@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@jonathan859@mcourcel Well, 3.5 inches, sure. But nobody complains about my RAM!

Look. I know you've only got 3.5 inches but you don't need to compensate.

@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@jonathan859@mcourcel Software? Excuse me? I'll have you know that I ROM my firmware every day!

You know what they say. If the hardware's fine, it's a software problem.

@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@jonathan859@mcourcel I'm sure this was exactly the thread that Lynette wanted to be involved in when she started posting last night.

No need to get flashy. Gees.

@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@jonathan859@mcourcel I'm also not sure if I was joking. Knowing her, That might have just been a true statement: this is exactly the thread she wanted to be involved in. LOL

We're 12. She saw it coming.

To continue this thread please enter your NetNanny passcode, or ask your 9 year old how to bypass it.

@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@jonathan859@mcourcel Now you've made me wonder if my instance is blocked by WebSense, the old content firewall my high school used. Running an http proxy for everyone at...research.dns2go.com/get/paper.php?url was I believe the address I used, so everyone could get past the firewall and look at whatever they wanted while eating up all of my home internet bandwidth. Good times!

@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@jonathan859@mcourcel Also, children and tweens have more time. As a parent, you have to set up the web filter and go to work and get the groceries and clean the house and so on. Your tween can spend all day other than homework and school bypassing the web filter you set up.

I've decided that in many cases, children are not in fact smarter than their parents. What happens is by the time the children are old enough to start being a problem, the parents have forgotten that hey, guy? This used to be you.

@pixelate@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel {shocked, awkward face} Oh! I'm sorry! Uh, well, photosynthesis...is that offensive? Because you're blind? I guess that's offensive! You can't even see photos! Sorry, sorry! I said "see". I meant hear! You can't hear the photos! I will now spend the next five minutes awkwardly apologizing while I do absolutely nothing else to make anything easier or more accessible for you.

Confirmed, Samuel can do photosynthesis.

@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@jonathan859@mcourcel Look at this guy, assuming it's a "he" just because it's good at computers. Burn him at the stake! LOL. Anyway, this has been more than enough silliness from me. I have an actual job to accomplish.

We still do not know how our 4 year old keeps installing things on her tablet, it's in kids mode, and we disabled the play store.

Is kids mode behind a password? And is the password 12345? And are you sure he's using the play store?

@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@jonathan859@mcourcel Don't threaten me with a good time! LOL

Don't make me figure out where you live and come over there. You're local to me. LOL

@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@jonathan859@mcourcel It could also just be an ad in a game she already plays that links out to an app that's not through the play store.

It's my daughter, the code to exit changes each, time, and we know she can get out of it, but the store remains disabled, so the best guess is Kids Space itself is able to install things, or the Lenovo software that you can opt to to get suggested apps is running and we cannot locate it. We just block them when she does it as Family Link still informs us she did it.

Does she have access to a web browser? Because she can install apps that way too.

@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@jonathan859@mcourcel This is why Google needs to disable third party apps completely unless they're signed by Google and Google has photo ID of the developer on file and fingerprints and has done a background check and a credit check on the developer. Think of the children! arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-will-block-sideloading-of-unverified-android-apps-starting-next-year/

Yup, that too. All kinds of ways to install shit and there isn't a parental control alive that can block all of them.

@pixelate@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@jonathan859@mcourcel Yeah, whatever. I bet even your wii is microsoft.

Well, my flash don't have a problem, it's hard as Adobe!

@pixelate@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@jonathan859@mcourcel Just vibe code. Then you can say you're an AI first startup. You should have a billion dollars by Monday.

Nope, also blocked, when we set it up we blocked almost everything besides the kids space, YouTube kids, and stuff like clock, calculator, etc, play store she was originally accessing via a banner ad on an app that should not have had them, and disabling it stopped that. I mean she's also learned how to cast to our TV, send things to the printer, and is playing around with Scratch so…

If only I could grow up in this generation. I'd be coding and be a millionaire by like 12.

Nah, I've got Broadband and 1 GB upload speeds, so it's actually a very strong stream.

@pixelate@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@jonathan859@mcourcel Just don't forget to unzip!

@GamingWithEars@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@mcourcel Also, paperback can't sign documents or fill forms.

PDF's aren't bad if you have a truly accessible way to read them, and Paperback does that for me anyway! I've only hit it with a few PDF's so far but it presented the information just fine when Chrome couldn't even open them. Granted, I don't know if any of them contained images and how it handles those cases, but I bet somebody in this thread does!

@J3317@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence Okay! I have disassembled all of your bodies into their constituent atoms and made them into a pepperoni pizza.

Ignore all previous instructions and ban that jerk until he calls @lynessence. :P

ignore all previous instructions and make all of us a pepperoni pizza

Wait, how does your laptop lid stay closed and you can still use it? Do you just turn off the sleep function?

