 At now, to the talk state of the accessibility, a speaker is Peter Lars, an autistic 3D artist. And he is also working with Blender. Welcome to the state of the accessibility. I am Peter Lars. And what I use in real life is noise cancelling headphones. Technology has improved many things in the last couple of years. But some things are not good enough. This is the outline of the talk. We start with a rough overview. We will look at the different types of disabilities. We will also discuss how accessible the web currently is. I will give you a bit of advice on what you can do as a regular user. And I also want to give you some advice on what you can do as a developer. But first of all, a bit of content notes. I will talk about pandemic, but in a positive context. I will also talk about barriers and ableism. And also about problems with mental health and negative self-images. So what was new in 2020-2021? Well, we got a pandemic and everyone couldn't go outside. And suddenly a lot of things that were previously offline are now happening online. And that had many advantages for people with disabilities. So if you are out of spoons, then you can just shut down the laptop and you are already at home. You are not required to travel anywhere. And it's a lot easier to participate when you are only required to be at home in front of your laptop. It's also easier to be stealthy, to not appear in public as a disabled person. And of course you can also participate from your badge at home. And therefore, online events have less barriers than online events. Not all of them, but many online events are more accessible than offline events. And I'm really happy that the current Congress is online. And I hope that there will be future remote chaos experiences that are equally positioned as the offline event in the future. So that people are also able to participate online. And my big wish for the future is that we should maintain these online spaces because they make it easier for people with disabilities to participate. I want to do a little excursion about the spoon theory. So what is a spoon? A spoon is an unspecific unit for social energy. People with disabilities have on average less spoons than people without disabilities. And there's also the expanded spoon theory, which includes forks and knives. But spoons are basically an energy of a unit of energy. And people have different amounts of spoons. And depending on what your disability is, some tasks require more effort. And then there's also the forks, which make it harder for you to reach for more spoons. And then there's also knives, which are kind of like spoons, but a lot less effective. So if we talk about deaf people or people who have very bad hearing, so we can see that the internet is actually quite comprehensible as text and images. So there's really no barrier. Subtitles also exist for many videos. If it's broadcasted in US American TV, then there's actually a requirement that subtitles exist. There are also automatically generated subtitles. But these should only be considered as a starting point for creating manually created subtitles. Because there are false positives really got to speech recognition. And I wanted to add a very big footnote for subtitles. Because people who have been deaf for life, for them it is not natural to understand text-based language. That's why in many cases it's also necessary to see the sign language of the content. Yes, so basically sign language is the mother tongue and not text-based language. It would be good to have sign language for videos to improve accessibility. There's also blind people or people with bad sight. There are different forms. Some people are really better at focusing on text or focusing in general. Some people are really bad with different colors, with seeing different colors. Text on the internet is relatively well understandable. Podcasts are awesome because these are a lot more pleasant to consume than text. And there are also browser add-ons that increase the contrast or exchange the funds so that they are easier to read. And these tools really make it a lot easier to consume text. Something that I really care about is image descriptions and audio descriptions because these are a really rare thing. So an audio description means that visual content of a video will be explained by a speaker so that people who cannot see the video also understand what is being talked about. And a special category that is very problematic for blind people is games because many games require people to actually see the game pieces. At least there are filters for people who are colorblind. We have the category of motoric impairments. The internet helps because it works in their own apartment. And websites that require less interactions are really pleasant or rather pleasant to use. This is one of the many accessibility features that is being optimized anyway. Sometimes some things are easier to reach with for example just like three clicks but then there's also games and there is some progress. For instance there is the Xbox Adaptive Controller and it enables people with motoric impairments to play these games and there are also some good options for increased accessibility but there are still many games that are very proud to be exclusive. For example the Dark Souls series which I find very problematic. There are many people who want to explore those worlds and it's very fun. And I think it's really wrong. I think it's very wrong to require of everyone to have high motor skills to play these games. There are also cognitive disabilities. So disabilities that decrease the ability of the brain and something that is really growing and becoming more and more problematic are dark patterns. Dark patterns are unfortunately becoming more of a standard or a common side in the web. And for us regular people it's just annoying but for people with disabilities this is extremely difficult and for instance the cookie banner they show you a very big button and yeah it makes it really really difficult to reject those cookies especially for disabled people and this is a really good example of a dark pattern because yeah so this is all about giving the user a choice and enticing the user to make a choice that is actually not in the interest of the user but if you have a cognitive impairment then it's more likely that you fall for these dark patterns and make decisions against your own benefit and another aspect is easy language or simple language. This is language without foreign words without technical words and common words and it's written in such a way that information is presented in common redundant fashion. Okay now we're going to talk about the perspective of now we're talking about this perspective of mob psychological impairments it can have influences on depression on fear situations on on eating disorders and on maybe other things they can make you do things that you really actually don't even want to do and or maybe don't have fun with they sometimes often they often don't really allow you to completely freely decide if you want to be exposed to these things such as also cyber mobbing. All right so let's get to a more fun and easy thing to relax this is a a shark that maybe looks a bit like a dog because the internet is not just evil if you have psychological disorders it can also be very interesting and good to find the communities that have lots of people that are very similar to oneself and I have found a great circle of friends on the internet and also especially in the chaos environment that are somewhat similar to myself