Notices by André Polykanine (menelion@dragonscave.space)

Cette semaine j'ai eu une expérience extrêmement humiliante comme non-voyant. Je cherche du boulot (dévloppeur backend #PHP et #DotNet/#CSharp), et une société m'a contacté ici à Strasbourg. La personne RH était bienveillante, l'entretien s'est bien passé, puis on m'a fait venir chez eux pour discuter avec leur engineering manager.
J'ai prévenu dès la première conversation que j'étais complètement non-voyant, c'est-à-dire aveugle. Oké, m'a-t-on dit, pas d'soucis, si tu passes notre test, tu peux bien travailler chez nous.
Ils m'ont donné un test, une petite API à faire chez moi ce que j'ai fait dès le début (fichier Docker compose, base de données, tout le tralala avec les tests). Ils m'ont dit que tiens, ton test est super bon, « même j'ai pas pensé aux tests que tu as fait », m'a dit le lead dev.
C'était la fin décembre, et avant les vacances on m'a rassuré que tout va bien, que le test est bon, et même on m'a nommé le montant approximatif du salaire.
Quand je suis venu pour débriffer le test, on m'a laissé comprendre qu'en fait c'est l'entretien final. Bien sûr que je ne faisais rien pendant ce mois de janvier, croyant naïvement que le boulot était dans ma poche.
Quand j'ai commencé à parler avec le CTO, il m'a soudainement dit que, premièrement, il n'est pas possible de choisir le système d'exploitation et on est tous sur des Mac, même les sales et customer support. Oké, ai-je pensé, on va s'débrouiller (malgré le fait que j'en ai beaucoup parlé avant). Puis il m'a sorti le suivant : « Tu sais, il faut que tous nos développeurs voient des maquettes que les PM dessinent, et on les discute aux sessions de grooming ». Attends attends, lui ai-je dit, mais je suis backend, quel est le rapport entre moi et le fameux pixel perfect design ? «Mais ouais, tu sais, ici tout le monde fait comme ça, tu sais, faut voir des maquettes, gna gna gna ». Et en plus, m'a-t-il dit, les gens customer support travaillent qu'avec des vidéos. « Quoi ?! » — j'ai déjà compris qu'on ne voulait pas de moi, mais quand même. donc, ai-je demandé, c'est si difficile de copier-coller le texte d'erreur que le backend leur montre ? C'est si difficile de décrire un ticket normal en texte, comme tout le monde le fait ? « Mais tu sais, ils sont comme ça, les vidéos c'est plus rapide, plus facile, gna gna gna, patati-patata ».
Et bien sûr, on m'a appelé pour dire qu'on veut pas de moi.
Je suis vraiment choqué par cette attitude et si je savais quoi faire, je voudrais agir. #Accessibilité #NonVoyants #Aveugles #Discrimination

@glyph That's because most of users, I mean, the vast majority of users won't install Linux to use given software. I see "no Windows support", I don't install, sorry not sorry. I can justify my choice because I'm blind and I need accessibility (pretty niche thing, yeah?), but many other people have other justifications. That's why you are basically forced to, yes, support a proprietary platform. To defend Microsoft, they open-sourced lots of stuff recently, including the whole .NET ecosystem.

@Fragglemuppet Struggling. The app itself is also not welcoming, to be honest. The thing that makes me most angry is that they removed everything from https://alexa.amazon.com/. They used to have a neat web interface there.

@A11yAwareness I'm still proud I created an Accessibility channel at my previous work.

@xogium All of those "De-googlin" and "de-microsofting" solutions preach about evil corporations that will eat our bodies and suck our souls, how good and cool they are, but actually they don't give a flying F about accessibility. Maybe "all" is too strong, but lots and lots of them.

