This would be illegal in the EU if true, websites MUST be accessible to those with disabilities. There are no exceptions.
I’m not so sure about the “no exceptions”… I assume you’re refering to the Web Accessibility Directive here. It specifically states this:
This directive does not apply to public service broadcasters or non-governmental organisations that do not provide services that are essential to the public or specifically to people with disabilities.
This is very much an exception, and a big one at that.
Since reddit does not provide services essential to the public, they are not required to comply with web accessibility standards.
I’m happy to be proven wrong here, but this is how i interpreted it and it would cause a lot of problems if the EU started going after private websites (which reddit still is, they are not a public sector, nor do they provide essential services to the public) and force them to be accessible.
I never moderated a sub, but I am legally blind. Apollo had fantastic accessibility options while the official offering is garbage and makes using Reddit not only less enjoyable, but down right uncomfortable for some of us.
When the announcement came that Apollo was shutting down, I uninstalled and wiped my Reddit account. It’s been over a month now.
My only issue is I haven’t found an iOS app for kbin yet. So I’m basically just using the web version on PC.
There is a list of all the Lemmy apps here: https://lemmy.world/post/465785
It shows the current ones, announced apps, apps in development, etc. Across all platforms. Lots of devs have moved here from reddit, including Sync, Boost and Slide.
From what I’ve read from other users Wefwef is supposed to be very similar to Apollo, so you could try that one.
I hope you find what you’re looking for!
Amazing! I appreciate that. Thank you.
I hope reddit advertisers can see this. Why would you want to be associated with a site that discriminates against the blind?
they already lost 4.5bn because of this. Their valuation was cut down to 5.5bn from 10bn just the other day
That valuation cut was from before the whole shitstorm. We’ve yet to see the impact that this has all had on them, but given the attempts to crush the protests by the reddit admins, when they’ve just sort of ignored this stuff in the past, its likely not good
On one hand, it’s likely exactly what they wanted. They get a vanilla app with vanilla content, perfectly tailored for vanilla investors. The part they forgot is that the beacon of internet culture will never be vanilla.
They basically buzzfeedified themselves
They tumblr’d themselves and they haven’t even 100% gotten to the porn part. I hope all the only fans people on reddit have backups and start jumping ship.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/30/fidelity-deepens-valuation-cut-for-reddit-and-discord/
Valued at 10 billion when fidelity bought an ownership stake in 2021.
Currently they estimate Reddit is worth 5.6 billion
Well done team, I bet the investor calls are going great!
How it started: what if we built a platform where people create and moderate the content, but we just make all the money?
How it’s going:
Only 5.5 billion more to go
Buy shorts? Buy puts?I need some ill advise, where’s wallstreetbets when you need them?
That would be a quad-leveraged short on their IPO you could be wanting. Go big or go back to Wendy’s.
We need an unethical life tips here on how quickly we can bankrupt reddit
Check sub.rehab
And if I remember correctly that value cut was from before all this happened so it’s probably fixin to drop even more
Here’s hoping. (yeah, I’m an unreasonable, hateful bitch. I despise what they did with the Apollo dev (and others) and I hope it bites them in the arse.)
I wish it lives. May we never forget Aaron’s dream for the platform. May we never forget it. It’s my goal in life to carry on in his and other’s footsteps so we may use what we have made to help others.
I think if he was still around, he’d be all for ActivityPub and stuff like Lemmy/Kbin.
He definitely would have been all about ActivityPub, if not involved with bringing it about. Still amazes me that he was one of the inventors of RSS, arguably a proto-ActivityPub.
That’s not them actually losing money, though. They’re a private company, not a public one. Their valuation is just what analysts think that they’re worth—it has nothing to do with how much money they have.
True, but the valuation is for investors and per fucknut, Reddit isn’t making any money, hence the api push to a paid platform.
Also, Reddit is going public soon when they IPO and investors aren’t going to want to invest in a bot ridden, non active community.
I’d say 75%+ used Reddit on their phones and many of them used 3rd party apps.
The point is, Reddit IPOing soon and then this fiasco is the worst thing for them.
But valuation is a very real predictive measure on IPOs, and what Reddit is making all these bad decisions in preparation for. They tried to cut a little more pie by dragging third party app users onto their app to try and increase revenue and bump valuation, it’s just that it was so terribly misguided and executed that it had the opposite effect and blew up in their face.
Greedy Pig Boy has said for a long time that Reddit isn’t profitable. That means they’re losing money every year.
It could also be accounting tricks. If they pay themselves a bunch of money, reddit inc. doesn’t make a profit, but the individuals working for it do.
Private companies (which is most businesses) are still worth something. If big investors like Fidelity value your business at $1bn, banks will absolutely consider that as collateral for loans and so on. And if they say your business has halved in value, they’ll consider that too.
I get advocacy and I think this is a major point in the API changes, but the blind community deserves better than to just be ammo for this fight.
There have been reports of the traffic to their advertising portal dropping by about 20% over the past month
I’m actually surprised that metric would change much, because the users viewing ads aren’t impacted by changes to the API or third party apps. So that’s literally just 20% of people who either stopped using the site in solidarity or couldn’t get to their content because of the protests.
