Jeremiah Ticket pushed changes to the master branch of the I38 project: github.com/stormdragon2976/I38 Added volume beep to all system volume changes. Corrected typos for volume Jump variable. Moved some things around in the written config file to be more consistant with placement.
The accessibility for the blind advent calendar: day 12 - Poland - expand the content warning to open the window for today!
Somehow we made it through the first half of this calendar. Thank you for all of your interactions and encouragement. It's very motivating to see how far these little posts can reach. So I realized that all the time I have been doing this calendar, I haven't mentioned Poland, where I come from, once. Shame on me! Let's try to make it right. Inpost is the pioneer as the provider of parcel locker technology in Poland. It's quite common to order something and, instead of requesting that the package is delivered directly to your door, have it dropped at one of the lockers which are often located quite centrally, at a post office or another place of significance in a given city, town or village. Inpost have come up with quite a clever way of allowing blind people to open these lockers and find the right door. Not only is the app itself accessible so you can track your delivery all the way through but once your order arrives, all you have to do is go to the place where your locker is located, open the door for your parcel from within the app and read the instruction telling you which door is yours E.G. third up, sixth to the left of the touch screen. The system has become so useful for the general public that in order to become more sustainable, Inpost have begun installing screenless lockers so that everything has to be done with the app. This way, it is also possible to send a package somewhere without the need to stick a physical label on it. Other accessibility accommodations include the "easy access zone" as per the link below. inpost.pl/en/help-easy-access-… What are you ordering this Christmas and how is it delivered to you? #Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #Poland #Shopping
Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth has fled his home due to an escalation in threats due to the accusations being made against him by Musk and his cronies, which have nothing to do with reducing child sexual exploitation or child abuse material on Twitter. This is Musk using his power and influence at Twitter to organize and mobilize his base to harrass a former Twitter employee. 1/
Ulysses, the popular Markdown editor and writing app, is getting an important update this week with version 29. The update now lets users organize their writing into Projects with dedicated sections, Keyword Pools, and more.
Ja klar. Da schmeißen wir die Gasturbinen an weil zu wenig Strom und treiben damit den Strompreis hoch - und dann kann die deutlich günstigere Windenergie nicht eingespeist werden. Ich will gar nicht wissen, welche Sorte Lack das war. Vermutlich die fehlenden Stromtrassen, die der "Vorreiter" blockiert hat. 😖
Die deutschen Energieversorger erhalten von den Verbrauchern eine Entschädigung, wenn sie ihren Strom etwa wegen Netzengpässen nicht einspeisen können. Im vorigen Jahr wurde ein Höchststand gemessen.
Bei den Beträgen muss ein technischer Grund vorliegen. Ich vermute die fehlende Transportkapazität vom Norden nach Bayern. Jemand mit Ahnung hier, der das erläutern kann? @holm
If you want to read any of my cartoons about Twitter or Google, the best places are twittoons.com and goomics.net . No paywall, no ads, no subscription, easy navigation.
You can join a group by following the group account. You can post to the group by @-ing the group account, which then reposts that to all its other followers
It is similar to the existing a.gup.pe system, but chirp.social allows a group manager to delete posts and ban people from the group.
It works on all Fediverse platforms including Mastodon.
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
I have strong opinions on my preferred presentation framework. I have these opinions for good reasons, which I am happy to explain. If you are a conference organizer, I would ask you to give this a read, and if you aren't a conference organizer but know one, I would ask you to point them to this. Thank you!
If you’re wondering about Mastodon’s impact, Twitter is now automatically marking links to mastodon as “sensitive” (aka dangerous) and forcing users who get them to “appeal” the claim. In case Elon didn’t seem desperate enough for you already…
It’s not just links to Mastodon. It happened to me just using the word mastodon in another context. My link was actually to a story about mastodon DNA being sequenced at the MIT Technology Review
@Friendica Support I can't understand one thing: from the main screen of one of my friendica forums I don't see notifications or messages. But the browser tab shows me a number of notifications. Why is there this difference?
@Signor Amministratore It looks like you're missing an icon in the top bar, there should be a bell next to the group of people, and this is the notification icon.
@Hypolite Petovan I miss the notification bell because what you see is a "Forum" account. However, even without the bell, I should see all the notifications at the link https://poliverso.org/notifications/system?show=all
@Signor Amministratore Unfortunately I can't vouch for the accuracy of this page that is severely outdated and hasn't received any love lately. the simple fix would be to suppress the notification number for forum accounts since the notifications can't be accessed from the bell icon, which is where they end up with certainty for regular accounts.
@Hypolite Petovan What do you mean when you say "I can't vouch for the accuracy of this page that is severely outdated and hasn't received any love lately"? Are you ironic? Or am I just misunderstanding something in the visualization? My instance runs the rel. 2022.10...
@Signor Amministratore What I mean is that this specific page may not show all the notifications that we currently display in the bell icon menu. Even on the latest stable release. We need to get around to fix it or remove it altogether, but in the mean time it will stay inaccurate.
@Hypolite Petovan I found a trick to see notifications and mark them as read! This is a somewhat stupid, cumbersome, and impractical way; yet it worked.