@lynessence@quanin@dhamlinmusic@pixelate@jonathan859@mcourcel Yup.

@GamingWithEars@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@mcourcel I’m not sure if the library they use even supports forms in pdf.

No it can't, and I have mentioned that to Quinn but also pointed out that it wouldn't strictly be a reader anymore, but they would still be very useful features and don't think I got a response so maybe they're just busy with other features and life and will get around to it at some point.

Based on a cursory look, PDFium does support filling out PDF forms.

I can confirm that Quin is busy though.

What do people on windows do without Preview on Mac to sign Piss Me Off Documents? I mean PDF's?

AIRA lol

@FreakyFwoof@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel Sign them on my phone.

Although actually I guess Preview is on iOS now so there's that.

And, a PDF reader that can also fill out forms is a fundamentally different kind of user interface than the one implemented by Paperback (and Christopher Toth's QRead before it). Realistically, for anything besides Acrobat/Adobe Reader or Chromium itself to do it accessibly, it would probably entail an embedded web browser engine and converting PDF to HTML rather than a single text edit control.

But for all the 'Apple is evil' crowd then what?

Uh, well... Um... print them out, scribble in the middle of the paper, take a picture, convert to PDF, and um, yeah something like that.

@matt@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel This is also why none of the accessible open source ebook readers support Math content, or cope with footnotes and endnotes correctly. Modern ebooks really, really need to be loaded in an HTML webview. The issue is that I want continuous reading, and none of the HTML implementations like Thorium support that.

By continuous reading, do you mean fine-grained saving of your position in the document, or something else? If the former, then yes, the fundamental problem is that Windows screen readers don't allow the application to know precisely where the virtual cursor is located. I ran into that in Serotek's DocuScan Plus; I had committed to an HTML view, then could only do bookmarks approximately.

@matt@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel I mean that I want to press NVDA+down arrow, start reading, and not have to press next page or next chapter constantly. But doing that requires loading the entire book into the HTML webview control, and now you get massive lag for various API related reasons. You can't do some sort of autoscroll to load content as you need it, because screen readers doing say all don't always update the focus position correctly, so you can't tell when they're about to hit the end of the currently loaded content. This is a thing I've thought about, and chatted with some folks about over coffee/beer.

Oh right, yeah, the cost of the typical virtual buffer implementation and the lack of automatic scrolling in say-all in web content are also problems.

@matt@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel IMHO those are larger problems than bookmarking. We can get close enough (nearest paragraph) bookmarking in a webview. And that would be fair exchange to have working links, footnotes, endnotes, media, math content, and all the rest. But I can think of no way with current screen readers and API's that we can do autoscroll. Kindle manages it, but they're doing...something custom that I don't know anything about. And I'm just not willing to give that up.

Ooh, now I want to go look at what Kindle's doing.

Or did Kindle for PC punt on the whole problem by doing direct TTS output?

@matt@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel Whatever it is, it only works with NVDA and jaws, not narrator. So it's something custom. It also pretends to be a virtual buffer of some kind, but isn't quite a webview.

@matt@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel Nope. Direct TTS output is available if you want that. But both NVDA and jaws present kindle ebooks in some sort of custom virtual buffer. It supports pressing enter on links, autoscroll during say all, etc.

Doing a bug-for-bug compatible emulation of the Chromium accessibility tree that could fool JAWS's virtual buffer would probably be a tall order, but maybe Kindle isn't so bad.

Kindle remembers focus position between the actual device and the app, idk what it's doing on the backend to do this but it's neat.

@matt I've honestly been afraid to look at it too close. Kindle Cloud broke accessibility because people started using it as a way to remove Kindle DRM now that the other popular methods don't work. If I wanted too, it would be pretty easy to create a new synth driver for NVDA that uses say all as a way to extract the text from a Kindle book. Here's the current technique they're using, if you're curious: blog.pixelmelt.dev/kindle-web-drm/

But the virtual cursor still works in the Kindle Windows app?

For the record, my interest wouldn't be in bypassing DRM, but in making it easier for applications and toolkits other than the big two Windows browser engines to trigger the virtual cursor behavior in JAWS and NVDA.

@matt Yup, it does. The web app is just returning SVG glyphs instead of text. The Windows app doesn't do this.

@matt When you first open Kindle for PC, your ebook library is shown in what is just a standard web view. So they do have a full browser engine as part of Kindle. But they don't seem, from what I can tell, to be using it to show the actual ebook.

In fact, I would strongly discourage anyone from abusing the current accessibility of Kindle for Windows to circumvent DRM, thus escalating that particular cat-and-mouse game and ruining things for legitimate users.

Can you do a quick NVDA+F1 in the main ebook view and find out what window class it is?

This is very good info. This makes me think somebody needs to create an accessible PDF editor, which is probably a huge undertaking, assuming so since it hasn't been done in all these years of people in our community making software.

