Blind Sonos users have an important and rare opportunity to make our presence felt and our displeasure heard about the massive #accessibility regression in the new mobile apps.
Next Tuesday 14 May between 2 and 5 PM US Eastern time, three senior Sonos staff are conducting an “ask me anything” (AMA) session in the Sonos community. In attendance will be Diane Roberts, Senior Director of Software Development, Kate Wojogbe, Senior Director of User Experience, and Tucker Severson, Director of Product Management. These are the key people in the company who agreed to the app being released in the inaccessible state it’s in, and they are the key people who need to take fixing it seriously. Many people want to take some action that makes a difference. This is something you can do. You can bookmark the page for the AMA. It is, en.community.sonos.com/events/…
Try to become familiar with the forum before Tuesday, because while it isn’t completely inaccessible, it’s not the best and a little quirky. You should be able to sign in with your Sonos ID. Perhaps compose your question thoughtfully ahead of time and have it on your computer, so you can paste it into the AMA when it goes live. It will not hurt for Sonos to understand how upset and inconvenienced many of us are by what they have done. We can do that firmly while remaining polite. They need to understand, the best way to make us go away is to fix what they broke. We won’t be quiet until we get back what they took from us. Happy contributing.
Hey everyone! We have some exciting news to share with you all.Today is when the new app update with the new design is released, and will be rolled out to all of you during the next few days.
About my last boost (mastodon.social/@verge/1124064…): It sounds to me like the problems with the new Sonos app go beyond accessibility. I suspect a poorly managed rewrite. Given that the new version is such a step backward from the previous working app, I wonder if a rewrite was necessary in the first place. But I know our industry isn't good at maintaining a complex, long-lived codebase. We'd rather do something new and, we assume, better.
Sonos rolled out an overhauled mobile app for Android and iOS on May 7th, but some users aren’t happy with the number of missing features compared to the prior version.
Well, it basically went from a semantically totally accessible and UI standards conforming app to a plain mess. Imagine a well-behaved Win32 app turned into an electron app with only divs and no semantics.
Earnings call was yesterday. New product also in the pipeline (headphones). Bright and shiny GUI with functionality normies use and "we'll fix it later" mentality for everything else. Got to be seen to be making progress and listening to the detractors that say the app looks like it was designed in 2009. Stock price is down 4% which does make me happy to see.
Sonos rolled out an overhauled mobile app for Android and iOS on May 7th, but some users aren’t happy with the number of missing features compared to the prior version.
hey, sorry about this :( Your mail on Mar 18th looks like it was sent to abuse@matrix.org, but didn't get a response because your mail address was bouncing (SMTP 550 5.1.1 Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual mailbox table from mx01.mta.zknt.org). We can (could have?) pointed the room alias to a new room if you created one with the right permissions. support@matrix.org is the right place for this sort of support request (although we are very overstretched atm).
It has been a difficult couple of days for Sonos users. Now that the inaccessible app is out, I've reworked, and substantially updated, my blog post. I'll continue to add to it if I receive word of further media releases or coverage. I think Sonos now owes us two thinks, an urgent repair of the app, and a public apology to repair trust. mosen.org/sonos2024/
What is Sonos? Sonos develop a series of high-quality smart speakers. They are known for their ability to stay in sync throughout your home when the speakers are grouped. Sonos speakers come in a r…
The world is having a major discussion about automation and AI, so Apple’s latest commercial crushing all of human creativity into an iPad has angered a lot of artists and other creatives.
TL;DR: Avoid setting heading levels greater than six (6). This applies whether using `aria-level` or the proposed `headingstart` HTML attribute. Use HTML `<h#>` elements whenever possible.
TL;DR: Avoid setting heading levels greater than six (6). This applies whether using aria-level or the proposed headingstart HTML attribute. Use HTML elements whenever possible.
My personal IndieWeb site. I write about and develop software to promote user autonomy. Topics include accessibility, security, privacy, and software freedom.
Imagináis gastar una pasta gansa en unos altavoces y que por una decisión de la empresa la aplicación para gestionarlos se vuelva inaccesible? Esto les ha ocurrido a todos los clientes ciegos de Sonos.
New static site hosting provider hit my radar: statichost.eu. Ticks all the boxes, plus offers custom headers, OCSP Must-Staple, etc. which half the providers don’t do nowadays. I like how they do manual review and start conversations with customers for traffic spike billing instead of automated flagging and expecting users to reach out.
Modern static site hosting with European servers and absolutely no personal data collection! Just add your git repository, and we'll take care of the rest.
statichost.eu is working on Netlify/Vercel-like preview links for branches/PRs too. I always maintained that most of the established static hosting providers had no moat, and it looks like I’m being proven right.
