I've been running fediverse as the commenting system on this blog for a while now. Here's how it's been going.

I've been running fediverse as the commenting system on this blog for a while now. Here's how it's been going.

Oh My Posh is a set of configurations and themes for powershell, that allows dynamic modification of the prompt depending on what you're doing. This is the theme I use as my daily driver, and how I have powershell set up as a screen reader user.

All services on rblind.com will be down for 6 hours on August 18th, 2026.

• Date: 18-08-2026
• Start Time: 7:00 AM EST
• End Time: 5:00 PM EST
• Expected Downtime: Approximately 6 hours

Services effected are:

• lemmy: rblind.com and www.rblind.com
• IRC: irc.rblind.com

The RBlind discord will remain functioning as normal, and the ourblind.com website will also remain available. Thanks for your understanding, and see you on the other side!

I couldn't find any real information about how Yubikeys work with screen readers. So I decided to publish some.

The past year has seen an explosion in new text to speech engines based on neural networks, large language models, and machine learning. But has any of this advancement offered anything to those using screen readers?

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.

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.

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.

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.

cross-posted from: https://blackneon.net/post/94922

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Good morning, everyone:

After months of troubleshooting various performance issues, we're pleased to announce that all of the outstanding back-end issues we are aware of are fixed. You should no longer receive errors on browsing user profiles, and posts should load much faster.

If you're not technical or interested in the gritty details, you can stop reading, now, in the knowledge that everything should now work as expected. For those of you who are technical, the problems were caused by two things. First, a lack of indexes on the users and posts tables. Analysing logs revealed some database queries were taking upwards of 8 seconds, especially when loading user profiles. If you've landed here from Google, because lemmy-ui is giving the unhelpful message "an error has occurred on the server" without actually showing you the error, and you're seeing enormous queries referencing dullbananas's or i_love_jesus in your logs, get into your postgresql database and add some indexes:

CREATE INDEX idx_post_aggregates_creator ON post_aggregates (creator_id);

CREATE INDEX idx_post_aggregates_scaled_rank ON post_aggregates (scaled_rank);

CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY IF NOT EXISTS idx_post_saved_person_post ON post_saved (person_id, post_id);

CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY IF NOT EXISTS idx_community_moderator_community_person ON community_moderator (community_id, person_id);

CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY IF NOT EXISTS idx_local_user_admin ON local_user (admin);

Second, be careful when increasing your shared memory size in docker. If you have shm_size specified as "48 gb" or "48gb" in your docker compose, your shared memory will not increase, and you won't get an error message of any kind. Shm_size must be "48g", no space, and no b. For some bonus fun, shm_size only updates if you recreate the entire docker image. Restarting is not enough! You should always use df on the docker you're working with, to insure /dev/shm is actually the size you think it is. Because it probably isn't!

Happy holidays, everyone. Here's to a 2026 of stability and new features.

Deaf professor who worked on one product says developers won’t listen to feedback – about their products or their tech bro ways

Toymaker Mattel worked with Breakthrough T1D to create a Barbie doll who visibly lives with type 1 diabetes and carries an insulin pump.

I wanted to share an opportunity for folks in the UK who use screen readers or screen magnification. Fable, the company where I've been employed for the past eight years, works with organizations to make their digital experiences more accessible, and we're expanding our Community to the UK and are looking for new usability testers. It’s flexible, paid gig work you can do from home. You don’t need any previous experience – we offer paid training to get you started. You choose which projects you want to work on and set your own schedule. We also pay what we call a “technology wage” (which basically means better-than-minimum and recognizes the value of lived experience with tech). If you’ve ever wanted to have a say in how tech can work better for people with disabilities – and get paid for your time – this might be a good fit. Here's the link to apply: https://makeitfable.com/community/

cross-posted from: https://rblind.com/post/3476242

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.