Again unpopular opinion, but I don't care.
Those eco-activists lobbied a law that all plastic bottles should have attached caps.
I wonder only one thing: why everything they do is so fucking annoying, inconvenient and just extremely shitty? environment is good, protection, less waste, whatever, angels, flowers and butterflies, — everything is good, but why, for goodness sake, must it be so awfully inconvenient to use or simply disgusting, like those damned paper straws that smell and taste paper glue?
Bottles with attached caps. First, it's messy: when you want a bottle of water in a hot street, you'd be rather careful now, because drinking with that dangling thing near your mouth and not to spoil everything (let alone if you are eating something along with it) is nearly impossible. To drink only a part of it and put the bottle in your bag — also fucking impossible, because the cap doesn't close the bottle so strong anymore, and your liquid will be in your bag.
to buy larger bottles to drink a glass and leave everything for later? Also nope, because again, the cap is no longer reliable, and your bubbles of beloved carbon dioxyde will happily fly into the air.
Solution? Easy-peasy! Tell 'em that you take those bottles for 25 cents, you take those caps for 10 cents, and you take a bottle with a cap for 40 cents. That's it! No more bottles, no more caps, no nothing at all! They will be fightin' for them!
And me, with my character, I'll be keeping those small scissors in my bag just to cut those cap-attaching strings and drink my water, or cola, or whatever I want. Nobody will do as you want for the sake of some righteous ideas if, not hurting anyone, it ruins their comfort!

Those "Sign in with Google" pop-ups on every second website really start driving me nuts. #Google

Re last: I think it's one of the worst decisions Mozilla could made. Can't they afford a smallish Mastodon instance? Sorry, I don't believe. then it's a political decision: let's go back to the ex-bird site (pun intended), with all its hate speech and the jerk in the head; let's deprive many people that really care about the open-source community of a convenient way of communication. Nice of you, #Mozilla, nice of you.

Недавно узнал, что если вы хотите добавить новую резервную почту на Мейл.ру, то она применится не сразу, а через время, причём типа недели через две. Вот это для чего, мне интересно? Пока товарищ майор не проверит, что почта валидна? Пока изменения раскатятся по всем кластерам? Я даже представить не могу, почему такая суперэлементарная операция занимает столько времени.

Re last: there is a similar joke in russian, and there is even an expression "a spherical horse in vacuum", «сферический конь в вакууме» in Russian (because physicists modeled their experiment imagining a spherical horse in vacuum). It is so spread that the horse can be replaced with anything, like: "Trump is a spherical jerk in vacuum". Don't be surprised when you encounter something like this in daily speech of a person whose mother tongue is Russian.

"Send me the screenshot of the page.
— Okay.
— Please click the place where the red arrow is.
— As I've already told you, I'm blind, so please describe in words.
— I marked you the place with an arrow, can't you see it? If you can't, I'll re-mark the place for you.
— I'm blind, as I've already told you. Sorry to be that person, but the word "blind" means, I cannot see. At all."
That's how my day goes. #Work #MyDay #accessibility

@stvfrnzl I'd be definitely annoyed. I would make it a link in the beginning, somewhere in the middle and towards the end of the article, but I've never heard about a standard for those. // CC @aardrian

@simon Wow, thank you! am I right that it will nag you until you turn it off? That's the feature I've been searching for in all reminder apps. Like, not beep twice and go away, but reeeeally annoy me till I shut the reminder up.

@pollbot I mean… as pets or as food (sorry)? 😂

@JenMsft I wonder if it works in SSH sessions. If yes, then I had been an idiot for at least four years to select and copy everything to Notepad for further review.

@Kaliah To me their desktop interface is also this.

@Kaliah Probably that's because I'm a huge fan of Slack. To me, if developing an app in Electron and alikes at all, that's very close to how it must be done for accessibility. With Discord… I tried, I didn't really get it.

@Caoimhe @Kaliah Yes, I was lucky enough that they made it accessible just before I found my previous job. there we used Slack and I was happy. We once tried to use Teams for everything (we used Slack for chats, Microsoft Teams for calls), but it was just awful. Slack does almost everything right: channels, messages, message editing, emojis, Windows notifications, everything is just intuitive.

today I've heard for the first time about the #RigelA open-source screen reader project for #Windows written in #RustLang. Unfortunately only Readme has an English version, all other documents and code comments are in chinese, but the project seems very promising. Use Google Translate or another translator if you, like me, don't speak Chinese. https://gitcode.net/mzdk100/rigela

Dear #blind folks, does anybody know about the #accessibility of audio conferencing service called #BigBlueButton? It used to be totally inaccessible, but sighted people say it got a redesign. Any ideas? The same question about #Jitsi. Oh, the platform of interest is #Windows. Thanks!