We will see what happens. Reddit is hard to let go especially for people in othe r/Blind community that fills a very real need. Plus they have been making a lot of cosmetic changes that may help appease some people and bring them back into the fold. Between that very real need we were filling and those cosmetic changes some of us are very likely to be drawn back in.
As for me, a short visit there yesterday proved to me that I cannot allow myself to go back. The r/Blind subreddit was what brought me to that site in the first place and was the one community I was a part of there that was largely resistant to the toxicity so prevalent through the rest of the site. Yesterday’s visit was heartbreaking, showing me how much the toxicity of the rest of the site had infiltrated r/Blind…and even so, the urge to dive back in was very strong. I felt like a recovering gambling addict walking into a casino for the first time since giving it up. I just cannot afford to go back to that.
While I hope that we will all continue to be a part of building something new, and hopefully better, we will have to see how may of us resist reddit’s siren call.
The need in the fediverse is at least as strong as the need r/Blind on reddit. I cannot imagine that building up this community will take any less time and effort than building up r/Blind on reddit originally did bit it should prove well worth it in the end.
A note to the admins and mods of rBlind.com and its communities:
Thank you for getting this started and providing a community for those of us with no place at reddit can support one another in our blindness and our visual impairments.
Learning read braille on paper and use braille on screen keyboard on Android
When I am working I work with computers of multiple types. If I do not keep in practice with all of them I lose track of the keybard shortcuts and gestures I need to do things with them.
Cane. Which, now that I think about it, most sighted people I know think is stupid. They all seem to think that there’s tiny portable magic radar, sonar, infrared, VR stuff that’s widely available and actually works.
Over the course of my life I have had the chance to support a lot of tech, including a couple of medical prototypes that were supposed to have that kind of magic. Yet after my vision loss it was what amounted to a long white stick that had the most beneficial affects on my life. Sometimes low tech is the best tech.
They have been pretty positive. I will need to practice more to help learn the quirks but am really enjoying it so far. It really helps me that markdown support seems to be the default.
Are you able to have text posts be read out to you and such?
I cannot tell you what they use for administration and moderation but for reading Jerbao has been working great with TalkBack on Android, Chrome has been doing well with JAWS on Windows, and Orca okay with Firefox on Debian…but Orca can often be more of a stretch for a lot of things.
The only thing that would be on my wish list would be better defined key bindings/shortcuts for the web UI…maybe even have the bindings listed in the labels of controls…they are absent for me when using carat browsing on Chrome Canary
Life events kept me almost completely away from the Internet, let alone Read It (intentionally misspelled), for a few months. When I was able to come back (on June 16th) the first place I tried to go was r/Blind only to find it, along with a lot of other subs dark.
A simple search told me what was going on and the spezanotor’s responses over the following days failed to inspire confidence that things would get better (to be fair I rarely have confidence in the Powers That Be, whoever they may be…it is in my name for a reason after all) so my own account went dark and I started looking for alternatives. I was just starting to think I was going to have to build something myself when I found what you all were putting together here (thankfully, because anything I build tends to be utilitarian and ugly).
Your post is exactly why I am here and my Reddit account remains dark.
BTW: Thank you for linking the web archive (wayback machine) snapshot of the original post. With the way Read It has been doing things there’s no telling how long the original will be allowed to remain.