Edited with a lot more resources and ways to get involved if you actually wanna get involved.
Hey non-disabled #Linux folk, sure would be fantastic if everyone pitched in on helping the blind and sighted allies making Linux more accessible to disabled users rather than warning us about the end of Windows 10, like we don't already know. Telling us something we already know doesn't help us switch to Linux because while you're lecturing us, Linux still has accessibility issues in the underlying infrastructures.
To start, Here’s a small, impactful thing you can do for now. There are bigger needs but making a fully accessible place one can research and compare distros would be a start. This website is linked to a lot. It’s inaccessible to screen magnifier users because the test is coded in such a way where elements appear behind other elements. All the links in the navigation area are empty and need labels. Making the quiz screen reader friendly by having regular web elements for questions such as radio buttons and other HTML elements without enabling an accessibility mode would be a fantastic start. distrochooser.de/
Here's some background on the recent state of Linux accessibility, and a project you can contribute to.
Make more repositories, wiki's, websites, like Linux Access ORG, of accessible mainstream distros and other flavors/spins. Make accessibility guides. Do what big tech does for accessibility but do it better than them.
and contribute to projects such as Access Kit. accesskit.dev/
Lastly, there are a ton of blind mailing lists out there for linux. Read what they have to say. Here's just one of them, this thread provides more. inbox.the-brannons.com/blinux/…
"By refusing to implement even the bare minimum protections they once promised, Google is making clear that user privacy comes second to their surveillance-based business model,” EFF’s Lena Cohen told The Register. theregister.com/2025/04/22/goo…
A federal district court judge rules USAGM (including its "special adviser" Kari Lake) acted unlawfully in shutting down the Voice of America. democracyforward.org/wp-conten…
“This decision is a powerful affirmation of the role that independent journalism plays in advancing democracy and countering disinformation." - Tom Yazdgerdi, president of the American Foreign Service Association.
“We are gratified by today’s ruling. This is another step in the process to restore VOA to full operation.” said Government Accountability Project Senior Counsel David Seide.
“Today’s ruling is a victory for the rule of law, for press freedom and journalistic integrity, and for democracy worldwide." - AFGE National President Everett Kelley.
“Today’s ruling marks a significant victory for press freedom and for the dedicated women and men who bring it to life—our clients, the journalists, executives, and staff of Voice of America." - Andrew G. Celli, Jr., founding Partner, Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP
I open my windows 11 VM on Mac after a long time of not doing so, and #TweeseCake picks up all the telegram messages it needs to. Always makes a grand old noise indeed.
that happened to me once, and after everything spectacularly got flooded with sounds,I exited tweesecake and stopped using it LOL. Because it does lag, but on windows windows it did. Sounds are funny though, unless they continue for more than a minute, everything after a minute is going to be annoying. LOL.
My wife Kirsten @MoonCat and I started a podcast last September and we're having fun with it. Over 16 hours and 31 episodes in, we've covered topics such as: How we first met. Never going to sleep on an argument. Double standards in a relationship. The tech from our childhood. Banning mobile/cellular phones in our children's schools. The incorrect pronunciation of our names. Our 16th wedding anniversary and much more.
We don't have sponsors, don't do ads, and none of what we say is scripted. It's raw, it's us and we hope you like it. Our only method of reaching new listeners like you is word-of-mouth so please do share if you've a mind to do so.
We're a blind sighted couple, I'm blind and she's fully-sighted, so we come at this from two quite different walks of life.
I ate pão de queijo (Brazilian cheese bread) my first day in Brazil, and have loved it ever since. now, I've discovered we kind of have it here in the US, I invite you to try it out.
I started donating blood when I was 17, the Red Cross is always looking for donors, their supply is often very low. If you can, please consider it. social.sgawolf.com/@simon/1143…
Sending this whilst I “recover” from giving blood for the first time ever. It’s definitely worth doing, and not just for the free drinks and snacks! I hate needles and blood but it was all remarkably easy and stress-free and the staff doing it gave a…
Q&A coming up, Saturday 26th at 3PM Eastern, 8PM UK On the last of the Saturdays in April, Join us, for your Q&A staple. Ok fine, that wasn't a sublime rhyme, I'm more of a reaper with poorly peepers than an Edgar Allan Poet.
As usual, me and Jen will be live starting at 3PM Eastern, taking and hopefully answering questions about REAPER and OSARA. Any amount of experience is welcome. Newcomers get first priority, then we get geeky in the gaps. Head over to ReaperTeacher.com for TeamTalk details, to ask a question in advance, or to send in one of your recent projects if you'd like some feedback. That's proving to be a popular piece of the action, so don't dilly-dally, we'll be playing the first couple of things that arrive. We'll also be streaming and taking questions from YouTube and the Blind Producers Discord server, that's at discord.gg/uPFzNHv4U7 if you want to join.