Modern static site hosting with European servers and absolutely no personal data collection! Just add your git repository, and we'll take care of the rest.
Context on my last boost (dragonscave.space/@jscholes/11…) for my followers who aren't plugged into the blind community: Sonos recently released an update to their mobile app that makes it way less usable with VoiceOver on iOS, and presumably TalkBack on Android as well. @jscholes has insightfully connected this to the genericization of UI development, and this post in particular: baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react…
The evolution of software development over the past decade has been very frustrating. Little of it seems to makes sense, even to those of us who are right in the middle of it.
@nick #Sonos has replaced its app not because they truly think the app is better. But because they can replace specialised Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS teams with one generic team who know how to use cross-platform tools.
It goes beyond that, though. Look at the ideas behind the new home screen, which essentially can be described as: "put what you want on it". Is that primarily a user-facing improvement? No.
Rather, it's a reason to not rely on designers who can carefully think through information architecture, viewport sizes, user flows, and the best ways to present information. Make it the user's problem so that they can fire the people whose responsibility it used to be, or move them to another team where they won't be able to do their best work and will eventually quit and not be replaced.
This update goes way beyond #accessibility. It's a fundamental shift in how they do business, and it will be shit for everyone. That, more than the lack of #VoiceOver support, is what will probably cause me to move away from their ecosystem.
The best idea I have so far is this: Win32 and classic hand-coded web user interfaces used to leak implementation details, including class names and IDs (numeric control IDs in Win32 dialogs, string IDs for HTML elements). This wasn't done for the sake of accessibility, but developers of screen reader scripts/add-ons made the most of these things to work around the app developer's indifference toward accessibility, especially for Win32.
So what if we could get the current generation of component frameworks to expose IDs and maybe even class names (or equivalent) as well, in properties that can be accessed by assistive technologies? UI Automation has the ClassName and AutomationId properties. I don't know if Android has anything useful here. And of course, all of this would be useless on iOS unless Apple does something very out of character, like adding scripting to iOS VoiceOver.
SO yes, my conclusion is that we, meaning assistive technology developers and to some extent users, will always have to work around app developers' indifference toward accessibility. Maybe that just comes with being an economically insignificant minority. Maybe we can at least get better tools for doing that.
I'm getting more and more convinced that slapping an AI-based accessibility overlay is eventually going to be the solution, and it's going to happen basically before anything else. We wont turn around the screen-reading world in 5 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if we got working overlays by then.
This doesn't work when developers use libraries like styled components, which don't rely on IDs and class names at all. There may be ids and class names, but they're an internal implementation detail and have no guarantee of stability.
Aliance rozhodně nezpracovává operativní úvahy, zdůrazňuje list La Reppublica, který s informací s odvoláním na své zdroje přišel. Jde jen o rané úvahy a krizový scénář.
Mark your calendars for Aira's next event in celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day! In this 1 hour event, "Getting to Know Access AI," we'll chat with the blind and low vision members of Aira's team to discuss Aira's newest feature. We'll cover uses, functionality, feedback, and answer any questions you may have. . Date: Thursday, May 16th Time: 3:00pm to 4:00pm PST Location: YouTube Livestream accessible via the Aira Explorer App . We can't wait to celebrate with you! 🥳
Hats off to the author, you don't see that kind of, uh, skillful rhetoric chicanery every day. Like "generative AI doesn't compete with artists because artists are not in the data market". 😬
While generative AI as a tool for artistic expression isn’t truly new — AI has been used to create art since at least the 1970s and the art auction house Christie’s sold its first piece of AI artwork in 2018 — the past year launched this exciting and…
Telefony Xiaomi prý obsahují kritické chyby. Hackeři díky nim mohou převzít kontrolu nad vaším mobilem
Telefony Xiaomi, Redmi a POCO s nadstavbami MIUI/HyperOS obsahují vážné chyby Přišla s nimi společnost Oversecure...| Celý článek najdete na tinyurl.com/25ss2d66
Společnost Xiaomi, třetí největší výrobce smartphonů na světě, čelí vážným bezpečnostním problémům. V nedávné zprávě společnosti Oversecured byly odhaleny
More bug fixes, including F-Droid metadata! Material 3 progress and targeting Android 14. All this AND glimpses of a two-app future in the April 2024 Progress Report for Thunderbird for Android. 📱 ✨
USAA really really not reading the room here and is *now* unveiling voice account verification, just as the whole world knows it's trivially easy to clone someone's voice with AI. Incredibly bad decision that will undoubtedly lead to bank accounts getting drained.
The PipeWire camera will enumerate the pipewire Video/Source nodes with their formats.
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as Republicans try to pin rising antisemitism on Dems, worth noting that not long ago James Comer and the GOP Oversight Committee shared video from an antisemitic QAnon account.
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