I’ve built a few Braille-related apps, and I’m learning the hard way how difficult this space really is.
Discoverability is hard, onboarding takes time, and even motivated users often need practice before the apps become useful. Some software concepts are innovative, powerful, but slower compared to hardware tools.
I’m still iterating and listening carefully to feedback.
Hello Mastodon 👋
I’m Stefan, an indie developer working on accessibility-focused apps for blind users.
My current work explores how light, color, and structure can be translated into sound and haptics without being overwhelming. A lot of it is learning by listening — to users, not just to code.
I’m here to learn, exchange ideas, and hopefully contribute something useful.
Happy to connect, and grateful for thoughtful feedback along the way.
A miserable complaint:
You know what really grinds my gears? When people who speak English as their first language have no fucking clue what they're talking about and have the gall to correct you about something they're wrong about, about their own language.
I learned the fucking rules and grammar! I checked the spelling in the dictionary! I read the style guides and the outlines of prose and poetry, I studied the classics! Sit the fuck down and go home to learn your own fucking language you silly oblivious little git. 👿
Kauai Coffee is a 3,000-acre farm on the south side of the island, the largest coffee farm in the US. Its lease is being threatened by the landowner and they may have to close shop.
I have mixed feelings about this because, a) The company provides jobs for the island, but b) Their coffee is absolute shite. They grow it in sandy soil near sea level and it tastes like dog's balls. Sorry not sorry.
yeah the only good coffee from Hawaii is Grandma's Coffee in Maui. @SlicerDicer used to take me there
grandmascoffeehousemaui.com/pr…
Our most popular roast is a dark organic bean with full body, medium acidity, and well rounded.Grandma's Coffee Hse
Federico Mena Quintero reshared this.
you'll have to set a custom exec.start for the jail to NOT be the init, but something (don't treat it like a VM)
also you'll want to set the persist; option on the jail in case you want to start it up with no processes running so you can poke around and figure out what you need to get it working the way you want
in FreeBSD, everything is in a jail technically. the PIDs are all global, they just have an additional identifier -- the JID.
So all normal processes are in JID 0
if you run top with the -j flag you can see the JIDs of processes
i have a lot of jails on my server
@delta, i've seen some mention of call in some place (app doc etc), is it worked on (and if already working in the advanced / experimental, is it E2EE ?
Thanks in advance.
i see in the settings, that we can set some server, does they need to be set to work or does the default configuration already work ? (i ask because it's not imediatly clear and i prefer avoir breaking it :)
also (wallpaper are like any other not shared with the other people we talk to i guess (just to be sure)).
Thanks for your work :)
Já jsem ten příspěvek zkonil, protože jsem chtěl napsat evropskej trh, ale měnit už to nebudu.
Golf vypadá tak, jak by člověk od Golfa čekal. Nuda, ale tak jak jí známe. Vlastně jsem s tim v pohodě, jen mě to nebaví :)
Vlastně se mi celkem líbí myšlenka "vezmu starej model, trochu ho uhladim a narvu do něj baterku". Třeba Renault 5 byl za mě fakt chytrej tah...
Inzerát na prodej Hatchback Fiat 500E, ELEKTRO 82kW. Stav: Ojeté;, Elektro; barva Černá; tachometr 60 832 km; cena 169 999 Kč; prodejce MAMA CAR a.s. - okres Hlavní město Prahawww.sauto.cz
Santa Claus is still a woman
The first line of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is “Christmas won’t be Christmas without presents”, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1850 short story The Good Fairy is about Christmas presents and, specifically, women trying to help each other figure out how best to navigate the task of choosing them. It is a mark of your columnist’s slow wits, then, that after 20 years o
timharford.com/2025/12/santa-c…
The first line of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is “Christmas won’t be Christmas without presents”, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1850 short story The Good Fairy is about Christmas presents and,…Tim Harford
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It's finally new #WhatsApp app day on Windows for me. If you were thinking I would buck the trend by saying it's not all that bad, then I would have to seriously ask whether you've ever read any of my posts at all.
It's shite.
