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beta5 of NVDA 2024.4 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what the next version of NVDA has to offer before it is officially released,

In Beta 5 we have fixed an issue where the custom multiple key press timeout was not honoured when repeatedly pressing the NVDA key. There are also updates to translations.

Read more and download from: nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-4b…

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Beta #FOSS #PreRelease #NewVersion



For Users of Reaper: The Reaper Accessibility Hoard: Containing Various Reaper Resources groups.io/g/tech-vi/message/78…





Microsoft Office 2024 gets you new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more, no subscription required windowscentral.com/software-ap…


I love that when you generate a deep dive conversation with Notebook LM, the presenters use words like Umm and, you know in there conversation about the topic. Much more natural sounding speech! I just wish LM was a bit more A11Y friendly,Hey Google, how bout some labels for all those unlabeled buttons!


Hurricane Helene drowned a key supplier of advanced microchip minerals | Vox

vox.com/climate/375404/helene-…



Who Will Care for Americans Left Behind by #Climate Migration?

#HurricaneHelene was the latest in a generation of storms that are intensifying faster and dumping more rain as the climate warms. It's precisely the kind of event expected to drive more Americans to relocate as climate change gets worse — leaving behind those who are older, poorer and more vulnerable.

propub.li/3ZROw7h

#News #ClimateChange #Hurricane #ExtremeWeather #Migration #Science #Flood




This is powerful, and will touch your heart! Grieving Mother Explains How 7-Year-Old Son 'Became My Hero' Just Before He Was Swept Away by Helene Floodwaters. westernjournal.com/grieving-mo…



I simply love #CPanel. I know it's a controversial statement for some, but I mean… it's so easy to do daily chores with it! I've been using it for… oh well… fifteen years or so, I had different #accessibility experience with it, but generally it just works.
in reply to André Polykanine

Are you actually deploying it on the servers themselves or just using it as an end-user? I can see why customers love it but find the backend really bad to deal with. This is why I switched to Cloudron for my setup, though apreciate you can't easily migrate from CPannel especially if you have lots of instances.
in reply to Andrew Hodgson

@andrew As customer so far, but I heard many complaints about deploying it, so definitely will need to try. but for a customer it's a breeze: want a subdomain? Click, boom, it's done. Want an email account? Again, click, boom, it's done. It really makes life easier.


Here's another recent example of the phenomenon I observed on various mailing lists. Someone presumably had pressed the Caps Lock key, so the entire message was in uppercase. The author apparently didn't notice...
in reply to Jason J.G. White

It used to happen a lot here in Brazil too. Nowadays, mailing lists are kinda out of fashion here...

in reply to Corey Quinn

Would You Please add a description (alt text) to this image? Thanks. #ALTforMe
in reply to Matt Campbell

@matt
It's a version of the IQ Meme. It shows a graph with a gaussian function representing IQ score on the X axis and percentage of people on the Y. The meme features a dumb looking drawing of a guy on the left, a crying nerd on top of the bell (middle of the graph), and a person looking like some sort of monk on the right. The title says "email address validation". On the person on the left (least IQ) reads "check if it has '@'". The crying nerd (average IQ) reads "3 full pages of one regular expression". The monk at the end of the graph (max IQ) reads "check if it has '@'".

#ALT4you



Glad to see that some community members have stepped up and are taking huge role in maintaining and improving Bookworm.
I'm open for community contributions to some NVDA add-ons I've developed but no longer interested to maintain. all of them are very popular:

* Chessmart:
* Audio Themes NVDA add-on
* Spellcheck

Please get in touch if you're interested

in reply to Musharraf

I love Bookworm! It's all I use when reading books with NVDA. And then I found out about the web view thing, so I can use JAWS with its speech and sound schemes to read headings, bold text, italics, all that in different tones, still in bookworm!
in reply to Musharraf

I thought you told me you had a latest version of spellcheck that you were going to release.


So according to this thread, in addition to the AI resume screeners, I also have to contend with the fake job postings made as a fraudulent signal of growth to investors? Who cares if a thousand applicants waste their times applying?

No, sorry. The world is burning. I have more valuable things to do with my time than throwing resumes past AI screeners for fake jobs.

In related news, actively considering changing careers. Spent a few hours in court recently supporting families being mass-evicted by an Austin co-op. Even if the situation itself was bad, being present and wearing a support sticker felt like a better use of my time than continuing to build managed Postgres.

in reply to Nolan Darilek

The number of places in tech where you can really make a *positive* difference in the world and also get paid seem to be shrinking. Or at least we're increasingly more aware how many tech companies are happy to boil the oceans for a dollar.
in reply to ocdtrekkie

Yeah, kind of where my mind's headed with this. Maybe keep tech as a hobby, do something more meaningful as a career. Sad I couldn't make it work for both.


New: Two men stole more than $1 million from DoorDash workers by impersonating them with customer service, getting access to their accounts, then draining them. In some cases customer service workers were complicit, indictment says:

404media.co/men-stole-over-1-m…



Nirgends begegne ich dem #Videokonferenzsystem #Zoom so oft wie in #digitaleKirche.

