Open Source Accessibility Summit!
Sunday, Oct 12, Raleigh, NC USA
"Improving the accessibility of open source software"
2025.allthingsopen.org/open-so…
#opensource #oss #a11y #accessibility #events #event #raleighNC

LibreOffice isn't just an app – it's a worldwide community of people who work on code, documentation, QA, design, marketing and more. Meet us at local events, like recently in northern Italy: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl… #foss #OpenSource

LibreOffice reshared this.

Purism Featured in Fortune- Secure Phone Made in the USA. While Big Tech claims U.S. smartphone manufacturing is “impossible” or “too expensive,”

Purism CEO Todd Weaver is proving otherwise.

puri.sm/posts/fortune-com-feat…

#AudioMo Day 16: In December of 2013 I visited #Estonia to go and visit @jakobrosin for the first time.
I decided to record as much of the plane-flight from the baggage hold as I could manage, so I set my Olympus LS-100 going, attached some mics to the suitcase straps internally and sent it on it's way.
Here, we have 9 minutes of what I like to call 'Ethereal Suitcase Music' as it wends it's merry way from baggage check-in to the plane.
Listen for the really strange and as yet unidentified noises the recorder captured at points along it's journey.
If you have any ideas what these might be, I'd be very curious. I've been waiting for over 11 years to find out.

reshared this

So, this time, i caught NVDA crashing, the same way it did yesterday, and it played an eror sound. I was curious to see if it would do it again, and right be for i hit record, it did. That time, it had no problem recovering, but i decided to leave Vertual Recorder open, to see if i can capture erors. I was in the interface of my Mastodon clyant, TWBlue browsing threw my home timeline as i usually do. About three minutes in, i heard an eror sound, and it stoped speaking intirely! It took me time to get Narrator up, so i can at least restart NVDA threw Task Manager. @NVAccess, hears what happened on my end. And guies, please don't take this as an attack, i just want this issue to be fixed. Thank you, for trying to help me yesterday, and i hope this can help bring foard a solution. Aside from this, i really do like NVDA's new features, and i support the project.
in reply to NV Access

there's a big problem with that. To put it lightly, the screen reader was unusable. I had to use narrator to get to the task manager, kill that NVDA process. Unfortunately, there is probably no Logg at all, and if there is if you can tell me where it is in a directory, I can see if I can find it. Whatever this is seems to be dependent on the severity. Sometimes, it can recover easily, but this time for some reason it took me over 10 minutes to figure out how to kill the bad process, and restart on my main copy. Thankfully, I never installed the update for my main copy, because, I don't know how much worse the crash would have been.

Since i'm on my laptop, let me correct my bad phone'serrors.

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to Alexis

If you press windows+e to open explorer, then alt+d to go to the address bar. Type %temp% (note the percent signs either side of the word temp) and press enter. In THAT directory are the nvda log files - nvda.log for the currently running or most recently running instance, nvda-old.log for the one before that, and also nvda_crash.dmp if NVDA itself has crashed. Please email those to us.

"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?

reshared this

Unknown parent

gotosocial - Link to source

the esoteric programmer

yes, from what I know, that's already a thing, technically. You can install it with orca enabled, then press alt+windows+s on the login screen to turn it on, and maybe again in the desktop? not sure. But yeah, definitely something that can be done, something I talked about with them before. No usb audio recognised and such, yeah, now that's a huge issue, that requires some serious troubleshooting. Maybe post about it in the a11y room, or in fedora's general support channel?

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…

This entry was edited (6 months ago)

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…

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.

in reply to miki

@miki I’m not totally sure. Right now our behavior mostly mimics iTerm. It’s admittedly not optimized for humans right now and more for AI (I note that in the PR), but the foundational work is all the same. It’s just all the last mile to get to the next spot.

My thinking thoigh was to break down the terminal into more accessibility groups e.g per command then per N lines of output, and notify AX framework that new data exists.

@miki
in reply to Mitchell Hashimoto

Autoreading on Mac is though (see that writeup I made on Github at one point) because Voice Over has no built-in queuing mechanism, and you really need one in a terminal. This is not a problem on any other platform, most screen readers let you decide whether you want new speech to interrupt all existing utterances or to queue up.

This means you basically need to handle speech yourself (Mac OS and all other platforms have APIs for that and they're decent), but that opens another can of worms, as then you need a way to manage speech preferences somehow.

