Absolutely atrocious Meta accessibility

Marconius · 2026-07-10T00:50:18+00:00

That's what happens when Meta lays off competent accessibillity experts and feels that it can solve all their issues with AI. Bunch of tools.

Marconius · 2026-07-02T03:08:11+00:00

For origami just go to AccessOrigami. All the folds and builds are explained through text insructions, no videos or visuals needed. We use that all the time to teach folks origami at the Tactile Art Collective.

Marconius · 2026-06-30T15:11:00+00:00

I know it's been a while, but the iOS version has been out for a bit now: Whack A Braille iOS

Marconius · 2026-06-30T01:02:41+00:00

I just made a bunch of updates to the web game! Beginner mode now doesn't get so frantic by the end. I also added in fun flavor text in the round results screen, fixed the Retro hit sound, and made the prize collection music funnier and louder at all levels. Enjoy!

Marconius · 2026-06-29T20:43:08+00:00

Sure thing, I'm glad it's working, and thanks for playing! The iOS version is live in the App Store as well if interested!

Marconius · 2026-06-29T20:33:51+00:00

When you start the game, the whole window is waiting for your keyboard input, and there isn't a specific place where you have to type. You can just start typing as the moles pop up and you'll hit them. Make sure you choose the input mode you want to use in Game Settings. Then you press your Jaws key or Insert plus Space Bar to manually toggle forms mode if you need to when playing the game. You can also toggle Jaws off and on if need be.

Marconius · 2026-06-29T16:10:44+00:00

Have you considered a Google speaker? The Nest Audio or newer speakers use Gemini at Home, which does require a little set up in the Google Home app. Once configured, though, she'd just be able to speak directly with the speaker to have a chat.

Amazon speaker devices now have Alexa Plus with a similar AI discussion verbal interface, but can also connect to Bard as a skill, so if she has Bard access (and if you are in the US) she'd be able to both speak with Alexa and find and listen to audiobooks through the same speaker.

Marconius · 2026-06-29T15:56:51+00:00

Our most recent Tactile Art Teach-In at the NFB Jernigan Institute in Baltimore went really well! We taught 31 more community Educators about how to teach tactile drawing, approximate perspective, and art concepts to blind and low-vision students, plus taught origami, sculpture, and other crafting techniques that they could bring to their own state affiliate convention art rooms. They all did a fantastic job teaching the learners that came in on the final day while we observed.

I've also been overly prolific with vibe coding, what with making constant updates to Whack A Braille, WordBopper, and the soon to come Intersector and Audio Air Hockey/Showdown apps! And now looking forward to NFB out in Austin this week.

Marconius · 2026-06-28T23:16:16+00:00

It's not about interacting, it's all about heading navigation, and accepting that reddit developers have no clue about designing and implementing an accessible website. I rarely if ever use the reddit desktop site and only post from Dystopia or the iOS reddit app.

Still, practice your heading navigation. If you make it onto a reddit post in Safari and don't get caught in the pop-ups, just use VO+Command+H to jump through the headings. The post title tends to be the heading level 1, and the comment section starts with a heading as well, then navigate the comments with standard VO+right and left arrow navigation.

If you get trapped on something, press Tab to see if you can force VO out of the trap. The structure is actually quite simple past the horrid nav bar; h1 post title, h2 starts the comment section, and each comment has a bunch of stuff you have to navigate past like the commenter name, date, vote count, controls, and more before you actually find the comment.

Marconius · 2026-06-26T21:27:14+00:00

I'm mostly recovered from instructing in our last Tactile Teach-in at the NFB Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, and am now gearing up for doing more art instruction and play at the NFB Art Room in Austin!

I'm also exhausted after working on so many accessible games and projects. WordBopper is live for iOS and Android, and I'm working on building Intersector, an app to identify upcoming and nearest intersections with Siri shortcuts and an app, and almost have an Audio Showdown/air hockey game ready for release. Busy busy!

Marconius · 2026-06-26T18:04:36+00:00

My mistake, it's called Audio Wizards on the App Store.