Mit meinem Bild von #Kirche, dass sich in der #DDR geprägt hat, passt das irgendwie gar nicht so recht zusammen. Da sehe ich wenig von der #Unabhängigkeit, #Selbstbestimmung und progressiven Herangehensweise von damals.

Vielleicht findet man diese Verknüpfung merkwürdig. Aber ich ahne langsam woher das Unbehagen kommt, was mich an manchen digitalen Entwicklungen bei Kirchens so beschleicht. Man kann es ebenso auf den Bereich #Office oder #SocialMedia übertragen.

Dieser Tage ist jemand auf meinen Vorschlag eingegangen statt Zoom #Jitsi zu nehmen und wir haben problemlos die Instanz des @luki@kirche.social genutzt, sie wird von engagierten Christen betrieben.

Sie erinnern mich an die 90iger. Es gab das #WWW noch nicht so wie wir es heute kennen, aber einen #Computerclub des #CVJM in #Chemnitz, der eine Instanz in dem weltweiten #Mailbox Netzwerk betrieb. Sie waren Wegbereiter einer nichtkommerziellen, selbstverwalteten internationalen #Vernetzung.

Einige wenige gibt es immer noch und es kommen auch neue hinzu, wie z.B. @librechurch@kirche.social oder @libori.social@libori.social. Ob dieser freiheitliche Geist in digitaler Kirche wieder stärker wehen wird?

#FediKirche

in reply to FediVerseExplorer

Aus meiner Erfahrung sind es oft verschiedene Gründe warum z.B. Zoom verwendet wird. Gerade leider auch im kirchlichen Bildungsbereich. Kennt man, hat während der Pandemie gut funktioniert, hat man damals von IT/Datenschutz freigegeben lassen, bietet professionellen Support...sind alles so Argumente. Digitale Nachhaltigkeit und digitale Souveränität sind oft noch kein Thema (TBI). Wie kann man ein Umdenken erreichen?
@luki @librechurch @libori.social
in reply to Digitale Bildung in der Kirche

Danke für die gute Frage!
Sie ist sicher nicht nur auf einer Ebene beantwortbar. Und es gibt keine einfachen Antworten.

Vielleicht wäre schon viel geholfen, wenn man sich auf einen gemeinsamen Weg machen würde.

Ein Aspekt: Digitale Tools sind anders als analoge. Der Hammer besteht aus Holz und Eisen. Es liegt in unserer Verantwortung was wir damit machen. Ein digitales Tool kann aus viel mehr Funktionen bestehen, als vordergründig erkennbar, besonders wenn es proprietäre Software ist. Welche (hintergründigen) Auswirkungen hat Software, die wir zur Kommunikation benutzen auf den Nächsten?

Wie @letterus@kirche.social in diesem Thread schon sagt "Den digitalen Raum als Gestaltungsraum wahrzunehmen, ist für die meisten ein sehr weiter Weg." Als Kirche könnten wir uns auf diesen Weg machen, und entsprechende Bildung anbieten 😉



At the smart suggestion of @deborahh the Wise, I added a one-time donation link to my profile. I'm a busker and arts creator, and income precarity is now my middle name, so if you've ever enjoyed my music or podcast posts, here's an opportunity to virtually drop money in my guitar case and receive my heart-felt gratitude. busk.co/29436/qr


A nice homage to the PC/GEOS operating system. Also lots of video clips that show how quick and zippy it was (remember, this thing is running on DOS-era hardware).

youtube.com/watch?v=j76USDqEfN…

in reply to Vertigo #$FF

I made so many homework assignments using its word processor, and even a little newspaper. I even sent them a letter, asking for an SDK in Pascal rather than C!

(I think that was part of why I decided to learn C back in the day)




Breaking news: Shaun finally starts using Jaws. Full details on tomorrow's show. 😎
in reply to Double Tap

This definitely deserves a "breaking news, breaking news" clip. I'm glad I'm only typing this reply because I'm feeling speechless at the moment. 😀 Seriously, @ShaunOfTheShed, congratulations. Please don't hesitate to put your JAWS questions out here if you should ever need help.


I typed "Missing medieval servant" into Google ...

But it just came up with "Page not found".



Still on a long-forgotten quest to get Mac OS 10.4 tiger up and running in virtual machine form for the old Fred voice that Apple used Pre Mac OS 10.5. Who knows when it'll happen, but ever so often I think of it.
in reply to Tamas G

Well, thing is, I did get this running in UTM/Qemu, but... Well... The good news is I *did* install Audio Hijack on there and was able to record glitch free audio that way.
in reply to Mason

@Mason oh yes! That Victoria voice is that one that was still in the Satisfaction song, too. You could tell those voices were used by even musicians like that. I know Sheep Shaver's PPC emulator had the same stutter problem (probably as it's also using Qemu like UTM is) - for awhile there was a promising build of Qemu with far better sound but it never materialized
in reply to Tamas G

Yeah, I used the build of Qemu that claimed it had far better sound. It did not.
in reply to Tamas G

@Mason Ah yes! Benny benassi. I love that song. I think they used Fred as well on that song.



