Re: Adding Radegast
I don't want to make it seem as though I'm calling out the OP for being dishonest. I don't believe they're being disingenuous or deceptive. It seems to be more an issue of standards. They have found a world in which they can feel at home, and have accepted the limitations that exist. I am not content with that for my own usage, because I've experienced SL visually. I will say though, even if I never had, I still wouldn't be impressed with the access that is granted by Radegast.
The one area that I think the OP might be exaggerating slightly on is regarding how much help they require from sighted individuals to do certain tasks - at least for the first time. Clothing is one big factor, because the last time I was in world using Radegast, I got sighted assistance picking out clothing - which was fine - but I then had no idea which items were which, because the way they were identified was by using labels that had no meaning to me. Now, maybe the client offers the ability to re-label each element, but they would still presumably need help sorting through that for the first time at least.
The second is attending events This post has some good info and goes over things that I didn't know, but of relevance here is the root prim issue. Everything in SL is made up of prims - primitive shapes - and then textured. If an object has several prims glued together to make one thing - which most do - you're not gonna know where in or on that thing you end up. If you're at a speaking engagement or somewhere that offers seating, you best hope you don't sit on someone. Can you imagine how embarrassing that would be IRl if you attended a symposium and sat on someone? Well, SL is supposed to be a second life, meaning that you treat it like you would if you were really there. For all intents and purposes, you are really there and it is real, so why would we expect this type of thing to be tolerated.
Here's what I think is going on. OP is very passionate about SL and getting blind people in world. They are also very experienced with it, claiming 9 years in world. What happens to any of us after 9 years of experience with something? We tend to underestimate the initial learning curve for newbies. Not just that, but if we've solved certain problems by simply getting sighted help in certain situations, we've made that as part of our routine. It therefore doesn't seem odd to us to ask for help. For me personally, no amount of in world training is going to make me want to ask for help for every day tasks. If people want to do that, that is their prerogative and I am not judging them. I do believe there are some activities that can be undertaken completely independently as a blind person in world, but I don't believe that they encompass as much as it would take for me to take Radegast seriously. Maybe if we had a proper viewer that does everything that Firestorm does but is also screen reader accessible, I'd be open to exploring SL again. Until then, it's not for me, and I have been on top of this lately, because I don't think that it is necessarily going to be for many of the forumites either.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
