Blind IDers and audio IDs

Projects can serve a few different purposes depending on how they are set up. Depending on your needs, they may not offer any useful additional functions.

Traditional projects: users add observations manually to the project. This is useful for collecting observations there would otherwise be no way to search for. For example, if you wanted to be able to refer to audio observations with begging calls by juvenile birds, a traditional project would allow you to put them all in one place.

A collection project is essentially a saved search. So you could create a collection project for all observations with audio. This would allow you to go directly to the explore page and get only the audio observations without having to apply filters. Collection projects are particularly useful as a shortcut if you frequently want to refer to a set of observations that requires multiple search parameters (for example, audio observations of birds in a certain location that are “needs ID”), because this saves you from having to enter all the search criteria each time you want to listen to or ID observations.

Another purpose of projects is to bring people together. For finding people who also ID audio files this part may be unnecessary, since you can use the leaderboards on the explore page. But iNat is also a social community, and some people find it meaningful to know there are other users who self-identify the same way they do (for example, LGBTQ users, or disabled users). More importantly, people also use projects as an information hub. Identifiers interested in a particular taxon or members of a local nature group might use projects to share resources, discuss challenges, or coordinate activities. This can be done by making journal posts. Generally only project administrators can create journal posts, but anyone can comment on them.

I think the reason some people have suggested creating a project for blind iNat users is because it could be a way to promote awareness about the existence of users like yourself and potentially also give you and other users a place to support each other and share strategies for dealing with the limitations of iNat’s interface. (Of course you are welcome to continue to share your experiences in the forum. I have found your posts valuable for shedding light on what barriers unfortunately still exist on iNat. It is more a question of whether you would value the solidarity of having a project specifically for other users who deal with the same challenges you do.)

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