namelessWrench

A Jeb With No Name

@namelessWrench

The Only Rotten Dollhart Webring

A hideous fruit, disgracing itself.

Allo-Aro

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namelessWrench
@namelessWrench
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

tbh it kind of sucks that there are people on here who do put some serious work into trying to make accessibility tools — i was partway through porting the deyingletifier into a userscript before finding out that @dog had already done it, bless u — and the most visible responses to that are consistently this weird fury that someone would dare offer a 95% solution, the best they can do with the skills and status they possess, rather than somehow psychically compel staff to solve it with a built-in feature, or compel an arbitrary set of rando users to do some kinda manual per-post work, or just wave a magic wand and make the problem not exist at all.

like, frankly, what the fuck are you guys doing? i've seen so much nastiness towards the very idea of a third-party solution to some accessibility problem, every time this comes up, and i don't understand where that is coming from or what it's meant to accomplish. you know screen readers are basically third-party hacks, right??

in fact the more i think about it, the weirder it is that there's the common sentiment that cohost and its userbase hate accessibility. i have never seen a website with a stronger modding culture! every time an accessibility complaint comes up, someone has already written some kinda mod to fix it, yet somehow this just fuels the flames more

yeah it would be great if the problem didn't exist in the first place. it would be great if all problems didn't exist. it does, and they do. now what?

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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

eramdam
@eramdam

on the one hand i get the sentiment of "i shouldnt have to do extra work to accomodate around ppl if they make things inaccessible for me" but at the same time, idk man, it won't hurt anybody to learn a bit how to do those kinds of "mods". even if it's not to translate yingletspeak, at least you'd learn to do cool shit to further improve your general web usage and make websites you browse feel even more personal, idk.

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eramdam
@eramdam

(and for the record i still dont fully buy the "it's inaccessible" argument against yingletspeak, i fully believe it's annoying (because im not a fan of it) but deeming it inaccessible seems a bit much but idk)

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

there is a whole other thing there that's very difficult to wade into since you look like a huge dick if you get it wrong, and it's complicated by the dual meaning of "accessibility" as both the narrow "accommodation for an insurmountable disability" and the broader "i can't read this post because i don't speak french"

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eramdam
@eramdam

yeah, and even then it's like... idk man I won't get pissed at someone if they post in italien or japanese. we're in 2024 if you REALLY want to read a post written in a foreign language you can use a translation service. imagine if English-speaking people on Twitter went to Japanese posts demanding that they post in English??

Maybe I should start exclusively posting in French just to see what would happen lmao

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

it's not even like you're at a workplace or in a local group setting or whatever and people you see regularly are snubbing you. it's a website for public posting. you are a rando to almost everyone here. but the only acceptable solution is that all of those thousands of people are accommodating? just in a practical sense, how is that ever going to work? most of them aren't even aware this argument is happening!

and yeah i'm not in love with the subsentiment of "well i shouldn't have to learn how to use a computer more" like no one is asking you to install nitrous in your car here, you click two links

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eramdam
@eramdam

yeah, every time one of those discourse about posting happen I think of this post https://cohost.org/hellgnoll/post/1631831-the-timeline-is-not-the-living-room

and yeah i'm not in love with the subsentiment of "well i shouldn't have to learn how to use a computer more" like no one is asking you to install nitrous in your car here, you click two links

YEAH. Like I know tech is a fuck and probably more limited/obtuse than it has been but also...like... it's so much more powerful and accomodating that it has ever been.

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reccanti
@reccanti

It feels like the Yinglet stuff is kind of a “boiling over” point for other accessibility things, like tagging posts correctly, or adding alt text to images, and those are more “site culture” things rather than things that can be solved technically.

But yeah, I’m not really sure if cohost is exceptionally worse than other sites. Maybe some Mastadon instances? I’d actually be interested in hearing other people’s experiences. I also wonder if people are more likely to discourse about a problem rather than silently ignore, or if the site is small enough that it can’t be isolated into cliques as easily

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daboross
@daboross

i think it's a situation where people on cohost are willing to listen to the need for accessibility, whereas on other sites it'd just be yelling into a void.

there are certainly things cohost can do better, and earlier on in it's life there was some pretty inaccessible web design (i'm mostly thinking about the alt text interface), but i think the biggest difference is just how much people here listen (even though it's generally not people who can change anything, that's a big difference from yelling completely into the void IMO)

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dog
@dog

That’s why I made the userscript version! I wanted it to work in mobile Safari (and desktop Safari, etc), and it does actually work on my phone

Like I don’t disagree that the mobile extension ecosystem is a mess and Apple likes it that way, but at least there are options

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dog
@dog

I do get it - if something is an accessibility issue, being asked to install something unofficial to get what feels like an important feature can feel like a real problem.

I also feel like part of the problem is just that most modern websites and especially social media sites are totally uncustomizable, and hostile to browser extensions that customize them. So most users younger than, I dunno, 30 have probably never known a point on the web where installing dozens of browser extensions to customize the sites you use was normal. If people now use any browser extensions at all it's probably adblockers, right? So they psychologically fit into a thing where you use them to stop bad sites from doing hostile things towards you, not a neutral tool you can use to make changes to a site you like. I can understand why someone who's never used the web in the "customizing websites is normal and cool" era would see it as a huge imposition.

Using browser extensions also sucks a bunch on mobile, though at least userscripts integrate very well with iOS Safari. But for people using cohost on a phone, I understand why being asked to do something that feels very inconvenient is a big ask.

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

jeez i used to have so many god damn bookmarklets that such a view is almost unthinkable for me. i've reported browser engine bugs based on trying to patch twitter with a greasemonkey script

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dog
@dog

Right? But the web has changed a lot in the past 10-15 years. A bunch of modern JS and CSS frameworks broke ease of modding and whatever just as a side effect of how they work, but also modern social media sites don't want you modding them because they're opinionated about their Brand and also because they want to sell you stuff instead of letting you build it yourself. If most of your experience online has been on social media sites built like that, what browser extensions or bookmarklets would you even have to use that's not an ad blocker? cohost is by far the outlier by building itself in an easy-to-mod way. A lot of people have never used a site built with this mindset in their lives.

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

i mean even cohost is kind of a pain in the ass. i was in the middle of working out how to get mutation observers to work with whatever react is doing and it made me want to take a nap. the bizarre anti-css framework doesn't help either. back in the day you'd iterate over $('.post') on domcontentloaded and be done with it

it's weird though because surely a lot of people remember tumblr's xkit, although i guess that does leave the impression of "the only way to mod a website is through a Big Thing that does 50 small things"

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dog
@dog

Yeah that's fair, I'm over-romanticizing how easy it is to mod cohost. Probably more fair to say that the tech is incidentally mod-hostile but staff aren't.

And yeah, it's funny. I get the impression tumblr's attitude towards xkit and other stuff like that was, like. Not positive, but it got widely used. Definitely the case that one big mega browser extension was kinda the minimum you needed to do for significant mods, with the occasional exception like @minecraft's heroic dashboard unfucker.

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