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On this week’s show, understandably, there’s mounting frustration among the substantial number of blind people who’ve made the move to Mastodon to find that entities providing services to, or speaking on behalf of, the blind community have not moved with them. The situation we find ourselves in now, where accessible and in some cases custom-made third- party Twitter clients have been banned from the platform, was foreseeable as long as five months ago, so these entities have had more than ample time to prepare. I have written an open letter asking entities who value engagement with the blind community to stop equivocating and to follow their audience. If you’d like to read and hopefully sign the letter, you can find it at https://bit.ly/BlindMastodon. I would appreciate you sharing it widely.
Since our return from the summer break, we’ve been covering the battle of the book players. HumanWare is in the process of releasing the next generation of its venerable Victor Reader Stream, and Hims has its challenger, the SensePlayer. But this week, we here from one SensePlayer former owner who was full of praise just a few weeks ago who has now boxed up the device and sent it back, and Brian Hartgen, who was anticipating the arrival of his device, talks about why he is seriously considering doing the same.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I would be speaking with the author of “Caroline”, a novel by Adrian Spratt, to give you an opportunity to read the book before the interview. Adrian is blind himself, as is one of the main characters in the book. We’ll discuss the depiction of blind characters in mainstream literature. And in keeping with our philosophy that it’s possible to disagree respectfully and still have a robust discussion, Adrian and I explore our very different views on ableist language.
Listeners discuss a range of tech topics, including a foldable full-sized keyboard recommendation, more Focus 40 Blue reliability concerns, and why one listener is underwhelmed by Apple Music Classical.
All this and much more coming up this week on Living Blindfully.