Dyspraxia+Dyslexia and tech

My accessibility review of Nextcloud

In a previous post, I had written a post about the accessibility aspects of basecamp 3 and Hey Mail. In this post I will be writing about the issue of using the cloud especially if you are really bad at organising information, using multiple services and constantly having to switch services and devices. 

  The security of these devices are also a big question, much of what we keep is kept in the cloud, a bunch of servers in a remote location away from everyone else. These issues have shown over the past year where we have seen Microsoft being hacked by the Russians and Chinese over the past year, effectively leading to a lot of businesses losing a lot of money through ransomware attacks and data being stolen. The other thing that tends to happen is that many of these companies, such as Google can read through anything that is stored on the cloud, and know what you have bought, who you have been in contact with and what are in those files.

  Many of us use three or four different forms of software because we use two or three different devices, such as a Windows PC, which forces us to have a Microsoft account, an android phone or an iphone, which requires us to have a Google and an Apple account and will use their own services first and foremost, and a console or a tablet which may force us to sign in to a different account altogether. While, it is brilliant many of our files are automatically saved and therefore we are more likely to forget where they are because of our short-term memory. There is another argument made on the privacy point of view, which would suggest that our files are being read or viewed by Google or Microsoft. 

  The other argument that can be made is of the font language that is often used by these cloud companies to use their fonts, because often these contain trackers and therefore companies do not open source their fonts. The other issue is with these fonts is that they are not often dyslexic friendly because they can often be small or in italic and do not space out the words in the sentences. This can often mean that we do not recognise that a word is there, or skip over it, sometimes merge the words. This can make it longer to read because it takes longer for our brains to process that the word is there. 

  Nextcloud, an open-source cloud service that you run in your home, often helps with many of these issues by allowing you to integrate various email services, such as Outlook and Gmail, directly into the cloud system and therefore back up your cloud service rather than to the Google Drive or OneDrive. This means that all of your emails, files, tasks and calendars are integrated directly into one system. The other benefit to this is what they call the 'dashboard,' this is a place for all of your emails. weather, tasks, files and social media accounts, meaning it reminds you immediately of all the things you have to do during the day and all of the files you have to do, all the emails to write in a non-intrusive way.