"Smart glasses offering a combination of sensory substitution based 'raw' vision and AI-based scene description and OCR appears to be technically and economically the most feasible and sustainable way toward meeting expectations, needs and interests of many blind people." artificialvision.com/neuralink…

And yes, I did already check this statement with a number of totally blind people, including a congenitally blind and a late-blind person.

#BCI #NeuroTech #blind #blindness

I got interesting news from the fedora accessibility room today! this concerns blind and visually impaired #linux users exclusively, however:

For a bit of time, specifically pipewire >=1.4, one can start pipewire as root. That includes the regular daemon and the alsa layer, because jack emulation is a library loaded inside programs. Anyway, more recently than that, pipewire-pulse got the ability to be launched via root, as a system service:

gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewir…

I'm not sure if ubuntu can use any of this yet, I suppose not, but most other distros which aren't debian based should be able to do so, for example arch, gentoo, probably nix and fedora starting with 42. This means that your system can start talking much, much sooner without the use of scripts, as long as you enable the system services instead of the user ones, or well, apparently the user units don't conflict, weird as that might sound. Either way, the same security is achieved, because who cares if root apps can listen to your microphone, the battle is lost if those apps are already root anyway!

In particular, this means that one can start espeakup with the system and it'll speak as soon as possible. Not in the initramfs, not at the enter decryption key prompt, but that's still huge progress in case your system crashes and so on.

What do y'all think, does this change anything, or it's still the same for you because you use scripts anyway, or because your systems rarely crash in such a way where that'd be required?

systemd: add systemwide pipewire-pulse files (dea6fa7f) · Commits · PipeWire / pipewire · GitLab

We can and it works, so why not.

^GitLab

Come on #Fediverse, if you can, put some money where your heart is. The people from Framasoft are working hard on #PeerTube and are only looking for €75.000. With less than 40 hours to go, you can be part of the difference we want to see in the world :)

Soon we will be able to livestream from our smartphone to the fediverse!

Framasoft is a French non-profit, based in Lyon.

support.joinpeertube.org/en/?m…

Support PeerTube

Let's popularize videos shared by the people, for the people!

^{support.joinpeertube.org}

Strong winds, especially when combined with steep and unstable edges, significantly increases the risk of falling off cliffs when visiting coastal regions.

#unitedkingdom #travel #nature #hiking #outdoors #birds #birding #scotland #puffins

Australian man interrogated at LA airport and deported back to Melbourne for his writings about pro-Palestine protests. His social media posts, too, which he said he deleted before flying, were used as material.

"Clearly, they had technology in their system which linked those posts to my Esta … a long time before I took them down,” he said. “Because they knew all about the posts, and then interrogated me about the posts once I was there.”

theguardian.com/australia-news…

Australian deported from US says he was ‘targeted’ due to writing on pro-Palestine student protests

Alistair Kitchen says he was detained and questioned about views on Israel and Palestine before being deported from LA to Melbourne

^{Catie McLeod (The Guardian)}

Ghostty will soon be visible to accessibility tooling on macOS. This is increasingly important in the world of AI since this means that tools like ChatGPT, Claude, etc. can now read Ghostty's screen contents too (with permission). This feature is also relatively rare!

Only the built-in Terminal, iTerm2, and Warp also support this. Kitty, Alacritty, and others are invisible to a11y on macOS.

Beyond the screen contents, Ghostty's structure is also visible, navigable, and resizable such as its split as can be seen in the attached video. Ghostty and iTerm2 are the only terminals that expose structure too (splits, tabs).

This is a v1 implementation that is primarily read-only. I plan on iterating and improving a11y interactions in future versions.

Long COVID is Now the Number One Chronic Illness in Children.

"Repeatedly mass infecting kids with COVID is not a public health strategy. It's a fast pass to declining population health"

"So many children are getting Long COVID because COVID causes Long COVID, and children are not “immune” to COVID, they are not becoming healthier with each infection, and the adults around them are doing nothing to mitigate the virus."

"So if COVID is a virus that can disable them, damages their blood vessels, raises their risk of heart failure and cardiac arrest, causes autoimmune disorders, diabetes, and a range of mental health and cognitive problems, then we’d be doing something really awful by failing to deal with, or even acknowledge it. Maybe even unforgiveable."

Source: archive.md/c8aSv

@auscovid19

NV Access is pleased to announce that version 2025.1 of NVDA, the free screen reader for Microsoft Windows, is now available for download. We encourage all users to upgrade to this version. This release introduces NVDA Remote Access, provides speech, braille, OCR & Office improvements, Native selection in Chrome & edge

Full info & Download: nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2025-1/

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Accessibility #FOSS #NewVersion #Update #News #Free