France and Germany unveil Docs, a homegrown alternative to Google Docs techspot.com/news/107225-franc… In a push for digital independence, Europe debuts its own collaboration tool
The Trump administration has set out to drastically reshape the relationship between the US and Europe. In response, Brussels is scrambling to adapt to this new reality,...
"Accessibility is difficult, working in an ableist society is difficult. Realizing that ableism runs wide in the accessibility community hurts.
This is a chance to think about our own values and how we apply them to our jobs. For me, supporting people to experience all their human rights equally is a fundamental value. Not only that, but I think inaccessibility violates people’s dignity."
going on a stupid mental health walk in the stupid sun in stupid actually nice not stifling stupidly humid washington dc instead of sitting in my stupid hotel room for my stupid mental health because of stupid brain
another fun wire factoid: ive never seen it on any of those government lists of 'we gotta break into this platform'. whatspp, signal, telegram - yep, all of those. wire? people dont even know it exists, which works out better for privacy :D
Proton statt Gmail, Pixelfed statt Insta: Ein Wiener Softwareentwickler hat eine Plattform für heimische Alternativen zu den Angeboten von Big Tech erstellt
Definitely missing @Vivaldi browser in there, switch out brave for obvious reasons. Missing @disroot as another email alternative - those guys do good work ❤ Bitwarden authenticator could also be added. @filen is awesone cloud storage, less known but super good drive alternative.
The problem is that you can't really replace Android without seriously limiting yourself when it comes to device choice (LineageOS helps, but not that much), and even if you do, F-Droid is no match for Play Store, not even close (yes, I do use F-Droid). So these two alone would take some serious dedication to "deGoogle", probably way beyond what most are willing to do. So you're still stuck with Google there.
And let's not even talk about replacing YouTube...
But yeah, for the rest, there are certainly valid options.
Alarming Open Letter: "Community contributors to #OrganicMaps have expressed serious concerns about the project's #governance , #transparency ,and the potential for #shareholder profit at the expense of the #community .
I had 6 desperate Google accounts just to gain the free 15g of Drive space. I finally finished degoogling after transferring everything to that home server I've been promising myself for years.
My main question is, how is LibreOffice (a local program suite) an alternative to Google Docs (a cloud program suite)? CryptPad at least makes sense...
Not google is not enough for many now. Not US is where I and many more want to be. What makes Google, Meta, X etc a problem is that they are allowed to be a problem by US government that places everything below extracting profit and regarding its citizens as fair game.
kinda wild how many folks pointed out how mysteriously absent Proton is from the Gmail alt list... And how no one from either of these accounts have addressed this!
It'd be good to (perhaps with sorting or color?) indicate how many years each alternative presented has been in existence, and whether or not its funded - the lists like this I've seen in the past decades are mostly link-rot
#nebudkokot jako Macinka… Jako zkušený řidič (31 let plus, držitel licence pro rallye drivers, absolvent několika kurzů emergency driving jako řidič záchranky a majitel 5l V8 BMW a 3l V6 M-B říkám, že žádný závodní řidič při smyslech, tedy způsobilý řídit, nepojede po veřejné komunikaci v běžném provozu 200+. O tom, že se při řízení nebude fotit mobilem ani nebudeme mluvit, ju, čuráku…
Conversations 2.18.2 is available on Google Play and has client side mitigations for a server side security issue that was recently discovered and fixed in #ejabberd¹ and #OpenFire²
Go update your server. But just in case that takes a minute Conversations has your back too!
This release also fixes an issue with restoring (importing) backups on recent Android versions.
Die "Do It Blind" Gruppe in Metalab, in Rahmen dessen die Metabraille Oskar Brailletastatur entstanden ist, hat angefangen, ihre Mitschrifte für alle zu veröffentlichen. Ihr könnt dort jede Woche lesen, welche Themen wir besprochen haben, was wir so bezüglich barrierefreie Tech finden und was uns rund um diese Themen aufregt. Ihr seit auch herzlich eingeladen, zu unsere wöchentliche online Treffen zu kommen. Ich hoffe, das wird eine interessante Lekture für alle die sich für Technik, Barrierefreiheit für blinde Menschen, Technik und alles dazwischen interessieren. oskars.org/posts/ @oskar_mbr @metalab #Accessibility #Blind
My previous post in German is just a shoutout that the "Do it Blind" group, the people behind the Metabraille keyboard, log their weekly meeting protocols for everyone to see. The posts / logs are in German but if you throw a translation service at it, you may discover what we're up to and what we discover as far as accessible tech is concerned. We also host weekly online meetings you can attend. Although primarily in German, we will be happy about new English-speaking guests. #Accessibility #Blind
This is a super-helpful guide to emailing your MP about the recent Supreme Court ruling, which is inevitably going to be used to further persecute, humiliate, and segregate trans and NB people.
