I love how I still hear stuff like "And you really understand this?" "How do you even understand this?" When using a screenreader in public. No actually I don't understand this, I just let it babble and magically know what I'm focused on, every blind person has that super power. But seriously, it's just practise, it's not that deep. Why do you still ask or talk about this? Is it really that ultra remarkable?

Just figured out (out of necessity) that I have a better way of OCRing my vm's screen than using Seeing AI. If I specify a monitor when starting qemu, then I can telnet into the monitor, and there's a screendump command that will dump the screen to a file, and then I can use tesseract to OCR the image.

Unfortunately, none of that is helping me right now. I get "Guest has not initialized the display (yet)." So I'm just as mystified as before. Reminds me of the children's song I used to listen to where a climber went over the mountain to see what he could see, but the other side of the mountain was all that he could see.

in reply to Mike Gorse

Now I have this function in my .bashrc (I have the monitor on port 4444):

ocrvm()
{
rm -f a.png a.txt
echo screendump a.png |nc -N localhost 4444 >/dev/null
tesseract a.png a >/dev/null 2>&1
more a.txt
}

It isn't very polished--it creates files called a.png and a.txt in the current directory, but, meh, it does what I need.

Edit: I found my original issue--something was wrong with the virtual drive that I have set for the UEFI image. And I love having this little OCR scriptlet now--it makes it really easy to monitor the status of a vm while it's booting up and I don't have a screen reader available yet.

This entry was edited (6 days ago)

Khronos reshared this.

long, long post
#wordpress hates all #blind people, hates innovation.
#drupal is clunky and GPL v2 only which makes me unable to extend it the way I want.
#grav has unlabeled buttons everywhere.
#classicPress is a damn old version of #wordpress
did I skip anything?
ah, yes, #joomla, the 403 monster.
starts installation, looks nice, until it eats itself mid install.
really graceful.
#cms #cmsBattle or everything sucks or I missed some random cms that I'd probably want to support but didn't found I even ask #ai
it found garbage.
I thought that accessibility will be treated well at least in one place, but sadly it's drupal which is really clunky and don't get me started on random breakages.
this is my rant
sorry for it but I had to get it out of my chest
#technology #accessibility

André Polykanine reshared this.

Everyone hates OneDrive, motherfuckers boingboing.net/2026/01/05/ever…

reshared this

#XSF Announcement

The XSF is considering to participate the #Google Summer of Code 2026!

If you are interested as a contributor or mentoring #XMPP project start reading here:
wiki.xmpp.org/web/Google_Summe…

#GSoC #chat #messaging #jabber #standards #opensource #interoperability #rtc #specifications

Hey @FreakyFwoof, I've just started this one. Interested to know if you think it's worth carrying on!

Harry Potter and the Hero's Path, By TheJackOfDiamonds
AU Ritually abused by the Dursley's, young Harry Potter learns to count on himself. After discovering magic at a young age, he practices to become stronger to protect those weaker than him.
March 2006-November 2025.
323493
words in 52 chapters.
fanfiction.net/s/2869936/1/Har…

johann reshared this.

in reply to Gerhard Hallstein

@Gerhard Hallstein willst du damit RSS Feeds importieren? Wenn ja dann schau mal auf opml.sekbaer.de/ vorbei (hab da mal ein kleines Script schreiben lassen) da kannst du deine OPML Datei hochladen und die wird dann in eine CSV Datei konvertiert, die du dann herunterladen kannst. Auf Friendica gehst du dann unter Einstellungen ---> Kontakte importieren. Dort auf "Durchsuchen" klicken die csv datei auswählen und auf "Einstellungen speichern" klicken.
Du solltest dann die RSS Feeds in deinen Kontakten.

cd#436 Sara: Liberation EP *
Olin 1990-luvun alkupuolella siinä määrin aktiivinen erityisesti pohjoismaista indiemusiikkia käsittelevillä internet-alustoilla että pari ruotsalaista levy-yhtiötä erehtyi luulemaan minua jonkinlaiseksi influensseriksi ja lähetti muutaman promolevyn täysin pyytämättä. Tämä artisti ei olisi kuitenkaan missään tapauksessa saanut hyväksymismerkintääni: Saran lauluääni on yhtä kimeä ja yksisävyinen kuin Kate Bushia esittävällä japanilaisella animaatiohahmolla, eikä sitä pysty kuuntelemaan 30 vuotta myöhemminkään paria minuuttia pidempään. #musadontti #musiikkimastodon #cd-maraton
discogs.com/release/22784633-S…

Me Getting some blindness-specific stuff in for my latest post for the Squeaky Wheel thesqueakywheel.org/audio-desc… #Disability #Humor #Comedy #Blind #blindness

Ihr könnt den #DiDay ja für ne gute Idee halten — das tu ich prinzipiell auch, weil er lokale Vernetzung und Dezentralisierung stärkt.

Aber vielleicht denkt ihr nochmal darüber nach, ob man das in direkter Assoziation mit einem „D-Day“ oder einem „Unabhängigkeitstag“ haben mag, wo beide Begriffe ganz eng verwoben mit der Befreiung von Unterdrückten (oft Schwarzen, Sklaven, …) durch Europäer verwoben sind. #Dudegemacht

in reply to Casey

Und dann denkt bitte auch an die Barrierefreiheit von dem Kram für behinderte Menschen. di.day ist noch immer nicht zugänglich, obwohl mir zugesagt wurde, dass das bis morgen der Fall sein würde. Die darauf gelisteten Alternativen sind zu großen Teilen unzugänglich. Es gibt keine Linux-Distro oder auch nur Konfigurationsmöglichkeiten, um das einzige freie System für technisch unvisierte, behinderte Nutzendenkreise ausreichend zugänglich zu machen.