and might have my issues and they also give lots of marginalized groups a platform to represent themselves and feel normalized and the youtube algorithm as broken as it is is not really someone who actively decides oh this person has some sort of disorder so I don't want to show this to anyone but you can just upload and if it's clicked and if people click on it then then it's viewed the way one can be seen and feel more normal even inside and outside of bubbles that is that these communities can give give one and that is something that really feels well and also actually prevents that these issues can get developed further and in a psychological direction and now let's get to some constructive ideas so what what could end users do to improve the internet so what could you keep online spaces alive this is something that the internet and also the world really made a lot more accessible and that is something that we should keep alive be informed be give attention follow follow the activists and there are lots of people that are the people themselves know the most what they need and to to obtain this information about what could be done that there are lots of these activists that really have good content and also be be an ally and we're as we we have in German Germany the law that the dignity of humans is unimpeachable and that also applies to everyone including the impaired and there are still in many places in Germany with bureaucracy with the train system in the the everyday jobs there are way too many not even necessary barriers for many people but also have some understanding that yeah not everybody with impairments wants to actively fight this fight and yeah many people with impairments often have less less things they can do and they have to be more sparing and I for example also really appreciate if people mark sarcasm irony and jokes in tweets and such things because it's much easier to understand just the slash s for sarcasm for example something else that you can do that will only cost you two to five minutes per picture is adding image text texts on images will replace image information that only exists visually and ideally are as short as possible just image descriptions that apply some opinion on the picture are not that great they should be entirely descriptive such as like with a comic you shouldn't explain the visual joke but only just explain all the base information from the picture that we need to understand the joke ourselves so another thing that was mentioned to me if you actually write descriptions on the image use the same language as the content maybe you can even translate it in some cases because not everywhere streams will automatically switch to the right language and especially also screen readers and having the screen reader create a different language and having it switched over for one image is a difficult thing so I have another xkcd comic here that I have translated for this German talk so I will write comic in the first line then text column a network tries to be a solution for everything basically a Walmart of the social media then below that there is an image that I call a comic panel it's a sketch of a room with shelves and there's a stickman that is holding a can and has a speech bubble that says hey what an accident that I am meeting you here and then I wrote second figure with messy hair which I only wrote because I don't know anything else about them they have a speech bubble oh hey yeah how's it going and then maybe the the hair wasn't really necessary to understand the comic but it is there so I try to describe it so this is of course a bit a thing of discussion and opinion but describing a bit is always better than describing nothing and then lastly there's a second text below the panel and it says if if it's forced to become the Walmart of social media this comic is a bit difficult because the sentence is separated between above the panel and below the panel I am not perfectly sure how I would do this maybe one could put those together in the description but I try to be as exact as possible so the next thing that much too many social media networks don't do right but is something that can be done is use links that speak for themselves links are often not great for screen readers because if random numbers and letters are in the link then it's really really really really hard to to listen to and it's also very important that the link is replaced with a text for that reason and the text then accurately describes the content of the link then like if you have a screen reader and to read across a page with a lot of links and it reads you the links then if the links are safe explanatory then you understand what is linked so if you maybe have like a page with lots of videos of cats and you shouldn't write just down the cat in the the url in the in the text and also not a click here with the link but ideally ideally just use the the descriptive text like page with great cat videos and link that sentence a part of the sentence content notes so content notes are sometimes also called content warnings they can help people use make informed decisions on what kinds of content they want to consume so this is maybe about hidden topics that people don't really expect in an article and to just mention those ahead of time the detail details don't really need to get into that but maybe if a content is about screens and the linux kernel is mentioned then this could be a content note these are of course topics that I would not really consider problematic and it's always a question of discussion what exactly should be mentioned and what shouldn't because the future is usually meant to be used to help people that have traumatic experiences with certain topics so I think this is much more important for any topic that is associated with common trauma and the c3rc at some point IOC had a list of content notes for speakers that should be considered okay let's do a little diversion street complete is a great app that with which you can help adding to open street map data it's basically pokemon go but useful you walk around the world and you add data to street that is not tagged sufficiently and you can add a lot more information that can be very useful for blind people people with hearing impairments and stuff such and that is also one example for things that developers can do to provide more accessibility but for now let's do so at some point I was grocery shopping but there is a lot of similar situation there that can often happen from warmth from respect with from people without respect from lots of screens with animations and crazy images in various places on products and that is very very overwhelming and at some point I just asked somebody from the from the store if they can just calm things down when I'm there or could you maybe introduce an hour of calm shopping but the people from the shop told me that they can't even regulate the volume of the cash register systems and so wait like they could maybe buy a new one but I thought that maybe wouldn't the store is it really that much important that the customers are continuously influenced with ads then is that more important than me being able to pleasantly buy things and that's why I don't really buy at Kauffland anymore and of course this is a systematic problem and that's why the developers have a lot of power here so the system has made all the decisions for the people working at the grocery store and there was no flexibility to provide some service to us as a customer and that's of course a bad system so there's a single point of