Dnes mě i přes neděli lovil v práci pan generální.
Napřed mi mazal med kolem huby, pak zkoušel oddanost práci a pak vytáhl nejvyšší kalibr.
Pořídil pro mě úplně nový Mercedes Tourismo, který bude jen můj, nikdo jiný mi ho nebude řídit, nikdo mi ho nebude týrat...
Nebudu to natahovat místo linky do Londýna jsem od příštího měsíce Long Executive trip driver ❤️
Příští stížnosti na dopravu budou z cest po UK a Evropě 😇

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

This entry was edited (6 months ago)

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

reshared this

What would a Doctor Who missing episodes drama be like? blog.lovarzi.co.uk/doctor-who-… #DoctorWho
This entry was edited (6 months ago)

What bullshitery, Tiflotecnia's Vocalizer licenses have a limit, was just told that I've hit my max registered licenses, very sad, right away, just removed the add-on. Looks like back to the cracked Vocalizer we go, since they don't even have a portal where you can reset your license, wow. Here I had thought Tiflo got better, but nope. (Still sent them an e-mail to the address my license came from and I sent proof of purchase for the CF one, we'll ssee if it's one of those no-response ones, just listed as tiflotecnia@tiflotecnia.com.)
Can someone scan through their documentation and tell me if they reference anywhere a line about a license limit, needing to deauthorize a license to get the counter lowered, ETC? Because I sure ain't seeing it. tiflotecnia.com/documentation.…
Update: OK, that e-mail does work! FYI, they track your machine name, internal IP, and external IP of each machine. Very interesting, not entirely surprised this is kept to prevent sharing of licenses though.
This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to Tamas G

Hoping my Tiflotecnia Vocalizer issues will get solved today, I have 3 machines with my desktop, HP laptop, Asus laptop. So that's it, no work machine getting Vocalizer now. Ah well. They were not the ones to pay for it anyway, I'll just get them to invoice a license for me if I really needed to use it for work. Bye bye Vocalizer on Virtual Mac OS either, since that would count as a 4th machine. Argh. Guess I'll need to buy a second 3-pack license if I want it on more machines like that, what can I say, I just love computers. I sleep with 2 of them under the bed, 4 or 5 in storage bins like my old Macbook Air, so it's quite easy to hit that 3-machine ceiling for me.

The Halifax Explosion: The Devastating Maritime Collision That Produced The Largest Explosion Of The Pre-Nuclear Age

By Austin Harvey

allthatsinteresting.com/halifa…

Books about the Halifax Explosion at PG:

gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?q…

"A photograph of the Mont-Blanc purportedly taken 15 to 20 seconds after the explosion."

#disaster

This entry was edited (6 months ago)

Roland's Virtual Sound Canvas is essentially gm.dls, but with newly added samples of SC-88 and 88Pro instruments. Among the newly added samples is a sample of the Yyoo Dude patch from the SC-88Pro Asia kit.
Interestingly, Roland seems to have used the original Yyoo Dude sample when adding the patch to Virtual Sound Canvas, rather than using the SC-88Pro version of the sample, which is slightly shorter.

#AudioMo day 14:

On August 18. 2018. I took a Delta flight from Atlanta to New York City. During this flight, I plugged my Zoom H1N digital recorder directly into a headphone output at my seat, and recorded announcements from the flight deck during the entire flight, then edited out all the space between them.

This entry was edited (6 months ago)

#AudioMo day 15:

Remember when computers sounded like this?

For some reason, on August 6, 2007, I stuck my Zoom H4 in front of the old, even for the time, Compaq Deskpro Pentium III computer in my bedroom, which, at the time, was running FX Radio on Windows 2000. It had two hard drives, both Western Digital. The operating system was on a 10GB 5400 RPM drive, and the media was on a 30GB 7200 RPM drive.

reshared this

📺 I went in-depth on new Apple Intelligence Shortcuts actions, including the ability to choose on-device models, summary tools, and show several real-world uses! youtu.be/Msde-lZwOxg?si=B6-iFY…

#AndroidAppRain at apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid today with 13 updated and 1 added apps:

* App Lock: provides powerful app protection with powerful biometric protection and privacy controls 🛡️

Traccar Manager will no longer receive updates, as its authors decided to no longer ship a FOSS build (the other one has a bunch of proprietary components).

Enjoy your #free #Android #apps with the #IzzyOnDroid repo :awesome:

The Decline of Cable News: A Warning Flag for Cable TV’s Last Holdout cordcuttersnews.com/the-declin…

“Little House on the Prairie” Is Streaming Free on Amazon Prime Video as Netflix Gears Up for New Reboot cordcuttersnews.com/little-hou…

ATU733 – BrailleDoodle with Daniel Lubiner – Part 1 eastersealstech.com/2025/06/13…