The trans community is facing a major crisis in the UK after the Supreme Court ruled last week that for the purposes of The Equality Act 2010 sex should be classified as biological (i.e. as recorded at birth).
«Se vende el mito de una tecnología milagrosa e increíblemente poderosa, pero esta tecnología está basada en el trabajo en negro, precarizado y explotador de millones de trabajadores manuales sin los que la IA no funcionaría».
Entrevista a @milamiceli socióloga, doctora en Ciencias de la Computación, experta en IA en el Weizenbaum Institute, investigadora en el Dair Institute, y una de las principales expertas en un campo poco conocido: el de los trabajadores de datos.
La experta del Instituto Alemán de Internet advierte de que el auge de herramientas como ChatGPT aumentará la demanda de gente que genere contenidos por poco dinero para enriquecer las bases de datos
La stupidité du monde… Les consignes incendie c'est un truc que tu dois pouvoir lire dans l'urgence, tu dois pas avoir à sortir ton smartphone et scanner un QR code pour les avoir.
Oh et si vous pensiez que ça vous donne un PDF avec les infos pour sortir du bâtiment, non ça ouvre une vidéo de 2 minutes avec des généralités… Totalement inutile.
E-Waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the world. Most of it is not recycled and what is is often done in the Global South with terrible conditions and awful pay. Big Tech wants to keep the truly dirty secret of e-waste as hidden as possible, and keep paying poor workers as little as possible.
If you want to truly understand modern technology, start with e-waste.
Apparently the arXiv* is relocating from servers at Cornell University to Google Cloud. Putting all our eggs into Google's basket seems unwise, especially at this point in history.
This jobs listing gives a number of reasons for moving to the cloud, but to my inexpert eye it looks like they could do everything they want to do while remaining self-hosted. At the relatively modest scale of the arXiv the cloud really is just someone else's computer.
It's worth noting that the arXiv used to have a network of mirrors, but they decided to shut down the last of those in September of last year. The explanation was that they were no longer worthwhile as the Cornell servers + CDN delivered better performance than the regional mirrors: info.arxiv.org/help/mirrors.ht…
The multi-site (and multi-country) backup provided by those mirrors does not appear to have been a consideration, because of course nothing bad would ever happen to an American university.
*The arXiv is a repository providing free access to pre-prints of academic papers in a range of fields across physics, maths, biology, computer science, etc. In some fields, including astronomy, it is the main way that researchers keep up to date with new publications in their area of research.
I really enjoyed c-ares as a serious project to study a few years ago. Back then it looked like it didn't support encrypted DNS, maybe thats ok, maybe I didn't understand it at the time. Any opinions on the state of encrypting DNS going forward in the future? Did it catch on? will it?
@kiyo I don't know and I don't care that much. If people want it added there it will be added. For users such as #curl, we add things like DoH ourselves anyway and it would be hard to use any such provided by c-ares because of the "different layer" it works on.
I think I thought that then too, although without having a full picture. Long live c-ares, its small enough to study entirely, and it's a serious little lib! Thanks for all the hard work!
I have forgotten more than I ever knew about C. Nevertheless I have two ? 1) why is namelen on line 104 not being set to null if it is null on the input? Perhaps malloc initializes memory but I don't recall that or perhaps there is something else of why it isn't used. I get the ptrs here confused especially since I have no clue how c-ares works.
2) really a style question. line 11. Any reason why it's own dot.h isn't last? It shouldn't matter. Perhaps one could argue it should be first
After the Code of Conduct and the Mediation process, the Core Governance document is now ready for wider feedback.
This document describes what JoinJabber does and what we aim to achieve. It also describes what our values are and a way to make proposals to the entire community.
I think completely ruling out "LLMs and other probabilistic tools" (which rules out almost any autocompletion) is ill-informed. LLMs are way overhyped, the environmental concerns are real, but it's about the same as with any other program, it is possible to use them wisely, ie, not take their output at face value. That consent part feels very weird to me. I remember Napster and singing "copying is not theft". (1/2)
Fuck OpenAI and the others, sure. Also, I understand where this stance comes from, as the current LLM bubble and the ridiculous associated claims are insufferable. But this feels like a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
You asked for feedback, this was mine, I hope that does not get me excluded as I am grateful for joinjabber's existence. (2/2)
Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs. Special Guest: Cody Mi…
Brian Ziman
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