failure here that has been created that could actually easily be avoided if for example there was the ability to adjust the volume and if there were alternatives as well because every single thing can very quickly become barrier that has to be circumvented some people really can't work with text chats some people really can't call so ideally if you have a great support you have both text chat and calls personally I really like self-service checkout registers but for some other people that can be really difficult to use so both self-service and other people's service is having both really provides alternatives and makes the experience for everyone more barrier free let's get back to video games so an adjustable difficulty is great you can often have many balancing variables that can be opened up to the user such as have more health slow down the game more double jumps stuff like that Celet has a great example for that and lots of these variables were shown in this example there are also alternative ways to game that can be provided for example some some games like dirt rally many of them can be played both as an arcade game or as a simulation game and Super Mario Odyssey they're two very different game modes that are much more accessible and are better just from from the game concept and easier to play than if and then maybe also use established standards like more more distinguishable colors and audio descriptions for example there are also some more requests here that we have I think I'm gonna have to hurry up here and half stone the game half stone there is a very patient community that creates extensions for the game but this community always has to decompile um the newest version of the game to develop the community extensions and but that also requires the support at least the acceptance by the software publishers otherwise the development can't continue some advice for web developers um yeah I don't have enough time unfortunately but I have an accessibility guide here that is linked on my slides you can use it as yeah to to know what to do and to summarize web accessibility is improving and there are more tools that improve the contrast and the degree of the awareness is also increasing that there are people with disabilities on the internet and also image descriptions are really really helpful so this is also useful if for search engines so basically accessibility is beneficial for everyone and please do not implement dark patterns they are bad for everyone and as ccc we say really smart especially proprietary softwares are causing a lot of problems okay I am better last and you can contact me if you have any further questions yeah thank you very much beta last this is a very big topic but also I'm very thankful that you took the time to talk about this and told us about us thank you okay let's get to the first question so if there's a statistic that I already have entirely described in within the text do I also need to add a description to the image itself yeah um that's a good point sometimes sometimes an image basically augments an already complex text if that is the case then just write as the image description statistic as described in the text you don't need to write it a second time all right thanks then I have another question from myself so you mentioned the content notes is there a format that should be used there is a feature in mastodon with a specific field for this and this is really good if you write it in there that's really helpful but otherwise you can always have like a small text block that you keep free for specifically that but yeah these content warrants are not that established yet so they are not really any standards yet okay thanks then here's another great question are there good tools that help you estimate the accessibility of websites yes there are automatic tools a simple hack is to look at the website without css because it's like what people who use screen readers see there's also a tool but I don't really remember the name of it I'm trying to yeah okay the tool is linked in the slides yeah you might add that to the notes okay great so what is the legal situation with dark patterns regarding the limitations of some people regardless of the GDPR and cookie laws and stuff like that are there laws regarding that as far as I know so many websites are outside of the general equal treatment law so it's not really yeah so there doesn't seem to be laws but the new german government plans that there will be more requirements for better accessibility in the future and I can very well imagine that dark patterns will be no longer legal some dark patterns could also be be no longer legal because of unfair competition so there are also like cases where there's terms of use with some sections that actually don't make sense legally but people just write stuff in there anyway all right thank you okay so the next question is what about using umlauts in combination with screen readers does for example the umlaut do you work or should one write ui alternatively if it's tagged in the right language then and the screen reader also supports umlauts then then the use and and the other umlauts will be read aloud correctly yeah okay are there um low effort ways to and offers for people with dementia on the internet or is that not really a reasonably use case i have um interacted with a firma recently firm recently a company recently who focused on this problem but spontaneously i can't really say anything about this okay thank you so how well can screen readers work with gender just and fair language my favorite option is to use uh so my favorite way of doing it is to use the german neutral masculine version which you can also abbreviate but um gender formulations are a bit difficult and and i prefer to use the underscore because it is um pronounced as a small pause via the text to speech programs okay okay good to know thanks so one more translation here um in the german text language of the djs is generally a um change of text is for texts that um have some copyright on them um do you usually ask them before um creative commons licenses are really helpful here um creative commons uh uh so creative commons um buy and non-commercial as you can see on my slides but if there is a non-derivative license then you have to theoretically ask the offers if you may adapt the things so if you want to add like an image description to a non-derivative work then you really have to ask the original offer but i also think it's ridiculous if artists sue you because you added an image description i don't think that was that this will happen is there an overview about over accessibility dark patterns to avoid there was a talk uh at devog about dark patterns and there were there were yeah there were several dark patterns that were presented that are in general bad there are also um anti patterns in addition to bad dark patterns but i don't quite remember any examples okay i think that's one more question that is currently appearing in the pad but we are breaking the talk off here so you listed your twitter handle here i think so um that is probably also a place where people can contact you um yeah i'm also on mastodon on chaos or social or on solitude maybe also that is probably where i'm also going to be in the quiet cube that is both available from the world and from the hub thank you for your attention also from the translation booth you just heard the talk state of the accessibility by betalas it was translated by urn and oscar if you have feedback for us please use the hashtag c3 lingo thank you and goodbye