The accessibility link is a lie: my adventures in weaponizing corporate virtue signalling, by WeirdWriter@caneandable.social sightlessscribbles.com/posts/2…
Following GUI instructions written for sighted people as a blind person requires you to do mental gymnastics like working out what "Use the three dots icon" could mean.
This also makes it difficult to have a sighted colleague teach you how to use that one extra tool you need to go about your job-related tasks. My onboardings were a nightmare because of that. Still remembering fondly how I had to take an express course in Audacity to learn the basics in a couple of days for a traineeship. The task we got was: split the music bed we provided you into bars so that you can copy and paste them again and again to make the bed longer. „Bars? What do you mean by bars?” „You know, on the screen, the music is split into bars.” „Perfect, I can't see that.” Three days later: "So how do you split into bars by keyboard?" "Well, I press ctrl and I." - Turns out they meant clips all along.
after aggressively ignoring YouTube Shorts since their introduction, and Google continuing to force it onto my subscriptions page, I have finally taken the effort to locate a userscript that removes them from the site (I also read the code because I'm suspicious and reading code is fun). It does appear to work :)
Welcome to GUADEC 2025 GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a week of talks and workshops.
GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a w...
In case anyone finds this useful, I added a "ReaKontrol: Reconnect" action to #ReaKontrol which allows you to reconnect to your Kontrol keyboard if it isn't connected when you first start #REAPER or it gets disconnected while REAPER is running. Otherwise, you have to restart REAPER, which is deeply irritating. reakontrol.jantrid.net/
At NV Access we are always interested in understanding the satisfaction of our NVDA users. Plus we like to understand clearly what is important to you and also identify what we can do more effectively. We encourage you to complete the NVDA Satisfaction Survey 2025 to assist us with improving the NVDA user experience. It is a short, three question survey, which is anonymous and does not require signing in.
At NV Access we are always interested in understanding the satisfaction of our NVDA users.
Plus we like to understand clearly what is important to you and also identify what we can do more effectively.
Done. I was surprised it didn't ask for anything like the user's primary pain point or source of frustration. For the record, mine would have been updates breaking add-on compatibility, and all the problems this causes, especially for add-ons that don't use the auto update mechanism. I know there's not much NV Access can do about updates and such, but it feels like I'm disabling a whole raft of add-ons once per year for no reason.
@alexhall We try to leave that "What are the main reasons for your score" open for people to expand on things like that - and yes, we know that add-on breaking is one of the bigger pain points, and it is one we are working on (an expanded secure API which won't break for add-ons which use those functions) - I don't have a time frame but we are well aware it will be greatly appreciated when available! Thanks for your feedback!
Thanks for the update. My answers were generally positive, so it felt odd adding a negative there. The negative wasn't a reason for my overall positive responses.
@alexhall Maybe we could consider a general "Any other comments", or perhaps reword that "What are the main reasons for your score" to "Do you have any comments or suggestions, or would you like to elaborate on the reasons for your score"
@b_rain The survey is anonymous & you don't need a Google account. But, you are always most welcome to send us your thoughts directly! The questions in the survey were:
1) On a scale 0-10 how likely are you to recommend NVDA (0 = not at all, 10 is very likely)
2) What are the main reasons for your score (text field to type any feedback you'd like to give)
3) Is your use of NVDA primarily for accessibility testing? (Yes or No).
Feel free to email us at info@nvaccess.org if you would like.
Just installed the latest software upgrade on my BT Speak (blazietech.com/bt-speak-pro) from @BlazieTech, and at the last step, before it rebooted, the system hung for somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute, *with the vibrator active* all that time. I pressed and held the power button a couple of times, with no immediate effect, and it did finally reboot rather than powering off. Not sure what I would have done if it had stayed in that stuck state.
The same thing happen here as well. I was doing something else while the update process was working. I didn't even notice until the vibration motor was going on for about 15 seconds or so. I figured I'd wait for a minute or so before doing anything. Luckily, it stopped and the unit booted correctly.
The BT Speak boot process seems to start the vibration mootor pretty early (I haven't checked exactly where), and a script that runs after login stops the motor. I found this out because if you disable automatic login, the vibration motor continues running until you type your password, but stops a few seconds later when it says "BT Speak ready". So I would guess that the system did reboot, and was running some kind of update script that ran before login, so the motor didn't stop. Although I could be wrong; I haven't investigated how the updates work yet, but I can tell it updates the system one component at a time, and it seems to actually be compiling the editor and liblouis and other things instead of using pre-built binaries or Debian packages which is an interesting way to do it.
I bluntly do not understand why the British seem to not only tolerate but even prize their own subjugation, but that the people doing the subjugating are doing it with smoothbrained nonsense like this.
now that I dig a bit, what has become a meme for the French (not Canada) that peeing in the shower is good to save the environment along with deleting old emails, it might have been originating... from the UK.
