Went on a TV talk show with my wife, to talk about accessibility and inclusive design.

Went on a TV talk show with my wife, to talk about accessibility and inclusive design. Definitely mentioned various assistive technologies along the way. So far, I'm already receiving emails with mp3 files in them, because "this makes it more interesting for you not to listen to the robotic voice all the time." Maybe I should've explained bit better than screen readers allow me to read emails ca 700 words per minute, and skip over rambling texts...

@jakobrosin Explaining a screen reader is not a software to turn text documents into mp3's has become a fixed part of any 101 introduction to the subject I do since a professor asked me this exact question. Somehow it doesn't seem to be necessary wherever I preach these days. Are those actual voice messages from the senders or TTS/AI generated ones?

@Piciok @jakobrosin This reminds me of the conversation I had with the director of my Regional Examination Commission, basically the organization which handles the day-to-day of running the government-mandated final exams (think GCSEs / A-Levels) here.

She didn't understand the difference between an audio CD and a CD ROM with a PDF (or Word) file on it that a screen reader would read. She also thought that a screen reader is a program that connects me over video call to a real person who reads text from paper documents that I place in front of my camera.

This was the only time in my life where I wanted to take the phone and throw it at the wall.

This was during my middle school days, my high school fortunately managed to shield me from all this madness.

The commission for that particular region is... well... known for being utterly incompetent, obstreperous, objecting to basically everything as a matter of principle, and generally being a pain in the ass for anybody who is unfortunate enough to live in their jurisdiction.

@miki @jakobrosin A related story: there was a national project coordinated among a couple of schools for the blind in Poland which, to cut long story short, was aiming at preparing us for the FCE Cambridge examination. The commission in our city objected against us taking the reading comprehension part on our computers as the use of text-to-speech would turn it into listening comprehension. Ehhh...

@Piciok @jakobrosin Friend of mine took one of the Cambridge tests, and she got the test in contracted braille, despite requesting uncontracted multiple times.

@Piciok @jakobrosin Which makes me wonder whether blind schools in other countries teach that. I've never heard of it being taught here. Most English textbooks don't even use the English punctuation signs.

@miki @jakobrosin Definitely a problem at mine. I was the one campaigning for it being taught and ended up figuring basics by myself when I had a bit of spare time and trying to explain what I knew to my teachers.