Initial Thoughts on Affinity by Canva: We'll see how things go over time, but all in all, if not cautiously optimistic, I'm at least cautiously hopeful about the just-announced changes to Affinity. Seeing more improvements in their PDF accessibility tagging is encouraging! https://michaelhans.com/eclecticism/2025/10/31/initial-thoughts-on-affinity-by-canva

The #39c3 "style guide" is totally geared towards animations.

If you build something cool with animations, PLEASE offer a way to pause the movements. Even better: only start them once the user requests it.
Otherwise, this can be a real problem for people who suffer from motion sickness.
(You could check for `prefers-reduced-motion` and let CSS handle it, but since many people are unfamiliar with these OS/browser settings, a simple button/toggle would be better.)
#Accessibility ftw
#PukeLessWeb

The state of #Oregon has the absolute worst video banner I've seen for people with #VestibularDisorders and motion sensitivity, and there is no way to pause or hide it.

https://www.oregon.gov/

Don't get me wrong, it is absolutely beautiful aerial footage, but having it pan around one axis while rotating around another at full screen is simply nauseating, and each segment moves in an entirely different way than the last.

h/t @nsgeek

If anyone out there needs a pattern to follow, here's a message I'm sending organizations asking me to attend an in-person event this week. Allies welcome.

"Per Google, it looks like there's no wheelchair-accessible entrance.

I’d love to hear if they’ve corrected this issue since (date of pics online). If this is a wheelchair-accessible event, I will go [if true].

Either way, I sure would love it if the accessibility of events were mentioned when spreading event info."

Would be really cool to have something baked into #ActivityPub to directly suggest alt text to media when it is missing on other people's posts, as an evolution to #alt4u. With dedicated notification. Apps could support the feature with a neat side-by-side media and alt text field, and one-click "accept suggestion" in notification.
I'm using @Tusky and even though I enjoy suggesting alt text, not being able to write the post with the image clearly visible makes it too difficult.
#accessibility

Given that I’m going moderately punk with designing my #website, I inevitably stumbled upon #CSS custom cursors (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/cursor) and decided to make my own extremely doodly ones. And it did work nicely, especially after I fucked up the colors and ended up with some pixels broken!

But then I re-read one of the latest @dbushell posts (https://dbushell.com/2025/10/27/custom-cursor-accessibility/), discouraging custom cursors. And yeah, it's not as exciting and fun as I expected it to be, due to #Accessibility and customization mess.

So I removed custom cursors

Holy shite, Outer Wilds 2 characters can have prosthetic arms and legs, that is so cool.

I cannot remember seeing this particular type of disability representation before. (I do not count Cyberpunk 2077’s cybernetics as applicable here.)

Looks purely cosmetic so far, but it’s still cool to see.

In JAWS Settings Center, there are verbosity options for a text link. I’ve tested each of them (JAWS 2025) with Chrome and Edge and it’s not working as documented at all in the screenreader.

I’ve seen that @SteveFaulkner you said in the JAWS HTML Support that JAWS can instead speak the content of the title attribute. Is it still working? I can't make it work, the screenreader is reading the name and the description of the link.

https://freedomscientific.github.io/standards-support/html.html

Call for Participation
W3C will hold a virtual "Workshop on Smart Voice Agents" from 25–27 February 2026 to explore stakeholder needs, use-cases, and gaps in Web standards for voice agents.

Topics include #accessibility, internationalization, modality integration, #trust, #security, and business models. Attendance is free and open to all.
https://www.w3.org/2025/10/smartagents-workshop/

Submit your talk proposal by 27 November!

Just installed NVDA 2025.3.1. I signed into my account, filled out the demographics survey to let the company know how I use their product and then...
Just kidding, NVDA is free to use with no account needed, and you can easily opt out of their anonymous usage statistics collection. Bonus is that you don't have to pay anybody for the privilege of giving up even more personal data after installing
#nvda #foss #AccessForAll #blind #ScreenReader #accessibility

Just talked with #DisabilityServices at Colorado Christian University. They’re encouraging me to use #MicrosoftWord instead of #LaTeX for schoolwork, since Word has built-in dictation that could help when my #RheumatoidArthritis flares up and typing gets hard.

To other #Blind folks: how do you remember all of Word’s keyboard shortcuts? I swear I spend more time navigating the ribbon than actually writing. I stick with LaTeX because I can remember commands better than shortcuts.

They said Word’s dictation is accessible, so I’m giving it a shot. But I’m also wondering: what reference managers do you use? I’ve been using #Zotero since it works with #VSCode and LaTeX, but I don’t know how well it integrates with Word — and definitely not with #PowerPoint. My school has me doing a lot of #APA-style presentations lately.

Would love tips from anyone juggling accessibility, citations, and academic workflows.

@mastoblind@a.gup.pe @mastoblind @main

For folks who are newer here, Alt Text is important in the fediverse because many of us want to foster a healthy, strong community. I try not to nag about this, just know that we’re less likely to boost something without good image description. Pro-tip: words like “guy”, “woman”, etc. are not useful because AltText is meant to *describe*. Thank you for valuing accessibility! It benefits the abled and disabled alike.

Ok at first I loved loved this “dark mode” subway map in Zurich showing the night trains, but the more I look at it the more I pity the drunks who have to abandon all prior knowledge of the color coding of lines and rely solely on yellow spaghetti to get them home at midnight #DataViz #Zurich #Maps #Transit #Trains #Accessibility