Constantine ending persecution of Christians in 313 AD was really good. The previous policy of persecution under Diocletian was terrible. These are facts.
But, one can't help but lament the shift in Christianity as the faith transformed from being a deliberate rejection of the world to a path of ease and power. This is still true today as politicians and others misuse the name of Christ for their own ends.
#JoyScrolling by the inimitable Elle Cordova: a Solar System family reunion
We've just released Matrix spec v1.17 (hopefully our last release before v2.0!) including a few new MSCs and some exciting usability improvements for the spec website!
Read about it in the blog post: matrix.org/blog/2025/12/18/mat…
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communicationsRichard van der Hoff (matrix.org)
If you're on an osm-map (like ours) you can improve shop-information on streetcomplete.app , or mapcomplete.org or -if you have an account- on OSM.org
OSM maps are up to date because of nearly 1.6 million active people doing exactly these things.
#map #osm #osmdata #streetcomplete #mapcomplete
OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.OpenStreetMap
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I've been on mastodon a few times over the years but this is the first time I've created an account with the intent of actually interacting. And I'd like to start by making everyone here hate me by sharing a clearly unpopular opinion and say: I... Like using AI. And I hope I can win some of you over as well.
Now don't get me wrong, I see the damage, I hate the people causing it, but I would ask, if we gave up on every new piece of technology that wasn't immediately as good as its predecessor, where would we be? We would never have invested in electric cars, or hell, vehicles at all. We wouldn't dare to building anything for fear our initial prototype couldn't compete with a refined legacy standard.
Many of the people on this platform are the people who actually can affect change. We're programmers, hackers, network engineers, the ones who actually get to do something. But instead of finding solutions, trying to make things better, so many are burying their head in the sand and hoping the world doesn't change around them. And I hate to say it but it won't work.
The world is changing, technology is changing, but we have the ability and knowledge to build the alternative. We're the ones who can challege big AI, and implement solutions built by people, outside of data centers, and in the control of people. As a person who has to implement these solutions for businesses, open source, local and edge applications are where I want to see this technology, not in a datacenter thats destroying a community.
I've done a lot over the years to push for open source technology, more than most can say they have. I didn't sit in a bubble and wait for the world to adopt the tools I want them to use, I climbed the ranks as from an IT professional to a sysadmin, a network engineer, and finally someone who actually has a say. And then I deployed those technologies for people. I gave end users linux, I chose proxmox over esxi, I deployed open source office suites instead of just paying for microsoft office because "that's what you do", even when it made my job harder.
I look at the landscape today in tech and I see an opportunity for us as open source devs and builders to shape things before they take place. To take the place of big AI in communities and businesses before it gains a foothold. And it hurts a bit to see businesses and organizations I've loved and followed for so long digging themselves a grave and praying it will all go away while the people like me have to keep helping businesses use chatgpt and gemini trash without good alternatives. Thank you for your attention, I'll be taking hate mail in the comments below.
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You don't realize how much not a cost bandwidth is when it comes to AI. One Netflix movie (despite all the layers of CDNs) will probably offset your Chat GPT use for a year (napkin math).
I think you have a point re: community impact, but due to how much of a non-concern bandwidth is, we have a really great opportunity to build AI datacenters very close to green energy sources (or build green energy sources closer to AI datacenters). THis includes things like geothermal. If eveybody is running their own AI, they'll use whatever power they have.
This is one of a very few industries that a) uses insane amounts of energy, and b) the energy can be used at the other end of the world from where the product user is, with 0 loss to the user experience.
Bei meinem Vortrag auf dem 38c3 habe ich gezeigt, dass die deutsche Zweigstelle der International Association of Accessibility Professionals peinliche & falsche Übersetzungen, die den Sinn einer Prüfungs-Aufgabe für eine Zertifizierung entstellen, veröffentlicht hat.
Sie haben danach noch sehr lange rumgeeiert und mich der Lüge bezichtigt, obwohl der Beweis direkt auf der Folie war und ich auch mehreren (!) IAAP-Mitgliedern gegenüber die entsprechende Quelle gezeigt habe.
