Social virtual reality often relies on visual avatar behaviors such as head orientation, spatial arrangement, and turn-taking cues, creating barriers for blind and low vision users in small-group interaction. This project explores private non-visual addressivity cues that help BLV users perceive when attention is directed toward them without publicly marking assistance needs. Through formative co-design with BLV participants and VR designers, we identified breakdowns around speaker attention, turn readiness, and being acknowledged. We then implemented orientation-based cues delivered through either haptic feedback or spatial audio and evaluated them in an exploratory within-subject study with 11 BLV participants. Both cue conditions improved perceived access to conversational attention relative to baseline. Audio cues appeared useful for conversational flow and synchrony, while haptic cues more consistently supported perceived inclusion and social presence. These findings suggest that accessible social VR should treat modality, privacy, density, and user control as core design dimensions.

...

Recent accessibility work has begun to examine how BLV users perceive other people in social VR. VRBubble focuses on proxemic awareness by using audio to convey nearby avatars and their movement [7]. Sighted guidance systems support navigation and contextual interpretation through assistance from another person, while raising questions about agency and scalability [4]. Jung et al. translate several nonverbal behaviors, including eye contact, head nodding, and head shaking, into audio and haptic representations [8]. SocialCueSwitch further emphasizes user-configurable mappings of social cues across sensory modalities [12]. These systems do not necessarily make assistance publicly visible, and we do not characterize them as public cueing systems.

Our distinction instead concerns their primary design focus. Prior work has largely examined proximity awareness, general translation of nonverbal behavior, human guidance, or cross-modal configurability. We examine the narrower interactional problem of privately informing a BLV user that attention is being directed specifically toward them during mixed-ability group conversation. Privacy in this study therefore refers not only to the sensory channel used, but also to reducing reliance on explicit verbal nomination, visible intervention, or assistance initiated by sighted participants.

This project examines private non-visual addressivity cues as one way to support social coordination, addressivity, and participation in mixed-ability social VR conversation. We use private to describe cues that are delivered to the BLV user without requiring other participants to verbally nominate them, explicitly provide assistance, or make the cue visible as a special accommodation in the group interaction. In social settings, such design choices matter because cues can also shape how attention, disability, assistance, and participation are disclosed or noticed by others [9]. Accessibility research likewise emphasizes designing around users’ abilities and preferences rather than forcing users to adapt to a single interaction model [13]. We therefore focus on orientation-based cues that preserve the social function of addressivity, turn readiness, and being noticed in a way that can be perceived non-visually [10].

Whatever you feel about VR I think there is something beautiful about this!

Design student Sneha Rao is developing Tact, an edible pregnancy test that allows people with vision impairment to feel its results on their tongues

Bit of irony here. I was on https://www.edf-feph.org/ trying to use the menus. You hover over a menu item at the top and the menu for that category pops up. But when you move off the category bar to actually select a link in the popup menu, it disappears faster than you can move the mouse.

After some irritating fiddling with this whack-a-mole game, I figured out that the mouse pointer must follow an invisible vertical line that bisects the popup. Any deviation from that path and everything is unclickable.

Just thought the irony should be showcased because this website intends to advocate for people with disabilities.

