Is there a coop or collective of disabled people in tech where you can go to hire accessibility experts? I don't want to continue to release software unless I know its accessible, but I can't know that unless I have my software audited by disabled tech experts that know the pitfalls of these things. I don't need free labour either. I am happy to pay for this service.

#a11y #accessbility #disablity #foss

Sorry for the extreme delay. As I mentioned earlier, this is my hobby project, so I can only dedicate a lot of time to it when work isn't demanding on weekdays, but more frequently on the weekend! The project is called smol-k8s-lab (pronounced "small kay eights lab" which is the trick I used to get it to be pronounced properly by the tts library in python). You can install it using pipx, so pipx install smol-k8s-lab, but it has external dependencies for using kubernetes, so you'll also need to install with apt or brew kind and k3d. I have added screen reading elements for the terminal UI, but they're all prerecorded MP3s because I found orca and espeak to not sound very good. The TTS library I used with python has an irish accent, which I think is understandable, but I'd love your feedback on. Because the program uses MP3s, you will need alsa and/or pulse libraries installed to actually play the audio. If you would like, you can check out the project on github here: github.com/small-hack/smol-k8s…

If you have questions, or you would like to chat on a voice call, I can help out if we can find a time to link up. I can do weekends in the mornings after 10AM CEST, so tomorrow could work if either of you would like to do a call. I guess it makes sense to use something were we can share screens, that way if you run into any hiccups, I can see what you can't, and live fix any issues so you can continue. I've tested it form the point of running the smol-k8s-lab command, and then gone through the accessibility options. I am very interested in what you think of the accessibility screen and options and if I should improve them. I allow setting terminal beeps as well as reading various elements including screen titles. What I don't know how to do is make orca read the text. I know how to launch orca, and I know how to use the MP3s I added or espeak, but I don't understand how to tell orca, from the command line, to read a line of text.

Sorry for the very long reply. I know they're a pain on screenreaders, but there's a lot of info here and I didn't want to leave anything out. If you're still interested, please let me know what app you'd like to meet on and I'll get you my info. If you'd like to do it on your own and just provide feedback that's also ok. Please don't hold back any negative feedback. If you think it's an awful experience, tell me, and tell me how you'd like it to be better. I am here to help, as long as you understand that it may take me a few weeks as I do this in my free time. If you'd like payment for your services, please just DM me your rate and how best to pay you. I can do paypal through my roommate, direct bank transfer if you have an IBAN account, and ko-fi. The reason paypal has to be through my roommate is that paypal canceled my account when I tried to change my name after transitioning my gender.

Oh, this is also the first project I am confident enough to introduce to the blind community, but if you don't mind working with me, I have others that I'd like to work with you on in the future. I'd love to develop a relationship where I can start working more closely with people in the community that passionate about accessibility. I promise to learn from anything you tell me and disseminate that info back to my other friends in the industry and my coworkers if they'll hear it 🙇

Yes, it's in a full TUI right now. There's also a CLI that can be used, but the purpose of the TUI was to make it easier to walk you through the process of setting everything up. Technically, if you're good with YAML, you could just use the CLI, but then you'd need to fill out the yaml using only comments in the yaml file.

Do you know of a CLI command to play some text, so something like: orca say "welcome to the TUI"? I know how to do this with espeak, but I'm not sure how to make orca read a TUI specifically. Alternatively, if you can tell me the command to make orca read everything in the terminal, that'd be awesome, or even just point me at a guide where I can learn myself. I can also spend sometime this evening reading this guide I found, but I'm not in a space where I can do that right at this exact moment. github.com/C-Loftus/orca-intro…

GitHub - C-Loftus/orca-intro-guide: A new user's guide for the Orca screen reader on Linux

A new user's guide for the Orca screen reader on Linux - C-Loftus/orca-intro-guide

^GitHub

I really appreciate it, but please don't stress yourself too much on this. If you don't have the time or your system isn't cooperating, you can always wait till next weekend.

Until then, I'm going to keep fighting pyobjc on macOS. I think part of my issues here are because I wrapped tdsr in a poetry project so I could develop with it a bit more quickly and then released it via pip. When I do a pipx install tdsr2 it doesn't work and says it can't find the objc library, but when I use poetry shell to create a local python virtual environment and use the tdsr command, it works beautifully. When I try to run smol-k8s-lab in the terminal after tdsr is running, it both plays the MP3s I mentioned before AND tdsr uses the default system TTS voice and you get both playing at once which is horrible. It also causes tdsr to start spitting out a lot of terminal escape key garbage to the screen and breaks the whole session entirely. I had to manually close my terminal tab, because it wasn't responding to control + D like it normally does. If I wrote the thing and I feel frustrated, I don't want users to also go through that.

As far as linux is concerned, I don't have easy access to a machine console with gnome on it, as I'm currently running KDE and tdsr doesn't seem to play well on kde at all. Let me give speakup a try though. I haven't tried that one yet. It looks like it uses espeak, which I have tried before, so maybe it'll work better. 🙏 (The other thing that makes this complicated is supporting both Linux and MacOS at the same time, because there's different tools across bother of these. I wonder if this is made any better by anything the wezterm project has done lately as that's a terminal that works on multiple OS. I brought this up to wez himself in 2023 github.com/wezterm/wezterm/dis…

I followed up with wezterm and it looks like he opened an issue where he's gotten about as far as I have in learning the tools he needs to learn, but hasn't put in any actual PRs github.com/wezterm/wezterm/iss… Having a single terminal to support across all operating systems though would make this easier, so I will push on this as well in the background.

How to use screenreaders or text-to-speech functions with wezterm? · wezterm wezterm · Discussion #4441

I am working on a TUI for a tool I'm writing and I was wondering if there's any built-in accessibility features in wezterm for users with vision disabilities, such as support for screen readers, a ...

^GitHub

this is puzzling to me, I'm on fedora and have had some specific browser screenreader things to test at the end of last year and it just worked. At least from the pov of a sighted.

I know there are big efforts to modernize the whole accessability stack, driven by the gnome team and the stf. You are probably right and we should be mad it's not IBM spending their money on it.

also it's the same bullshit for languages other than English.

Linux needs to make non-English language input mirror how it feels on Windows.

I was mostly confused, by aral claiming, that nobody could test their websites for accessibility when running linux.

kinda thought the accessibility of flutter was more of a problem, when it comes to linux.