Außerdem steht darin folgendes:
- Für die Prüfung sollten Sie nach Möglichkeit Ihren eigenen Laptop mitbringen, da nur so die
Nutzung Ihrer assistiven Technologien sichergestellt werden kann. Bitte beachten Sie, dass
die vor Ort bereitgestellten Computer keine assistiven Technologien oder sonstige Software
enthalten.
- Wenn Sie assistive Technologien mit Audioausgabe (z. B. Screenreader) verwenden, ist die
Nutzung von Kopfhörern zwingend erforderlich
Wie ists mit lauten Braillezeilen oder belüfteten Hilfsmitteln? Was, wenn ich auch eine Hörbehinderung habe, die die Nutzung von Kopfhörern unmöglich macht? Was ist, wenn ich Schaltersteuerungen benutzen muss oder Spracheingabe, und dadurch erheblich langsamer bin? Was, wenn ich ADHS oder Autismus habe und mich in einem Raum mit anderen Prüflingen nicht konzentrieren kann?
Tja, dann ist das Angebot der internationalen Vereinigung der Barrierefreiheitsspezialist*innen für dich unzugänglich.
Forscan as software for ford, mazda, etc?
WTF can imagine their cli/gui displaying errors from underneath curl… Yet cannot get how curl license/contact can be first thing rookies are able to access before theirs ??? !!!
I have no any FORScan product but have a question about it (last link ;)
forscan.org/support/start.php?…
Bei Rückführungen muss Frontex Grundrechte ebenso achten wie die Mitgliedstaaten. Der EuGH stellt klar: Die EU-Agentur trägt eigene Verantwortung.Legal Tribune Online
In a past life, I did an internet radio show, called "Things and Stuff", where much of my time was spent messing with buttons, sliders and knobs, talking about and demonstrating weird things, and playing music.
On December 23, 2017, I did one of only two pre-recorded shows in the 14 years that Things and Stuff existed, this being that year's Christmas-themed show.
Should you care to throw a bunch of Christmas things at your face, including a look back at recordings of somewhat incriminating Perdue family Christmases from every year between 1986 and 2017, except for 1997, as presented by me and another me (who doesn't talk to themselves every now and then), you can do so, at least until I get around to removing all the 2016 through 2019 archives from the place they are currently being hosted.
Now, if that's not incentive, I don't know what is.
We can't put enough gratitude in the character limit for everything our community has helped us do this year, so we wrote a recap blog. Thank you everyone who made this all happen! 💙 🙌
blog.thunderbird.net/2025/12/t…
No year-end judging of your music or video habits here. Just what Thunderbird donors, contributors, and team members made possible in 2025!Monica Ayhens-Madon (The Thunderbird Blog)
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I'm listening with the wife, but we're only half way through the first book so far. Finding time is hard with the baby.
It's weird how I've actually read well over 4 million words of fanfiction, but actually only read the original series 3 times (once as a first read, again for me to log on my goodreads, and a third time with my daughter. She's listened to all the audiobooks many times, but I read them all to her myself when she was younger.
She's looking forward to the new TV series next year.
I imagine these full cast recordings are bringing the stories to another generation, too.
Just tried getting a program to run that didn't want to.
"ooh I forgot I have that thing called a coding agent, let's see what it can do."
Two minutes (and a few really weird binary metadata inspection tricks) later, I have the command that makes the program run.
Not being very familiar with the environment, I'd be surprised if I could pull it off inside an hour if I had to do it all myself.
New #screenReader verbosity settings for messages are now widely available in #Slack, under the #accessibility category of preferences. You can now control which parts of messages are spoken and in what order.
As part of this change, you'll also find that recent replies in threads now have relative timestamps (e.g. "just now" or "2 minutes ago") instead of absolute ones. This update brings the screen reader experience in line with the visual interface, with absolute timestamps still being used outside of threads.
If you have suggestions or run into problems, please use the /feedback command and mention that you use a screen reader. Alternatively I'm also happy to pass along any issues if I can reproduce them.
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André Polykanine
in reply to Stefan Welebny • • •