1,768 words7–11 minutesNo comments on Mutual Aid Request Roundup 1 Oct 2026Fifty-Eight Cents a DayFifty-eight cents. That is what UNCTAD, the UN’s trade and development body, now calculates as the average Palestinian’s daily income in Gaza, in a report released on 24 September that describes the territory’s economy as the most severe collapse on record, anywhere, full stop. Per-capita income has fallen 83 percent since 2022, from an already-poor baseline to $212 a year. More than 90 percent of the working-age population is without a job. Ninety-two percent of Gaza’s economic establishments, the shops and workshops and small businesses that make up an economy’s actual texture, are damaged or destroyed. UNCTAD’s reconstruction estimate now stands at $71.5 billion and is expected to keep rising, built from $35.2 billion in physical infrastructure damage and $22.7 billion in economic and social losses, against an occupation the report notes has run 59 years and counting.Six days after that report landed, on 30 September, a drone struck a passenger van in Tal al-Hawa, southwest Gaza City, killing six people and sending thirteen wounded to al-Quds Hospital. The same day, a drone hit a displacement shelter in southern Gaza, wounding four people including two children. Among the eight Palestinians killed that Wednesday was Muhammad Abdel Aziz al-Najjar, a journalist, the 263rd reporter killed by Israel since October 2023. A local correspondent summed up the day in six words: “There is supposed to be a ceasefire.” The toll since that ceasefire took hold now stands at 1,431 killed and 5,026 wounded. Since October 2023, Gaza’s count runs to 74,032 dead and 175,142 wounded, on top of an economy the UN itself says has never, anywhere in its records, been this thoroughly destroyed.None of this destruction arrives without a receipt. The Trump administration has approved $21.6 billion in arms deals and taxpayer-funded military aid for Israel across twenty months, according to US State Department notifications to Congress, already surpassing the $17.9 billion the Biden administration approved in the sixteen months from October 2023. The line items read like an inventory of what did the damage UNCTAD is now pricing: forty thousand two-thousand-pound bombs, twenty thousand BLU-117 bombs, twenty thousand bunker-penetrating warheads, Apache helicopters, assault vehicles, and Caterpillar bulldozers, the same machine that flattens a home counted once as rubble and again as a line in a damage assessment. Ninety percent unemployment and a $21.6 billion weapons pipeline are not two different stories about the same region. They are the same transaction, read from opposite ends: Gaza’s economy was not simply bombed, it was replaced, deliberately, with a market for exactly the hardware that keeps bombing it.A besieged population cannot out-earn an occupation that prices its own destruction in the tens of billions and keeps the invoice for weapons flowing regardless. What it can do, and what this list exists for, is receive what people outside the blockade choose to redirect toward it, directly, without a state or a contractor sitting in the middle taking a cut. Below this piece sits this week’s mutual aid roundup: rent, medication, evacuation costs, campaigns that have sat underfunded for days people don’t have left to lose. Give what you can move today. Share what you can’t fund, because reach costs nothing, and nobody on this list can eat a projection.A note before the list: mutualaidspace.org’s submission form is live. Submitting a request there gets it federated as @comrade, automatically tagged for wider reach, and listed publicly under Comrades & Community or Victims of Empire, whether or not the person asking has a Fediverse account of their own. No verification process, no proof of suffering required. More on the project itself: mutualaidspace.org/about✨Mutual Aid Roundup✨@monaant @kshernandez @ctrlaltglitch @tiredpinklover @francesdanger @yellow @notkawaii_irl @cadence022 @WeirdWriter @wendythedruid✨Palestinian Campaign Spotlight✨Help Badr and her four children survive while her husband is behind barsBadr is raising four children in a tent on rented land in Gaza, with her husband in prison and no income. The rent is $200 a month, and without it the family may be forced off the land with nowhere safe to go. [View original post]@bader2000REDISTRIBUTEHelp Hanan’s four children surviveHanan is holding on to hope in Gaza and says a perfect life is not the ask, only peace, food for the family and children who can smile without fear. The campaign is for Hanan’s four children, and every day feels impossible. [View original post]@Hanan1991REDISTRIBUTE

Gaza Verified Archive Verified Palestinian campaigns under $200

These are verified Palestinian accounts whose campaigns received less than $200 in the past 7 days.

  Nine of many. The archive holds the rest.

@Hilalgazayafa@mastodon.social @rewaida77@kolektiva.social @maher123@rivals.space @sleman@masto.es @NOUR_GAZA_s2@mastodon.social @mohmad_ah@mstdn.social @Lubnaaj5@mastodon.social @ahmadallouh32@autonomous.zone @jehad1@mas.to Open the archive, find the campaign link on each account, give directly where possible, and share the campaign links that need movement.

View underfunded campaign list About Gaza Verified Campaigns @mutualaid @disability @disability @disability @autistics @actuallyadhd @theleftistlawyer @frugalcoffee @wrzky @wrzky @edendestroyer @QasimRashid #Gaza #Palestine #genocide #mutualaid #anarchism #internationalism #mutualaidrequest #DisabilityMutualAid #mutualaidspace #DisabilityCrowdfund #transmutualaid #queermutualaid #lgbtq #politics #emergencycrowdfund #gazamutualaid #poverty #healthcare #mentalhealth #disability #neurodivergence #activism #fedihelp #fediverse #blackfedi #queermutualaid #helpfolkslive2026 #socialmedia #blackmutualaid #writer #disabledwriters #mutualaidvoid #helpsky #press #globalsouthsolidarity #fediforgaza🗣️Support Corner🗣️📱Share this article far and wide. Subscribe to get this update in your inbox!This space is held together by a disabled Indonesian Muslim woman. Monthly support keeps me fed, medicated, and connected, and helps me keep resisting corporate funding and the humanitarian-industrial complex through my writing and mutual aid projects.If you find this voluntary work worth supporting, please do so by pledging as little as $1 monthly via Liberapay or other tiers available across Liberapay, ko-fi, and Patreon. One-off support helps too. Any amount genuinely helps.Paid Membership on PatreonKo-fi voluntary monthly supportLiberapay voluntary monthly supportMonthly Support Package

Diane Swonk says July’s bizarre jobs report is the first data from the deportation economy: shrinking payrolls and a shrinking workforce. [TLDR: unpaid caregivers remove themselves from the job market to provide healthcare and social work that deported immigrants no longer provide]

RE: me.dm/@kshernandez/11663504186Hi y'all. I'm just $1115 away from goal and from being able to end this nightmare of a living situation. Another run in with a housemate today, and slamming doors all day and night. That's what I have to deal with. Please make this happen for me? Chuffed.org/project/blessks#mutualaid #Blackmutualaid #disability #housingcrisis #Crowdfund @disability @mutualaid @mutual_aid@starflower.space @mutual_aid@hexbear.net @BlackAzizAnansi

I had the boardwalk between the house and the summer cottage replaced, but with twist - literally: both ends of the boardwalk now gently rise up and meet the house's backdoor and the cottage's terrace level, so there are no steps anywhere. Also, it's wider than regular, commercial boardwalks. You could say it's a boardwalk with accessibility in mind.