In practice you have to open two browser tabs, logged in with an account other than the forum one (for example, the account that controls the forum account).
At this point on one of the two browser tabs, you change your account and switch to the forum account.
As soon as you've browsed two or three pages, a funny thing will happen on the other browser tab: 1) the interface remains that of the normal account and will not yet have transformed into the typical interface of "forum" accounts 2) however the logged in user is the new one, and therefore will be the "forum" user
In doing so, you will see the bell icon (as with the normal account), but with notifications from the "forum" account
@Hypolite Petovan Today I created several forum accounts in my friendica instance. I created them above all to give Italian Mastodon users a valid alternative to GUP (also because, paradoxically, with Friendica I prefer to follow the Lemmy communities rather than the Friendica forums)! However I need to understand if everything works and I can understand it better by logging into the individual accounts and looking at the timeline from within
RScan: for blind fellows, who find identification of things through OCR too slow and inefficient (1/2)
Have you ever been impatiently waiting, until your phone reads through all the information in all sorts of languages about the manufacturer, compounds, source, distributor and finally gets to the name and flavor of the chocolate you're holding in your hand? I had. And some kinds of goodies are just like fabricated for this, say bottles. I don't even know where the title is in the first place, the fact that the OCR software can have problems with the curvy surface doesn't help much either, when the bottle is full the recognition may be hard to do in air as I struggle to keep it still in one hand, and even if I finally get to the desired info, hoping I would hear also say the bottle's volume is hyperoptimistic at best.
Thus, I developed RScan. Simply point your device to the product, and in few seconds, you will hear the brand, name, type and sometimes also the related metric information like volume, weight etc. How does it work? RScan is a barcode reader for Android, that is looking for barcodes - an identification mark that every commercial product needs to have. When it finds one, it automatically looks it up on DuckDuckGo, and using a special algorithm, tries to figure out which search result would be most useful for the user. Designed for speed and convenience, from my experience, it correctly identifies 90% of products and thanks to swift operation, can be used to quickly sort through whole groups of goodies you need to classify.
RScan: for blind fellows, who find identification of things through OCR too slow and inefficient (2/2)
Right now, I'm seeking beta-testers. The app seems to work pretty well in Slovakia and Czech, but the performance is highly dependent on the quality of Internet's product coverage in particular country. Simply put, if you want the app to provide you with a good search result, there need to be some in the first place. If you like trying new things, perhaps reading a bit and would like to help, then you're more than welcome in the app's repository: github.com/RastislavKish/RScan…
Please make sure, for any action, to stay in the development branch, as the main-one is pretty out-of date. Also note the app was shifting design goals from its last release, so the readme is a bit messy, auto-recognition is the aimed capability right now.
The testing procedure is very simple, just scan anything you find interesting, and see if you get the brand, name, type and a metric information for the product if there could be any. If you're missing information, click on the result in the list and see in the new window, if the app could have made a better choice from the ones presented in the name suggestions list. Your feedback would be very welcome. The percentage of successfully identified objects, your satisfaction with the provided information, and (completely optional), your country (or at least the region) are all very helpful.
RScan: for blind fellows, who find identification of things through OCR too slow and inefficient (1/2)
Hello and thank you for this amazing app. I have only heard it being tested by my friends but I was very impressed with what I heard. It worked great with Polish products too. I wanted to share some suggestions: 1. Would it be possible for it not to enforce the landscape orientation and let the user decide how they want to view it? 2. Any way of it using your default system TTS engine rather than Google or let the user choose? 3. With some products that are sold internationally, the app is more likely to come up with a result in English rather than our default language. Is there any way to influence that? Once again, thank you and keep up the good work!
RScan: for blind fellows, who find identification of things through OCR too slow and inefficient (1/2)
@Piciok Hello, thanks for your feedback! 1. Yes, in fact, many users from Czechoslovakia requested this. Originally, I decided to enforce landscape to remind users of the ideal barcode scanning position, but it's true the gestures can in turn get a bit confusing. I'm not sure when do I get to implement this, since I'm not yet decided even how exactly to do it i.e. if the app is going to maintain its orientation, or it will be integrated with the system, but I certainly have this on my roadmap. 2. Thanks for reporting this. I thought the app uses the system default TTS, since that's how my tts code used to work. But I've been rewriting, modernizing and updating it multiple times, so I may have messed up something in the process, I will give it a look. 3. Do you know, in case of the English descriptions, if there were any available Polish-ones after clicking on the particular scan? The languages, in fact, are one of the reasons I've claimed an international beta. Right now, RScan doesn't consider languages when selecting the most useful descriptions, but I can imagine making it do so. But I need a direct feedback from someone who's running into this problem, as over here, the only products I found to have an English description did not have any Slovak search results.
RScan: for blind fellows, who find identification of things through OCR too slow and inefficient (1/2)
From what one of the users told me, nothing happens when he taps twice on that first result that is automatically announced. Is this how it's supposed to be done?