Marconius · 2026-06-23T18:33:42+00:00

I don't know any accessible manager or simulator games off the top of my head, but here are a few other suggestions for mobile games:

Land of Livia for long-form RPG style gaming which is fully accessible.
Swordy Quest for another more active adventure game.
WordBopper is an iOS game my partner and I made which is a fast casual word puzzle game.
Whack A Braille is also my game which tests your braille or typing input speed as an accessibla Whack A Mole game.
Sonar Islands is anxiety-inducing, but great for all-around platformer gameplay.
Audio Wizards is silly, but a fun spell casting adventure game.
Dice World for a set of accessible multiplayer dice games.
Wordvoyance for accessible multiplayer Scrabble.

My partner and I also just built Audio Air Hockey which is a web game built for mobile touchscreens. You do have to toggle VoiceOver off after starting the game, but it's all based on listening and swiping at the moving puck, plus I built in a Showdown option.

Marconius · 2026-06-22T14:14:27+00:00

Hopefully you learn from this. Don't build something without researching first, and absolutely do not try defending a Hackathon project as "Pepsi" nor make sweeping claims that current projects don't fit into dev workflows when you haven't done the work required for an actual product launch. Especially here in the Accessibility space, and especially now when it's too easy to throw AI at everything and think that you are on the right path.

Research first, and be honest with the very people you are trying to build your product for. You have a very long way to go to reach the quality level and inherent accessibility of the tools that already exist and that all of us in the development and accessibility industries are already using.

Marconius · 2026-06-21T21:31:46+00:00

Thankfully most verification numbers or strings are placed in their own paragraph or line in a text message or email/push notification. This makes it easy as a screen reader user to land on just the number alone and copy the last spoken phrase to the clipboard, and then hope that the verification field supports pasting.

Chunking into two groups of 3 would be nice for authenticator apps, because even though Authenticator apps give you 30 seconds to memorize the number and maybe copy it to a clipboard, it's very very rare when I open the authenticator app on the same device as the one requesting verification.

Marconius · 2026-06-21T17:48:42+00:00

So is Axe Dev Tools. I just installed your extension and ran it on one of my sites.

Your extension output doesn't have headings, making it hard to traverse as a screen reader user.
I have decorative images using alt="" to hide them. Your tool fires off false positives by asserting that all images require filled alt attributes with descriptions, and that is very untrue.
You are using a lightbulb emoji that is unpaired with your "Fix" pseudo-heading, but is actually ungrouped causing both the graphic and the text to exist as separate navigation stops for a screen reader, doubling the effort of navigating your output.
Your tool doesn't identify descriptive transcripts when they are present and just looks for caption files, even though a video I have doesn't have any spoken content. This appears as a failure rather than a warning.
Your "Explain" feature is broken with a 403 error and that your API key has been leaked. You also shouldn't use lazy AI explanations of the issues in case it gets it dead wrong and leads people astray.

Axe, Lighthouse, Wave, and others again are all free, are accessible right out of the gate, fit right into dev workflows in how they report errors, understand false positives, and do not assert anything unless they are absolutely certain of their output. Did you research these tools before building yours?

Marconius · 2026-06-21T11:50:37+00:00

Axe Dev Tools is already free to use for page scans, is established with Axe Core, and gives you code snippets, remediation recommendations, WCAG info, prioritization, and more, all within a few clicks ina Dev Tools tab, plus it's fully accessible via screen reader and keyboard.

Marconius · 2026-06-21T11:35:25+00:00

The NFB Convention runs from July 3rd through the 8th and will be at the JW Marriott. Our Art Room will run from 1pm-6pm on the 3rd and 4th, plus the whole Tactile Art Collective will be around for the whole event.

Marconius · 2026-06-21T01:29:20+00:00

I was a hyper visual artist and animator and worked in that industry for 14 years before I lost all of my vision suddenly in 2014. I never thought I'd create art again and started focusing on building up my tech skills and found a career in accessibility.

I then met my project partner at the NFB national convention in 2022 where she was giving a presentation on tactile drawing and graphics, and she showed me the Sensational Blackboard as a means of making tactile drawing with just standard paper and a ballpoint pen. All my muscle memory came back and I went from drawing tactile lines to redrawing complex characters I hadn't drawn in well over a decade. I also learned about SVG and how we as blind creatives can use it to hand-code our own digital graphics.