My wife who has a disability can now easily go to the cottage and spend some time enjoying the lake and listening to music there without any help.

From the linked PDF:

Anyone with a smartphone or other wireless device that supports RTT can make a TTY Relay call. As a result, it is easier for individuals with no communication- related disability to misuse TTY Relay in an attempt to hide their identities or otherwise deceive a called party by communicating through a CA.

36. To ensure that TTY Relay is used appropriately and efficiently, and to safeguard the TRS Fund from waste, fraud, and abuse, we seek comment below on applying user eligibility, registration, verification, and call detail records requirements to all forms of TRS95—measures that have proven effective in safeguarding other TRS programs. 96 We seek comment on the specific processes for TTY Relay user registration and verification, including the type of documentation or assessment required to confirm eligibility and how to balance ease of access for legitimate users with robust protections against misuse. Are providers able to verify the identity of TTY Relay users at the beginning of calls? Would user registration requirements unduly burden state TRS programs in their support and oversight of intrastate TRS?

54·. User Eligibility, Registration, and Verification Requirements. To ensure that IP STS are used appropriately and efficiently, and to safeguard the TRS Fund from waste, fraud, and abuse, we propose to apply user eligibility, registration, and verification requirements similar to those already in place for IP Relay, VRS, and IP CTS. 137 This would include requiring users to register with a certified provider and undergo a verification process to confirm their identify and location, as well as to certify eligibility as individuals with speech disabilities who require the service for functionally equivalent communication. 138 We seek comment on the specific processes for IP STS user registration and verification, including the type of documentation or assessment required to confirm eligibility and how to balance ease of access for legitimate users with robust protections against misuse.

Yikes. Having my voice recorded by large corporations (e.g. banks), then having to trust the untrustworthy to protect the recording so that it is not used to do AI-driven impersonation -- no thanks. So obviously TTY/RTT services are interesting for non-impaired (hearing) people who want to avoid that exploitation. As we can see from the quote, the FCC intends treat street-wise people as “abusers” for doing common-sense self-defense.

Some people need a Call Assistant (CA) and some do not. Obviously a hearing person does not need a human CA. We can simply do a straight text chat in both directions. Having a needless MitM is where the waste is. I’ve read that IP relays need a CA, but it’s not clear why that would necessarily be the case for everyone.

Interesting to note that the FCC cares to protect the privacy of the hearing/speech-impaired /to some extent/:

53. Provision of a Muting Option. The Commission currently requires STS providers to offer the user the option of having their voice muted so that the other party to the call would only hear the STS CA re-voicing the call, and not also the voice of the STS user. This feature serves to minimize disruption to the conversational flow and potentially enhance the privacy and comfort of the STS user.

Nice, but in the end the FCC (who blocks Tor) is privacy-hostile motherfuckers:

3. Extending User Registration and Verification Requirements

4. While Internet-based TRS users are subject to various registration and verification requirements, analog TRS, such as TTY Relay, CTS, and STS, currently lack comparable mandated user registration and centralized verification processes. To further strengthen the integrity and oversight of the entire TRS program and build upon the recognized benefits of a user registration database, we propose to extend comprehensive user registration and verification requirements to all forms of TRS, including these analog services and any future Internet-based forms of TRS. This expansion is crucial to ensuring that all services supported by the TRS Fund operate with enhanced accountability and to combat waste, fraud, and abuse program-wide. Such a measure would allow the Commission to gather complete and accurate data on service demand and utilization across the entire TRS landscape. We seek comprehensive comment on the feasibility, costs, and benefits of extending user registration and verification requirements to all forms of TRS. Commenters should detail any unique technical or operational challenges for specific services (e.g., TTY Relay, STS, CTS, or IP Relay, or proposed IP STS and RTT- based relay service), and identify the specific types of data that would be most relevant and least burdensome for the providers to collect and submit. We also solicit input on how current user registration data elements might apply or need modification for these services, and the timeframe for implementation.

5. TRS providers seeking compensation from the TRS Fund must submit Call Detail Records (CDRs) to the TRS Fund administrator for each call for which compensation is sought.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/27156738

I have been relying on quite poor VOIP service to place calls to large orgs that have call centers. The voice quality was lousy and recently my VOIP provider screwed something up and the service became broken.