RScan: for blind fellows, who find identification of things through OCR too slow and inefficient (1/2)
@Piciok the main screen contains a list of the currently made scans. Double tapping on any of them should bring a screen for attaching your own description to the barcode. This screen contains a list of suggestions, which are basically DuckDuckGo search results for that barcode. Double tapping on any of them will fill out the field on the bottom of the screen with that result, it saves typing or copying. For purposes of debugging the automatic suggestion algorithm, the list of the suggestions present on this screen is a good aid because these are basically the options the automated recognition is choosing from, so we can see if the algorithm has made a good choice or not.
Even if he hadn’t written three of the most-loved #DoctorWho stories, Chris Boucher would be a legend for just this line:
"You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering."
Fact of the day: You don't need to be a full-time programmer, to contribute to #LibreOffice! 锁琨珑 (Kevin Suo) is an accountant, and helps to fix bugs in his spare time: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl…
Today we’re talking to 锁琨珑 (Kevin Suo), who’s doing great work improving LibreOffice and fixing bugs… Tell us a bit about yourself! I’m 36 years old, and I was born in the Gansu Province of China.
Dave Chappelle, the jerk he is, invited Elon Musk on stage during an SF show last night. Musk got booed off and now accounts that post the video are getting suspended from Twitter.
I wrote a technical guide showing how you can create your own orthorectified (aka satellite view/bird mode) imagery, point clouds and 3D models of streets with nothing but a 360 degree camera mounted on bicycle helmet, and the open source photogrammetry software OpenDroneMap.
Why might you want to do this? With your own up-to-date, highly detailed point clouds and imagery you could: - quantify and communicate inefficient road space allocation - record necessary infrastructure repairs - take measurements such as lane and cycleway widths - measure footpath obstructions in 3D and rate pedestrian amenity - map kerb features on OpenStreetMap - survey street parking using the new OSM spec: wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/St… - 3D print a model of your home street!
This technical guide details how you can create your own orthorectified (aka satellite view/bird mode) imagery, point clouds and 3D models of streets with nothing but a 360 degree camera mounted on bicycle helmet, and the open source photogrammetry s…
One of my nice friends at Hurricane Electric gave me a dead 100G-LR4 optic to tear apart for your entertainment, so for the sake of your entertainment, lets dig into it! 🧵
Two things here: First, good luck to all the publishers and agents who will face a torrent of this glossy, incomprehensible shit over the next few years.
Second: For real creators, this will add to the growing swamp of unfiltered shit that new books find themselves in online. The sheer quantities that these can be produced in will make real books even harder to find.
@davey_cakes It's not that these will be a realistic alternative to real books any time soon – though there'll be a trend for bonkers AI books at some point – it's that it will create a tide of this crap that dilutes the value of every real book that gets published from now on, in a market where our work is steadily being devalued all the time.
Capblocker (my little hack to disable the caps lock key for anything other than NVDA), has been turned into an NVDA add-on. This is much less hacky, and won't require you to restart your screen reader if the script should happen to start after it. github.com/theQuinbox/capblock…
Hack on a Free Software project of your choice, meet like-minded people and get a chance to win cash awards from the @fsfe – Join Youth Hacking 4 Freedom! fsfe.org/activities/yh4f/
If you like coding, tinkering, and having fun with software and if you are up for a challenge, we have something exciting for you: "Youth Hacking 4 Freedom...
Zbytek Evropy si stěžuje na rostoucí ceny a dokonce jsou tu tací, co napadení suverénního státu, znásilňování, mučení a zabíjení civilistů na Ukrajině obhajují. Je třeba si uvědomit, že agresora je třeba zastavit všemi prostředky, a to i za cenu rostoucích cen. Nám stačí se trochu uzkromnit, zatímco na Ukrajině denně umírá velké množství civilistů i vojáků, kteří bojují za svobodu své vlasti i zbytku svobodné Evropy.
I felt moved to write this article after reading a post on Mastodon this morning. I am paraphrasing the post’s contents, because it’s not my intention to call out or embarrass any individual. I am …
I just read your entire blog post. That was an extremely powerful article! I won’t go into all the details here, but I will be deleting my Twitter account as well. I just think they have gone too far. in my opinion, I believe you are a huge asset to the blind, and visually impaired community, and for somebody to make that statement to you on Twitter is just beyond wrong, in my opinion.
this is such a great blog post that has me thinking. I’ve always been incredibly cautious on Twitter but over the pandemic lockdowns found a community there and got sucked into posting. I was gutted when Musk actually went through with it and took over and the results are terrible as expected! Thank you so much for your podcast which showed me how to use Mastodon and I’ve found it fascinating how my use of social media has shifted in the month I’ve been over here, for the better. I feel so much more comfortable replying to posts on here than I ever did on Twitter
- accessibility fixes - keyboard shortcut "a" to bookmark a toot - close inline reply with the Esc key - fixes for push notifications - redesigned boost icon
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What's Changed
feat: Allow image descriptions to be read automatically by screen readers without needing to expand media. by @jcsteh in #2269
feat: Make it possible to close inline reply with the ...
Hans Carlings’ Bagpipe Blues, above.
A devotee of such early jazz greats as Freddie Keppard, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, and Billie Holiday, Carling told the Jerusalem Post some instruments “sing in my voice more than others':
Archos
in reply to Marie Glöckner • • •