I was fixing a few memory leaks in the AT-SPI collection tests and being reminded how clunky the C API is in some ways.
Part of me would like to make a version 3 and clean up a few things.
On the other hand, I'm not sure if anyone uses the C API directly, so it might not matter much.
I could say similar things about the DBus API that libatspi wraps, but then I don't know what we want for the future. If someone picks up Newton and finishes it, then I don't think that we'd want an AT-SPI 2, AT-SPI 3, *and* Newton to contend with...
in reply to Matt Campbell

@matt I don't know what might be available in terms of funding--Federico might know better--but it would be awesome if we could find a way to help you get back to it. I wish I was being more helpful, but, alas, I feel like I have too many balls in the air right now and can't see my way towards giving it the focused attention that I think it would need.
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

While we are at the topic of accessibility... how good did your wayland transition go for accessibility software like dwell clickers and on screen keyboards?

A Gnome developer claiming that he cares about accessibility is an insult.

Your software is absolutely horrid in that subject. And you regularly mess things up that make it worse. While claiming the opposite.

It's like someone who beats you up and then claims that the beating is actually good for you.

in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

That's utterly gross, fuck them honestly.

I want to also add as an aside, people with legitimate issues can get swept into the same bucket as bad faith actors like that.

Just wanna be seen: some who want to disable animations aren't wankers, but rather, people like me with sensory sensitivity issues. I disable any kind of animation I can because those kinds of things really intensely distract me. It can be distressing if I can't avoid stuff like that while trying to work and focus

The Unihertz Jelly Star is two years old, runs Android 13, and still does something no other phone can: make me think before I use it.
It’s tiny, awkward, and honest — a detox device that actually works. No one’s made anything like it since. Even Unihertz gave up.
I looked for something that could replace it. Nothing exists.
Read: The Tiny, Brilliant, Infuriating Phone No One Will Replace
fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the…
#Unihertz #JellyStar #Android #DigitalMinimalism #TechCulture #Phones #Detox #SmallPhones #Minimalism #Review

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@pluralistic
An article that talks about the killjoy of people using AI for fun activities, like escape rooms. A good read. But the part I like was the author’s playful use of enshittification.

“Killjoy in the MachineWhy do so many people use AI to cheat at fun?” by Michelle Santiago Cortés - link to the article: thecut.com/article/would-you-u…

#enshittification

in reply to Tomáš Odehnal

@def @zoul No, it was part of Red Hat running camp and I was actually the one who came up with the route. If you'd like to make a round trip, there aren't many options here. The logic behind it was that the 4 km would be brutal, but the rest of the run would be okish. But the climb was more brutal than I expected, or I had less energy at its foot than I expected.

Re: last boost (caneandable.social/@JonathanMo…): Glen Gordon deserves immense respect for his contributions to assistive technology for blind people. During the critical transition to the GUI as the dominant type of user interface in the 90s, JAWS set the standard for what GUI screen readers should be able to do, and as Jonathan said, Glen played a critical role in that. Thank you, Glen, for everything you've contributed and for staying true to your values.


It is impossible to overstate the contribution Glen Gordon has made to the #accessibility industry. More important even than that, his meticulous attention to detail and his understanding that something must be more than accessible, it must be efficient, has helped countless people to be productive at work, at school, and just when living life.
Glen devised many concepts that are now just thought of as the way things are done in a graphical user interface.
On top of all that, he is one of the nicest, most humble people I’ve ever met and worked with. I have heard from several young people following the National Federation of the Blind’s National Convention, at which we honored Glen with the prestigious Kenneth Jernigan award and he offered some wise advice, that Glen inspired them.
You are a legend, Glen. And although the words seem ridiculously inadequate, all I can say in conclusion is, thank you so much for all you have done.
I am pasting Glen’s LinkedIn post for those who are not over there.
Glen Gordon, Screen reading for the blind software pioneer, 24 minutes ago • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn, 1st
Today is a very sad day for me, since after nearly 32 years, it’s the first day that I’m no longer working on the JAWS screen reader.
I’ve voluntarily resigned my position at Freedom Scientific/Vispero because I found myself unable to continue working for a company that’s changing in ways that are moving away from my personal values.
As recently as the 2025 NFB convention, I was thinking that I’d be working on JAWS far into the future. Much to my surprise, a recent influx of new Executive leaders and customer facing product related changes convinced me that it was time to leave.
I leave behind a group of smart and passionate colleagues, and products which are the best in class. It’s been a great journey, and I thank all of you who have been users of Freedom Scientific software for some or all that time.
Yes, I’m retiring, in the sense that I’m of retirement age and not actively seeking another job. But I’m resigning in the sense that I felt I needed to take a principled stand.
I will continue doing my part to improve the state of accessibility. What that will look like will evolve over time.

This entry was edited (1 week ago)

Jamie Teh reshared this.

in reply to Matt Campbell

Jonathan's toot (the one I boosted) included a copy of Glen's announcement on LinkedIn, but here's the actual link, in case anyone wants to comment over there (I don't have an account there): linkedin.com/posts/glen-gordon…

victor tsaran reshared this.

in reply to Matt Campbell

Off-topic, but I had an account once, and now I'm locked out of it because my password was compromised in a data breach a long time ago, and they want me to provide a photo ID to prove my identity, and, last time I tried, I couldn't get their page to let me do that. I think that I tried on my phone and ended up in an endless loop where I was bumped back to the login screen or something like that.
in reply to Matt Campbell

Yes, I am immensely grateful to him for working on Jaws for all those many years, especially during the 90s when a lot of us wondered if the windows platform would be accessible to us. I remember sitting in a meeting room at a blindness convention, where we discussed this very thing. I wish him all the very best in his retirement and if he chooses to work with accessibility, I look forward to seeing what he does, as well!