Are you into #opensource ? And in the #eu ?
There is a Call for Feedback by the European Commission for a 'European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy' For strategic approach to #foss in Europe, and a framework for using open source within the European Commission. You can respond until 3 February. It is useful to respond even if your point has already been submitted by someone else. The number and repetition of arguments is used as a weight. ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-r… cc #fosdem

Moin!
Neues Jahr, erster #Chaostreff, 19:00 heute in der #Machbar. Beste Medizin gegen Post-Congress-Depression nach dem #39C3.
Einige Infos:

* Es wird etwas kühler (18C) werden, weil nur 3/4 Wärmepumpen arbeiten. Zieht 1 Schicht mehr an.
* Congress-Items müssen noch final ins Lager eingeräumt werden.
* Wir wollen dieses Jahr ein Geekend im Mai machen. Hier brauchen wir Teams für Programm, PL, Party, Ihr kennt den Drill :)
* Es gibt Kartoffelsuppe! 🥔

#XMPP Community

The #XSF Communication Team announces a new initiative to help evolving the XMPP ecosystem. Join the cross-network workshop series!

xmpp.org/2026/01/chat-of-the-f…

#jabber #chat #interoperability #rtc #xeps #standards #opensource #decentralization #federation #messaging

#Russia has just officially closed the criminal investigation of the #Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 their air defense downed over #Grozny in December 2024. Prosecutor’s General office simply states:

It has been established that the aircraft departed at 06:55 (Moscow time) from Baku airport to Grozny airport. Due to weather conditions (cloudiness), after two unsuccessful attempts, the crew was unable to land at Grozny airport, made a decision to proceed to another airport, and during the approach to landing at Aktau airport at approximately 9:28 (Moscow time) collided with the ground, resulting in the destruction of the aircraft and fire, as a result of which 38 people died and 29 received injuries of varying severity.


The fact that the aircraft has been hit by two surface-to-air rockets fired from Russian “Pantsir-S1” system on the ground is not even mentioned and instead they push some bullshit about “weather conditions”, which undoubtedly will be received as an insult by Azerbaijan - which it is.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaij…

I don't understand how the UK government (and indeed many firms) can continue to maintain a presence on Elon Musk's deepfake porn site (formerly known as Twitter), rather than jumping ship to the likes of Mastodon and Bluesky.

Their continued association with X/Twitter isn't just a bad look, it's an endorsement of a site that behaves in a disgusting, degrading way, and has been churning out sexualised images of real-life women and young girls.

Is it just to avoid the wrath of Elon Musk?

reshared this

According to Newsnight, the UK government say they can't block X—despite the deepfake CSAM—because people could evade such a ban using VPNs.

But the #OnlineSafetyAct is working just fine even though people can use VPNs to avoid having to upload photos of their passport (etc.) to some shady unregulated age verification company.

The UK government's internet policies are totally rational and coherent. Nothing to see here. Please don't ask us any more annoying critical questions.

Imagine that it's 1925 and I am a clever, experienced mechanical engineer. I look around at the "tech" world of the time and notice some disturbing things:

- the rising power of literally fascist CEOs like Henry Ford
- What began as an inefficient, quirky novelty toy for rich people, the automobile, has become "normal" and started to dominate public space
- rising levels of fossil pollution
- the rising monopoly power of Oil companies
- dangerous levels of stock-market speculation
- brutal exploitation of people and environmental destruction in mining and rubber producing (mostly colonial) regions
- the use of debt to get less wealthy consumers to buy cars
- scores of innocent pedestrians injured or killed by automobiles
- urban planning that increasingly favors more expensive cars over other users of the streets
- declining sense of importance of shared forms of transportation like trolleys and trains

As an engineer, I look at all those rising issues and then I say:

"What we need is an Open Source Model-T Ford with some slightly better safety features."

In retrospect, that would seem like a pretty inadequate response.

Great. Two PDF forms I'm supposed to read and sign before a medical procedure are completely inaccessible - probably bad scans. Two OCR tools and ChatGPT either extract garbled text or report there is no text to be found. Time to find a sighted person to print this shit out, read all about everything, and fill things in by pen. It's 2025 for fuck sake! #blind #A11Y

#Degoogled Maps? Yes, it's possible. 📍🗺️

The Big Tech does not need to track your every step 👉use a Google Maps alternative instead.

Find out which open source maps we'd recommend: tuta.com/blog/google-maps-alte…

#GoogleMaps

Considering migrating all my virtual machines to UTM on Mac OS some day. Sigh. Not sure why the bug with VMWare Fusion is back, where with VoiceOver, the machine will not start up. Of course this is a bug returned from the past, because it existed earlier on in the Mac OS 15 days. Then it got fixed, and life was happy again. Not so much anymore, after Mac OS 26, it has returned.
If you have started up a virtual machine with VoiceOver on, and then noticed the "start up" button become dimmed again and not move to "suspend" instead but back to pressable, you're experiencing that bug. The only option is, and I'm not kidding, is to press the button, turn VoiceOver off right after (at a split second) and hope that its presence didn't register within your VMWare App.
This entry was edited (6 days ago)