag of highly exclusive “100% Robusta.” At this point I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and for them to market “0% cyanide” coffee.

How’s everybody else’s grocery shopping experience these days? Is this a big trend in your area?

I switched to macOS pretty for all my day-to-day, development and work uses, but still have a Ryzem+RTX (I do use Ray tracing features) desktop that I only ever use for gaming anymore.

I play games from Steam, GoG, Epic, and occasionally Xbox Game Pass.

The big problem here is I’m visually impaired and need a desktop environment that will let me consistently use a lime green mouse cursor and zoom in full screen via keyboard and scroll shortcuts.

At the risk of 1) nobody having actual experience and 2) the current Linux distro/DE ecosystem being hopelessly broken, what should I try?

I also only have some 2 hours a week for videogames. I can’t afford the time to tinker, after the transition and setup period.

I’m perfectly happy with “you’re outta luck, buddy, just suffer through Windows,” but I figure it can’t hurt to ask…

Life is hard - for everybody, but in many ways more so for blind and visually impaired folks. It’s also awesome though, so let’s talk about that.

What did you recently succeed in and want to talk about? Work, relationships, travel… something else?

I have a huge backlog of free giveaway games, because I have less time for playing than I think I do and because I never know if I'll be able to play a game or if it'll be too visually challenging - my username is both literal and relevant.

I finally got around to trying Prey (2017) and, so far, I'm really enjoying it. The visual style is manageable, text is usually large and clear enough, and the "Story" difficulty setting means I can enjoy the game in a way that's balanced between relaxed and challenging. I'm still always on edge, but I'm not as pushed for my poor aim and lack of situational awareness.

Accessibility aside, I love the BioShock (I'd say System Shock, but I wasn't playing video games then) vibes. The gameplay, the concept and setting, the aesthetics... it's all there and I'm here for it. I for one am excited to poke myself with dystopian technology McMuffins in a city consumed by its own hubris.

How are folks here liking the game? Am I late to this particular party? Do any Something Shock players have an opinion to share?