This time next week we'll have our first NLnet office hour. Every last Wednesday of the month we'll be available for a chat at 16.00 CEST. It is open to anyone for questions or remarks. As this is our first session, we're very interested to learn what kind of topics will come up. And if there are any suggestions about the office hour itself, we're also keen to hear it.
"DEADNAME!" and "deadname!" (amab) out now on my spotify and everywhere! https://beacons.ai/flasch ★★★★★ ALL MUSIC AND LINKS HERE! ★★★★★https://www.instagra...
The Wireless Power Consortium launches faster Qi2 25W wireless charging, with "major Android smartphones" finally adopting the standard alongside the iPhone (Dominic Preston/The Verge)
You Shouldn’t Have to Make Your Social Media Public to Get a Visa eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/you-… The Trump administration is continuing its dangerous push to surveil and suppress foreign students’ social media activity. The State Department recently announced an unprecedented new requirement that applicants for student and exchange visas must set all social media accounts to “public” f --- 76 uses from 76 accounts #toplink
It's common to be overwhelmed by the constant attacks on privacy we read about every day, and to burn out trying to fix every problem all at once.
This is by the attackers' design, of course. Big tech companies and governments want to paralyze you with choices and actions, so you give up on the fight entirely.
It's okay to take a breath, clean up slowly, and train yourself over the long-term to improve your data privacy health over time.
Improving privacy can get overwhelming at first. It's important to move one step at a time, but remain persistent. Good privacy is like good health habits.
Ever see a bunch of restaurants on delivery apps sharing an address and possibly even large chunks of their menus?
I used to see this stuff and thought it was some tax evasion scheme, but no – they're ghost kitchens.
This looks like an existential danger to traditional local gastronomy with shit like big chains pretending to be small locally-owned shops. And of course systemic work and food safety violations because it wouldn't be late-stage capitalism without those…
merch - https://yikesshop.com/Start speaking a new language in 3 weeks with Babbel🎉. Get up to 60% OFF your subscription ➡️Here: https://go.babbel.com/t?bsc...
this became very popular during COVID due to everyone doing deliveries and nobody wanting to get food from Denny's delivered, but they'd do it if it was called SUPER AWESOME BURGERS
However, this still existed long before then. I don't know how you conclude that there is any food safety violation going on though. They're still working out of a licensed commercial kitchen...
An expressive, semi-modular, and comprehensive physical modeling/waveguide synthesizer. - GitHub - gabrielsoule/resonarium: An expressive, semi-modular, and comprehensive physical modeling/wavegui...
@dch I hate checking status and doing management tasks with their web interface and PlexDash is also sorta inconvenient, so I'm making my own tied into my Phoenix/LiveView home automation / internal network homepage website thing
I have a fake phone-style landing page on my intranet with a grid of buttons like "apps" which some are links to internal hosted services, others open a LiveView page... it's growing features as I think of them.
I have live co2 measurement for my office on the top bar as well as the live glucose for my mother so I can see how she's doing at a glance. Need to get some live bandwidth up there too, maybe my server load and CPU temp too...
Welcome to GUADEC 2025 GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a week of talks and workshops.
My colleague Georges Stavracas will talk about the state of the XDG desktop portals, and the plans for the future of this shared application development API, on Friday, July 25, at 11:40
Welcome to GUADEC 2025 GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a week of talks and workshops.
* FixupXer - URL Enhancer: removes tracking parameters from URLs to protect your privacy and make links cleaner 🛡️ * Simplest Notes: a clean, minimalistic app for quickly taking and organizing notes 🛡️
This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
#Thüringen #BadBlankenburg, Burg Greifenstein. Blick von der Burgmauer ins malerische Schwarzatal. Auf der Informationstafel an der Burgmauer ist folgender Text zu lesen: " Burg Greifenstein" Ehemals eine der größten deutschen Adelsburgen. Um 1208 wird die Burg "Blankenstein" im Besitz der Grafen von Schwarzburg erwähnt und ist später Sitz des Zweiges Blankenburg der schwarzburgischen Dynastie. 1304 ist sie Geburtsort des späteren Königs Günter XXI. von Schwarzburg-Blankenburg.
***Attention! If you miss MSN/Windows Live Messenger, AIM, and/or ICQ, this is for you! If you use a screen reader and want a 100% accessible messenger client, this is also for you.* This works with Windows XPthrough 11, and I'm logged into it as I write! It's called Escargot, and it revives Windows Live/MSN Messenger. This is the original software, but it has been patched so that it connects to the escargot.chat server and not the Microsoft one. It is 100% free and accessible with NVDA and I'm sure JAWS as well. They also have projects for AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and ICQ, including for Android and IOS, and are working on a web client for MSN. (I don't know if AIM or ICQ are accessible with screen readers, as I have never tried them). Anyway, if you're over twenty-one (my personal request), have read my profile here, and wish to add me, I am dandylover1@escargot.chat. You can find everything here.