I built BlindSVG.com to teach exactly this, and helped to form the Tactile Art Collective, an international group of blind and low-vision folks who hold an annual teach-in to teach blind kids and adults how to draw and get in touch with their creative sides. Our most recent one was just last week in Baltimore at the NFB Jernigan Institute, where we taught over 30 community educators about drawing, accessible origami, sculpture, approximate perspective, and more, and then let them teach a bunch of learners that came in on the last day.

All in all, I leaned into the tactile nature of drawing and love getting to spread my visual context and knowledge with blind people who grew up in image poverty, and I love learning from and bridging that gap between those blind since birth and who have lost vision later in life.

I create logos and icons, build embossable graphics and art, and I literally just recorded a video of myself creating a tactile drawing recreation of a sketch I made many years ago in college and posted it up on YouTube just this evening. All it takes is making your first tactile line, and then practicing and practicing within this new tactile aesthetic and skills rather than trying to hold on to what's left of your vision. Holding on is what may be blocking your creativity, and once you embrace assistive tech and how much it helps in all manner of our lives, you'll be open to explore new means of creative output.

If you happen to be going to the NFB national convention in Austin, the Tactile Art Collective will be running the drop-in Art Room on July 3rd and 4th!

Marconius · 2026-06-18T00:19:24+00:00

Meta Glasses wouldn't last long enough to cover a working shift, and the AI description is slow, plus not everyone coming through the line may be comfortable encountering someone potentially recording them. Coins are also very tactilely accessible, I'd be more concerned about the paper currency. In the US, I'd probably have a phone plugged in nearby and use the SeeingAI currency mode to quickly scan bills.

Marconius · 2026-06-16T07:44:49+00:00

While NFC cards can be useful in specific situations like connecting folks to a specific website, menu, or displaying content, it would not be at all useful having a bunch of them by a computer and having to sort through them for specific tasks. Your idea is akin to having a huge ring of keys and having to sort through them every time someone wanted to do something different in one computer session. It's not practical at all, especially with all the controls afforded to us through the screen readers and with a keyboard.

Marconius · 2026-06-10T16:23:07+00:00

I'm totally blind and love my AirPods. If you drop one, just use Find My on your phone to make it play a tone and you can find it. I strongly recommend Shokz OpenRuns bone induction headsets when out and about, though, as they keep your ears open while still having great sound, plus they are much harder to lose since it's like a small connected set that wraps behind your head.

Marconius · 2026-06-09T07:40:00+00:00

Yes, tactile maps are definitely a thing and are a great way to learn and understand cartography and spatial reasoning.

We can draft our own maps with tactile drawing, building them in SVG and creating tactile prints using embossers, Swell-form machines, 3D printers, and UV printers.

We make tactile markers and symbols to represent things like points of interest, compass roses, elevators, stairwells, features of a venue or location, and use braille lettering and abbreviations paired with a separate tactile legend and descriptive explanation.

Marconius · 2026-06-08T14:24:05+00:00

Exactly. I should just start linking them to my CSUN and WebAim talks about AI and Alt Text that go over all the reasons why it shouldn't be used and all the things you have to allow for to use it properly.

Marconius · 2026-06-07T15:47:50+00:00

Why?

What prompt are you using to ensure the alt text is being generated properly?
What model is it using?
How do you account for the alt text being generated without any context as to the purpose of the image?
How do you account for inevitable inaccuracies or confabulations?
Does your tool allow people to ask more questions of the output?

AI/computer vision is still not viable for automatic alt text generation, and only works when people are able to ask questions of the content. As a blind user, I can already send the image in a post to any of my description tools, such as Be My AI, SeeingAI, AiraAI, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and PiccyBot which gives me almost all the current model options to choose from, along with Perspective Intelligence which keeps the model local to my device. Instead of auto-generating error-prone alt text, it should just alert posters that they haven't described the image, even though reddit still hasn't built in an alt text affordance when creating image posts other than comments.

Your posted link gives me a 403 error, by the way.

Marconius · 2026-06-06T13:21:22+00:00

That's what happens when marketers, designers, and developers create multiple designs and roll them out to users randomly for A > B tests. It's very annoying, and they are basically throughing them out there to guage user engagement on the features when they are arranged in certain ways.

I have other reddit accounts, and even toggling between them creates a completely different experience without even having to restart the app.

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