It’s not out of solidarity, advertisers are worried they’ll turn into lightning rods: https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-reddit-as-advertisers-weather-moderators-strike/
I read the thread and I kind of cringed inside. I understand the moderators of r/blind want to keep the resources & information accessible but they actually tried to negotiate and sort it out with Reddit according to their words and Reddit just didn’t give a fuck about them. What I would’ve done is just nuke the sub and move to Lemmy yet they continue to eat shit from u/spez
I feel for them.
It’s not like Lemmy has great mod tools.
I’ve not looked for myself, but does Lemmy or Kbin have good, accessible tooling? They’re both much more modern so I would expect that it would be a priority, but they’re also much less mature so I wouldn’t be surprised if little in that way has been implemented yet.
The frontend of Lemmy is an inferno app, which is a JS framework like react.
I noticed that command enter didn’t submit comments, so I made both a userscript and then later opened a pull request fixing it. The pull request has already been merged, so should be coming to Lemmy soon.
Back 13 years ago, I built the compact interface to reddit. Now, I’m a much better developer than I was then, but Lemmy front end seems a hell of a lot more organized
r/Blind is still a valuable resource for many people. No sense denying people access to it. r/Blind mods already created a Lemmy instance which they try to promote for their members. But learning new software can be challenging when you can’t see, especially if the software isn’t very accessible.
That is a fair, I just hate to see the community abused like that and being held hostage by one VC schmuck who doesn’t understand that he’s basically killing his platform.
r/Blind is still a valuable resource for Reddit to exploit many people, especially blind people.
This is following a predictable pattern:
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Person/group reaches out to admins in good faith to discuss changes.
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They don’t hear anything at all.
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Reddit touts them as an example of how they’re working with people.
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The admins get back to them.
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They don’t listen or care about the concerns and aren’t going to change anything.
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they actually tried to negotiate and sort it out with Reddit according to their words and Reddit just didn’t give a fuck about them.
More than that, during his AMA, spez actually said he was actively working with them. Fucking liar!
What’s so stupid is that they don’t even have to do that. alt text can be fucking handled by eslint and a pipeline checker. This is basic devops. Reddit has 1400 employees, wtf are they doing?
u/Spez really didn’t take the community seriously with the protests which has lead to this mass exodus. Crazy how they killed their platform so quickly with the writing on the wall in neon bright colors.
Wow, why am I surprised… They said they were going to keep accessibility for the blind, but it sucks so bad, it’s useless.
As someone with partial blindness, this is very pathetic of u/spez!
I’m curious how accessible Lemmy is to users who need to use assistive technology, and whether the many 3rd party app developers are making their apps accessible.
I’m not sure about the current offerings, but I think former Reddit apps transitioning to Lemmy (such as Sync) should retain any accessibility compatibility/features they had.
Actually, open-source software can be great for accessibility and I’ve been testing Lemmy with a screen reader.
Overall Lemmy is pretty close right now once a few roadblocks are removed. The audio captcha was broken, I helped fix that in the code just a couple of days ago but it hasn’t been released yet (at least not in lemmy.world).
After that I mostly see more subtle issues, not complete deal breakers. I haven’t started looking at moderator features, though.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is discriminating against people with disabilities!
Abelist fucks over there.
So dumb.
PS - It’s quite awful reading reddit after being here. I uninstalled RES, and good lord reading the comment chains now is ghastly.
Someone needs to start a “campaign” for naming and shaming companies who advertises on Reddit. “[This company] supports a company that actively discriminates against the disabled. #SayNoToReddit”
I already cancelled my Dashlane, after they did an AMA on Reddit during the blackout. I don’t support companies who cross picket lines.
honestly yes. While I do think “ableism” is sometimes took to a bit of an extreme, in this case it’s good… and serves the good purpose of making Reddit even less money, which is a good purpose in and of itself!
Things are getting worse. Some subreddits like /r/breastfeeding, which were private from the start, are now being forced by Reddit to make their subreddits public. It’s completely stupid. r/breastfeeding NEEDS to stay private to keep creeps and weirdos away.
I’m not up-to-date with the latest in accessibility, but does lemmy cater for those who need assistive tech? (just curious)
Lemmy is open source and built by the community - the apps are all third party - with the exception of Jerboa, which is maintained by the same maintainers as Lemmy and lemmys default web interface.
So if the community want accessibility, they can do it themselves, submitting code to the maintainers for consideration or building their own interface based on the official and universal API that all interfaces use.
Essentially the official app is official only because of who maintains it - it has just as much privilege and the same access as the other apps and interfaces, and that’s why the app is not called “The Lemmy App” but rather “Jerboa for Lemmy”
Thee official web interface is official and named “Lemmy-UI” not only because of the maintainers but also because it’s bundled with the standard instance backend code - you set up a standard Lemmy instance package, it comes with “Lemmy-UI” as it’s basic interface, alongside thus it also includes additional tools and access for instance admins to use to administer the instance while it’s running. (Defederation and Federation settings, wether to enabled downvoted, 2FA and many other settings)
Just taking a shot in the dark, but I’m assuming if people were making the needed third party apps for Reddit before, they can repeat this task for Lemmy.
(Please correct me if I’m wrong though.)
You are absolutely correct. Lemmy’s federated nature basically guarantees that free / affordable API access will always be available to app developers.
Thing about Lemmy is, since its federated, and fully opensource, even if it doesn’t right now, adding an accessible interface is trivial. Be it through forks/pull requests, separate clients or frontends, or as a full-fledged federated peer focused on accessibility
