my dad is blind.

he used to use yahoo! chat and he REALLY enjoyed the voice chat feature. i think it’s because it reminded him of party lines from his younger days. anyway he did honestly develop relationships with some of the people on that platform and when yahoo! shut down their chat platform, a diaspora happened. he followed some of them to paltalk.

i doubt most blind people have ever even tried paltalk: 10 years ago they started pushing an interface that seems actively hostile to screenreaders and keyboard navigation. more recently (the last year or maybe two), they totally disabled their “classic” interface and i got to learn just how hostile the new interface is to accessibility software. its actually impossible for him to use his microphone or read the text that appears in the text chat. this puts him in the awkward position of being able to listen to others and type out responses or quips (slowly, but he’s getting quicker)

i am quite adept at keyboard based navigation as a result of his disability. i feel that i am supremely capable of learning and teaching software for the blind.

UNFORTUNATELY he is also a diagnosed antisocial narcissist, and absolutely resistant to change. i feel confident that i could learn discord well enough to give him some training sessions and the whole discord ecosystem would open up for him. but he insists his friends are on paltalk.

can anyone recommend software for him, or give me compelling arguments in favor of discord? i will say he primarily likes to chat with boomers about politics, if that’s any help picking a suggestion.

ADDENDUM

this is just a little vent from me: he insists these people are his friends and i tell him if that’s the case, they will give him their email address or phone number or just follow him somewhere that is accessible (i know they won’t though and i think he’s afraid to find out that’s true). to compound this particular difficulty, one of the paltalk chatrooms he hangs out in has a rule (but it’s more of an ethos) that you can’t talk about other chat rooms or platforms, as though drawing people away from their channel is a threat to them. it feels like a fucking cult.

fin