Note: If you already have Windows Live/MSN Messenger on your system, you will still need to download their version and create an account. Your Microsoft, MSN, or Hotmail one won't work for signing in. Also, remember to click on RUN_AFTER_INSTALL.exe, in order to patch the program to the Escargot server.
@fireborn So do I! I found some people to add and started a conversation with one of them. Wow! I forgot how incredibly simle and wonderful the interface is! I just have to hit shift+tab to go into the history, and tab to go back into the edit field. Plus, NVDA reads messages as they are sent and as I receive them. I can also easily copy and paste things!
Happy birthday to pharmaceutical #chemist Alice Ball (1892-1916) who developed 1st effective treatment for #leprosy. Though her life was cut tragically short, her research saved 1000s from exile & painful, ineffective lifelong treatment for leprosy, & she was a trailblazer for both women & Black scientists. Ball studied #chemistry at UW earning a BSc & 2nd degree in pharmacy 2 years later. She published “Benzoylations in Ether
Stihl jsem i jeho odjezd. Dojel k přechodu, počkal na zeleného panáčka na semaforu a pak se tam vmotal mezi přecházející chodce a auta co ty chodce pouštěla. Ani světla si nerozsvítil. Skoro si myslím jestli neměl něco pod kůží.
In de welkomsthal van station Amsterdam Centraal werd donderdagavond op grote schaal gedemonstreerd tegen de uithongering van Gaza door Israël. Demonstranten zijn vervolgens in een lange stoet door de stad aan het wandelen.
"We're going to get the drug prices down ... 1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%, numbers that are not even thought to be achievable"US President Donald Trump made bo...
Dropkick Murphys announced Wednesday they will no longer be performing at any more Punk in the Park shows after learning the festival’s organizer donated to the Trump campaign.
Government is prioritizing technology solutions that encourage speed, savings and innovation. Open source software — a type of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution — aligns with that approach.
Thank you for writing up these specs! I noticed that Arch Linux has consistently improved its documentation and infrastructure over the past years, and it's great to see this improve even further!
There's a Chinese-developed Windows GUI toolkit called DuiLib (github.com/DuiLib/DuiLib) that, as far as I can tell, has no programmatic accessibility, so it's not usable with a screen reader. Does anyone know how widely used this toolkit is in China? I know the Zoom Windows app is using a private fork of this toolkit with a somewhat broken accessibility implementation (particularly when it comes to edit controls).
The IT world has convinced us no new software can be deployed outside of US clouds. We're so sure about this that European governments (including the UK) are handing over vital government functions & data to US controlled servers. In this piece I argue that until recently we somehow could run stuff on locally owned hardware, and that we should urgently relearn that skill, while it is still possible - or end up as digital colony of the US: berthub.eu/articles/posts/our-…
I know this is gonna be stupid as hell, i just couldn't help myself. I went on my XP VM, got bord, and started fucking around with Sample TTS voice. All it really says is bla, so i took full advantage of that fact, out of pure boredom. I have the wav file, of what he was actually trying to say, coming next! When i come in contact with TTS, these abominations tend to rise from the pits of my brain!
'How big tech is force-feeding us AI". I'm reading a study “Imposing AI: Deceptive design patterns against sustainability” and thinking about how to integrate that into @Vivaldi's feedback on the EU's nascent Digital Fairness Act. Many people don't want to be tricked (or forced) to use -or feed- LLMs. bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-bi…
Plus, OpenAI's absurd listening tour, top AI scientists say AI is evolving beyond our control, Facebook is putting data centers in tents, and the AI bubble question — answered?
Amen to this. One of the things that really galled me about the spate of tech layoffs is the undercurrent of "gee, y'all just weren't working hard enough" instead of "corporate leadership didn't know WTF to do, made a bunch of shitty choices, and now y'all are on the unemployement line while execs collect bonuses and see their stock go up".
When, not if, things implode, it should be the C-suite that gets sent packing, not the workers.
Slowly reading through Ed Zitron's last article on AI and there's one thing that stands out: it's clear that the AI bubble might send us straight into another 2007-style financial meltdown.
@hub Exactly. When I've been a manager, I expected that if I had a failure at that level, I'd be (at best) demoted or given my walking papers with little more than pocket change. Instead, the C-suite folks skate by and, even if they're fired, they're given more than I make in a decade or two to hold them over until they can screw up elsewhere. Sigh.
Paweł Masarczyk
in reply to Kevin R Jones • • •