#blind

A severe #accessibility issue I've seen very few people talking about is the widespread adoption (in my country at least) of touch-only card payment terminals with no physical number buttons.

Not only do these devices offer no tactile affordances, but the on-screen numbers move around to limit the chances of a customer's PIN number being captured by bad actors. In turn, this makes it impossible to create any kind of physical overlay (which itself would be a hacky solution at best).

When faced with such a terminal, blind people have only a few ways to proceed:

* Switch to cash (if they have it);
* refuse to pay via inaccessible means;
* ask the seller to split the transaction into several to facilitate multiple contactless payments (assuming contactless is available);
* switch to something like Apple Pay (again assuming availability); or
* hand over their PIN to a complete stranger.

Not one of these solutions is without problems.

If you're #blind, have you encountered this situation, and if so how did you deal with it? It's not uncommon for me to run into it several times per day.

why do you think this is not being talked about or made the subject of action by blindness organisations? Is it the case that it disproportionately affects people in countries where alternative payment technology (like paying via a smart watch) is slower to roll out and economically out of reach for residents?

@akamran@indieweb.social @altbot@fuzzies.wtf @Jyoti@mas.to be me, be visually impaired, notice comic boosted by mutual, start reading overly verbose alt text.

Sigh.
This was written by an LLM wasn’t it?

Continue being me, get confused by alt text, zoom into comic and strain vision to read it, notice alt text said it’s four panels arranged horizontally when it’s actually a 2 by 2 square, fail to find the “small cylindrical object between the two mice” from the alt text, realize one of the characters is that object but not a mouse and not cylindrical.

Sigh.

I was so happy with the culture of using alt text on the Fedi, but it’s being flooded by wasteful and incorrect descriptions promoted as helpful. The tech bros are winning. Human art and thoughtfully communication is being chewed up by machines that waste power and water while pretending to help people.

If AltBot provides you a description, I beg of you to write one yourself instead. You know what you posted, you know why, you know what’s important and what it means. I want that. I want what the human posting for other humans wants to share.

#blind #accessibility #AIslop