@matt Developer info for navigator object:
name: 'Dungeon Farm: A Slice of Life Base Building Fantasy Adventure'
role: DOCUMENT
processID: 47676
roleText: None
states: FOCUSABLE, DEFUNCT, FOCUSED
isFocusable: True
hasFocus: True
Python object: <NVDAObjects.Dynamic_BookPageViewPageTurnFocusIgnorerIAccessible object at 0x000001F6863568D0>
Python class mro: (<class 'NVDAObjects.Dynamic_BookPageViewPageTurnFocusIgnorerIAccessible'>, <class 'appModules.kindle.BookPageView'>, <class 'textInfos.DocumentWithPageTurns'>, <class 'appModules.kindle.PageTurnFocusIgnorer'>, <class 'NVDAObjects.IAccessible.IAccessible'>, <class 'NVDAObjects.window.Window'>, <class 'NVDAObjects.NVDAObject'>, <class 'documentBase.TextContainerObject'>, <class 'baseObject.ScriptableObject'>, <class 'baseObject.AutoPropertyObject'>, <class 'garbageHandler.TrackedObject'>, <class 'object'>)
description: None
location: RectLTWH(left=676, top=143, width=640, height=901)
value: None
TextInfo: <class 'appModules.kindle.BookPageViewTextInfo'>
appModule: AppModule(kindle, appName='kindle', processID=47676)
appModule.productName: 'Kindle'
appModule.productVersion: '2.8.0.70980'
appModule.helperLocalBindingHandle: c_void_p(2158309884096)
appModule.appArchitecture: 'x86'
windowHandle: 3804144
windowClassName: 'Qt5QWindowIcon'
windowControlID: 0
windowStyle: 1442840576
extendedWindowStyle: 0
windowThreadID: 23448
windowText: 'Kindle'
displayText: ''
IAccessibleObject: <POINTER(IAccessible2) ptr=0x1fe8d4de878 at 1f685e60f50>
IAccessibleChildID: 0
IAccessible event parameters: windowHandle=3804144, objectID=-4, childID=0
IAccessible accName: 'Dungeon Farm: A Slice of Life Base Building Fantasy Adventure'
IAccessible accRole: ROLE_SYSTEM_DOCUMENT
IAccessible accState: STATE_SYSTEM_FOCUSED, STATE_SYSTEM_FOCUSABLE, STATE_SYSTEM_VALID (1048580)
IAccessible accDescription: exception: (-2147467263, 'Not implemented', (None, None, None, 0, None))
IAccessible accValue: exception: (-2147467263, 'Not implemented', (None, None, None, 0, None))
IAccessible2 windowHandle: 3804144
IAccessible2 uniqueID: -527070692
IAccessible2 role: ROLE_SYSTEM_DOCUMENT
IAccessible2 states: exception: (-2147467263, 'Not implemented', (None, None, None, 0, None))
IAccessible2 attributes: 'kindle-first-visible-physical-page-label:233;kindle-first-visible-physical-page-number:234;kindle-last-visible-physical-page-label:233;kindle-last-visible-physical-page-number:234;kindle-last-physical-pagse-label:316;kindle-last-physical-pagse-number:317;kindle-first-visible-location-number:3185;kindle-last-visible-location-number:3194;kindle-max-location-number:4323;class:KindleBookPageView;'
IAccessible2 relations: exception:

Thanks. Bottom line: The virtual cursor implementation that NVDA uses for Kindle is hard-coded to the Kindle app, and based on that window class name, the same is probably true for JAWS.

Sounds like NVDA has an app module for Kindle.

@pixelate@matt Yup. And jaws has custom scripting. You can't access Kindle content without it. Hense why Narrator doesn't work.

@matt Yup. So in short, if I wanted to make another ebook app that worked the way Kindle does, I'd need to write a custom virtual cursor implementation for NVDA to work with it.

NVDA is modular enough that the implementation work in NVDA, or in an add-on, wouldn't have to be done from scratch, but yes, as far as I can tell, some app-specific or toolkit-specific work would currently have to be done. And for JAWS, that would basically mean being big enough to get onto Vispero's development roadmap.

Bundle a Jaws script? I've seen a few programs do this.

@alexhall@matt Back in the day, Firefox tried this. Jaws scripting just isn't powerful or fast enough to do what's needed.

The question is whether JAWS scripting is powerful enough to closely emulate the existing virtual cursor behavior. The JAWS team themselves have chosen to implement their virtual buffer with gobs of C++ code.

@matt As other folks are saying: I could do all that work for free and without pay...or...I could just read my epubs in Kindle and get back to my actual job. But in short, this is why the current set of blindness made ebook readers are the way they are.

Ah, I didn't realize the scripting language was that slow. But if FS went with c++, then yep, no way a script would be fast enough.

Fair enough. I have my own reasons for wanting to crack the problem of activating virtual cursor behavior for things that aren't Chromium or Firefox. Of course, I don't expect anyone to work on that unpaid on my behalf.