cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/7716703

Earlier this month I logged on to a Zoom webinar that had chat enabled. The meeting had a large attendance. The chat quickly filled up with dozens of people sharing their city or country, and later commenting on technical problems.

Some screen reader users had a difficult experience due to the heavy use of the chat. Here are three bits of feedback:

What is your opinion on this aspect of videoconference chat etiquette? I'm not talking about offensive or dangerous content--just the volume of content.

• Should frivolous chat messages be avoided, so that screen reader users don't miss important chat messages?
• Or is important that chat can be a chaotic free-for-all, to get the full Zoom experience?
• Does anyone have personal experience with this?
• Does anyone have a preferred etiquette guide that covers this?

Thumbnail image is an illustration of over a dozen empty word balloons, overlaid on each other in a chaotic mess. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/7474838

Via @nick@hkc.social:

Big update to Firefox (117) dropped if using a screen reader. YouTube video lists, and videos themselves, now scroll much better than before.

This Friday, 2023-08-25, a vendor is randomly choosing winners to receive a free ticket to a September conference hosted by London Web Standards.

Entry is by replying to this post on Mastodon.

Via the A11yTalks webinar Accessibility in Action: Indigenous Communities by Meggan Van Harten

Link to font:https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/governments/services-for-government/policies-procedures/bc-visual-identity/bc-sans

Several typefaces were examined that matched the criteria and a handful of these were tested. Noto Sans stood out as an option as it already had an extensive set of characters supporting over 800 languages, including many Indigenous languages in Canada. The typeface was also originally designed for enhanced readability on-screen.

Under an open-font license, Noto Sans presented the opportunity to access the font files and modify and improve its character sets. With expertise from a typographic Indigenous language expert, and from FirstVoices (an initiative of the First Peoples’ Cultural Council), additional characters and syllabic glyphs were added to support Indigenous languages in B.C. This new typeface was named BC Sans and first launched in 2019.