I am not hearing-impaired but I think TTY might solve my problem. If I need to call a large org/agency that is likely TTY-capable, is this possible without some kind of service? In principle, shouldn’t I be able to connect to a bank or something without using any kind of subscription service? Linux, gnu screen, ssh, a terminal, Internet should be all I need, no?

My searches for TTY either yields results about how deaf people can use dedicated hardware or a Telecommunications Relay Service (“TRS”) -- or the search results are about /dev/tty* which is just a UI for sending commands to a command interpreter (apparently not a human). There are claims that all iPhones and /some/ Androids can do TTY. But doesn’t that still rely on phone service? I prefer NOT to use a phone or phone service.

This question has no answers, but it’s along the lines of what I need. There is this Zapata thing but that project has had no status since 2004.

Update

After more looking, it seems an “IP-TTY” relay service is needed for this situation. Searches so far lead to services that want to force a proprietary app on you, which only works on proprietary platforms.

Mavis Tech is the manufacturer of the Viaro assistive smartglasses

That's one legit and worthwhile use case of AI and cameras concealed in glasses.

Interesting and informative video on the winter paralympics classification system.

It’s similar to drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth.

Not sure what chemical reaction happens, but it’s vile, and it lingers.

A rule change pushed by White House officials would slash benefits or end support for as many as 400,000 Supplemental Security Income recipients with Down syndrome, dementia and other disabilities whose parents or relatives receive SNAP benefits.

I have special feet and these are my new special boots. And they're awesome!

It took the shoemaker over 6 months to make them, but they're perfect. Someone's gonna be hiking everywhere soon 🙂

Yes, I know, they're just shoes. But they're something special to me. Today is a good day!

As part of Accessibility Week, Fundación Jean Maggi and VML Argentina unveiled the MONSTER CHAIR, a striking wheelchair with oversized wheels designed to spotlight a problem that is as common as it is frustrating: cars blocking access ramps and limiting accessibility in our cities.

MET! Thank you to every kind soul who uplifted me! Blessings to you. I'm safe for another month. 🐻🫂The numbers below include a fee I tried to avoid. Such a waste, that coulda been the phone bill or food, or some chronically unmet need. But alas... Needed today. Linktr.ee/khernandez#BlackMutualaid#helpfolkslive2026#mutualaid#disability#BlackFediverse#Housingcrisis@disability @blackfedi @Fedicares @mutualaid

MAGA maximum cruelty at work once again.

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/43438786

Dear all.

I am very sad to inform everyone that our friend Didier died last week.

Early 2015, I asked on the slackware list if brltty could be added in the installer ; Didier answered promptly that he could do it on slint. Afterwards, he worked hard so that slint became as accessible as possible for visually impaired people.

You all know that all these years, he tried and succeeded to answer as quickly as possible to our issues and questions.

He will be irreplaceable.

cross-posted from: https://rblind.com/post/17753100

In this article, I will discuss the details of 10 innovations throughout history that were only possible through unlocking the power of accessibility and including the voices of people with disabilities. In the disability community, it is a deeply believed and often repeated fact that improving accessibility leads to innovations that improve the world for everyone. Necessity is the mother of invention is, after all, a proverb so frequently quoted that it has become a cliché. And yet, people with disabilities still find ourselves left out of research and design, and all too often we don’t get a seat at the product development table. This leaves our inventions overlooked, unrecognized, and sometimes unrealized.

Decades after her act of defiance, Rosa Parks galvanized a cadre of activists to protest their own conditions and, though the scope of her legacy for them is still coming into focus, it remains just as powerful.

They were fighting for disability access, and, like Parks, they used public transportation as a springboard.

The disability rights movement took shape against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, growing in size with each passing year. By the 1980s, it had made strides, successfully passing legislation and increasing the visibility of people living with disabilities.

But on roads and rails, small advances made in bus accessibility throughout the years did little to meet the needs of commuters with disabilities, whose use of public transportation was severely limited. Oftentimes, they were relegated to using separate services entirely, relying on transit services such as Dial-a-Ride, which required passengers to request a pickup and were frequently unreliable.

In 1984, something changed. In Chicago, about a dozen wheelchair-bound activists from the disability rights group ADAPT placed themselves in front of city buses to protest the Chicago Transit Authority’s decision to purchase more than 350 buses — none of which were accessible to them due to the city’s refusal to pay for wheelchair lifts.

The demonstration was reminiscent of Parks’ own protest that had taken place more than 700 miles south and nearly 30 years prior, when she refused to vacate her seat for a White passenger. As law enforcement officers arrived at the scene, a single sentence was emblazoned on each of the protesters’ name tags: “My name is Rosa Parks.”