So this is totally hypothetical at this point. but let us just say you wanted to set up your own Masto instance, but you want it to be fully managed. You'd like to run a fork that allows for a decent character limit. what provider would you use? and go!


I’m one who tries to carry on the tradition of calling our posts here on Mastodon “toots”.

I’m glad the term “shit posting” is used instead of “shit tooting” though because that would be unfortunate.



Is it weird to be nostalgic about high pressure sodium lamps?

I really do miss the orange Glow and I only really see them during travel in other countries now



В Беларуси заблокировали российский онлайн-кинотеатр Okko за «пропаганду насилия и жестокости»
in reply to Игорь Минхерц

Я не вижу фото (ибо не вижу в принципе), но текст новости звучит как жабогадюкинг :)
in reply to André Polykanine

Я никому, ничего и никогда не доказываю. Считаю, что юзеры в состоянии сами поискать информацию в сети.
Я отвечаю за сказанное мною, а не за то, как вы поняли мои слова.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)


wow. Just checked out the banner saga accessibility mod because the game is on insanely deep discount on steam right now. This is really cool! Will do a stream either today or tomorrow.


Overjoyed to report that busking earnings are returning to "happy Christine" levels. Perplexed about the offering of a cigarette in my case: hugely generous from a smoker, wasted on a non-smoker; they should have kept it and gave me a compliment instead. And the Christian pamphlits? Really, whatever anyone else thinks, I'm certain they aren't going to help me pay my bills, and the daftness of dropping a printed list of daily prayers beside a white cane used by a blind person is spectacular

reshared this



I work at a public administration with an obligation to keep its software and systems #accessible for its civil servants, who like me might be disabled, as well as for citizens who use its systems from the outside.

Recently, #Firefox stopped working with my screen reader, after it was updated to version 115. After some investigation, requiring the aid of a coworker and far more knowledge about computers and #accessibility than should be expected from a civil service end user, I worked out what was happening. Can you guess?

Someone had the brilliant idea to set, as group policy, the following Firefox directive: accessibility.forced_disabled: 1.

Yes, that does what you think it does. It disallows accessibility providers such as screen readers to connect to Firefox and use the APIs. Who thought this was a good idea and why?

Jamie Teh reshared this.

in reply to modulux

This also supports my theory about people editing group policies. You give them a list of options to allow/disallow and they disallow most if not all for no other reason than they can, or they are scared they will leave something open and get blamed later on. Though why this option is even a thing is another question.
Unknown parent

modulux

I'm a bit more willing to give benefit of the doubt--I suspect ignorance rather than malice--but the effects are pretty bad all the same.

I might also add I issued a ticket on the user support system, and after a couple of days I only got confirmation that my diagnosis is correct, but no fix so far.



Seems like Aira's WhatsApp bridge for Meta glasses is rolling out to a lot more people now. I got access yesterday, still haven't tried it, but I now have a new button in my home screen to "customize my call". This gives access to a few options, including Meta glasses, navigation, tech support, and—for some reason—other. I assume Aira is starting to specialize certain agents according to what they're able to do, and being set up for Meta glasses is just one of those options. There was a big Zoom meeting to explain this functionality, but in a nutshell, due to Meta's current limitations and Aira not being able to secure a partnership with Meta, users have to make an Aira call, then join a WhatsApp call, then activate the glasses camera. I'm not sure how Be My Eyes and Envision are able to do what Aira can't, but hopefully all of these things end up on the glasses in a more cohesive way. Being able to say "Hey Meta, call an Aira agent" would be pretty nifty.




I try following some people and get 429 errors. Is that because things aren't set up here yet?


In tech, we need more people who enjoy maintenance and polishing existing features and fewer who enjoy adding new features. (And I’m saying that as a member of the latter group.)

Companies keep adding new features to useful products until they are no longer useful.

(As @Schrank points out, that’s partly due to how the economy currently works.)

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

reshared this



Well y'all, I broke something. I was using Emacs, and was committing a change to a repo like always, when my audio started to studder a bit. I'd noticed that Emacspeak sounds were a big sluggish, but I thought that was Sox being sox or Pipewire messing with something as usual. So I unplugged my Dell docking station, plugged it in again, and things returned to normal until the next time I committed. This time, audio stopped, and, well, never came back. I plugged the dock into my iPhone, and it worked. Windows, worked. Linux though? Nope. Not sure what's going on, but goodness I'm tired of technology. So tired of everything changing and breaking. Google Drive changed, so I'm having to redo the whole course on Google Docs/Drive. And this was not something I was expecting and definitely not something I needed today. So I'm gonna have to look for a way to reset the dock or something.

#linux #foss #accessibility #blind



Hi @nextcloud! Where can I report #NextCloud accessibility bugs? How can I contribute to fix them? You have sooo many repositories, I'm a bit confuzzled. Thanks!
in reply to André Polykanine

Ideally, you want to report issues to the app's repository. The main repository, which covers a lot of general issues, is this:
github.com/nextcloud/server/is…

If you're unsure which app has the accessibility bug, you can try reporting it in the main repo.