Bitte ab jetzt zwei Phänomene zusammendenken:

(1) Wenn Menschen gute Bücher und Online-Texte wahrnehmen, kaufen, lesen, besprechen, empfehlen, dann werden weiterhin gute Bücher und Online-Texte gemacht. Sonst nicht.

(2) Wenn Menschen Clickbait-Inhalte, deren einziger »Sinn« es ist, performatives Aufregungsmarketing zu sein, »kaufen« (anklicken), konsumieren, »empfehlen« (aufgebracht teilen), dann werden weiterhin Clickbait-Hetz-Inhalte produziert. Sonst nicht.

1/2

It is impossible to overstate the contribution Glen Gordon has made to the #accessibility industry. More important even than that, his meticulous attention to detail and his understanding that something must be more than accessible, it must be efficient, has helped countless people to be productive at work, at school, and just when living life.
Glen devised many concepts that are now just thought of as the way things are done in a graphical user interface.
On top of all that, he is one of the nicest, most humble people I’ve ever met and worked with. I have heard from several young people following the National Federation of the Blind’s National Convention, at which we honored Glen with the prestigious Kenneth Jernigan award and he offered some wise advice, that Glen inspired them.
You are a legend, Glen. And although the words seem ridiculously inadequate, all I can say in conclusion is, thank you so much for all you have done.
I am pasting Glen’s LinkedIn post for those who are not over there.
Glen Gordon, Screen reading for the blind software pioneer, 24 minutes ago • Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn, 1st
Today is a very sad day for me, since after nearly 32 years, it’s the first day that I’m no longer working on the JAWS screen reader.
I’ve voluntarily resigned my position at Freedom Scientific/Vispero because I found myself unable to continue working for a company that’s changing in ways that are moving away from my personal values.
As recently as the 2025 NFB convention, I was thinking that I’d be working on JAWS far into the future. Much to my surprise, a recent influx of new Executive leaders and customer facing product related changes convinced me that it was time to leave.
I leave behind a group of smart and passionate colleagues, and products which are the best in class. It’s been a great journey, and I thank all of you who have been users of Freedom Scientific software for some or all that time.
Yes, I’m retiring, in the sense that I’m of retirement age and not actively seeking another job. But I’m resigning in the sense that I felt I needed to take a principled stand.
I will continue doing my part to improve the state of accessibility. What that will look like will evolve over time.

Web Developers & Designers

This is your friendly reminder that low vision users exist. We need font sizes that are dramatically larger than yours.

Many of us use the “minimum font size" NOT zoom, because we need bigger text, not bigger images.

I'm on the very low end of low vision needs, but my 20pt minimum font size breaks SO MANY web sites.

This pic shows how big fonts are on my screen (thumb & ruler for context).
#accessibility #webdesign

Hubert Figuière reshared this.

in reply to Matt Campbell

@matt Yes. Your site's fine.

The way it works - in my experience - is that it doesn't matter what method the developer uses to set the font size. If my browser is set with a minimum that is larger than what the page says it will use what I set in the browser.

Most often this breaks CSS styled buttons because the developers use pixel sizes for the button styling that don't expand with text size but my fonts are too big to fit.

RE: mastodon.social/@Tutanota/1155…

Love your work, tutanota!


Two years ago we launched tuta.com 🥳

Here's why it's great:

⚡️️ Only 4 letters
⚡️️ Means "secure"
⚡️️ Brand name allows growth

Check out how the new domain helped Tuta become one of the most popular encrypted email providers! 💗 tuta.com/blog/two-years-tuta


This entry was edited (1 week ago)

No more jumping via website & wikis: now most of our documentation is available at our website :awesome: And as that's quite "a bit" (uh, a minor understatement) more, it has a "site search" now, too.

So we hope you like how it's set up and organized, and find what you're looking for at

izzyondroid.org/

Some more documentation will follow when it's ready, but that will take a little more time 😉

#izzyOnDroid

Sylvia reshared this.

Do not use AI email writers at the price of your privacy.

Yes, they are convenient, but you become the product & the risk is high.

With Tuta Mail, you control your email, your data, & your privacy. 🔒

Find out why AI email writers must be avoided 👉🏼 tuta.com/blog/ai-email-writers…

#PrivacyMatters #EmailPrivacy #DataProtection #TutaMail #Encryption #AI

I am so very, very tired of whatever causes NVDA to completely fall over on it's face when a bunch of console dumping happens. I can usually work around it, but today, had to hard shut down two PC's because I completely lost control of them to the point where I couldn't restart NVDA and/or focus away from all the scrolling text.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Borris

For what it's worth, I took the very overkill step of writing an AutoIt script that gives me a built-in "Kill NVDA" hotkey, and that's eliminated the need to restart or drop into secure mode. I know that if there is ongoing text flooding your console, it can be hard to get away from, but usually I find that some combination of my NVDA killer, hammering windows+m, and turning off NVDA+5 tends to fix the worst of it. But yeah, all of this is obnoxious and sometimes I find myself wondering if I need to figure out how to either run an extremely minimal Debian VM, or try to get TDSR working in WSL.
in reply to Simon Jaeger

@simon From my testing, you absolutely want diff match patch. First, press NVDA+F1 in your console, go to the bottom and see what you're using for diff algorithm. If it's difflib, go into advanced and force it to diff match patch. On my system, using console and not Windows Terminal, printing a whole bunch of random lines of text is at least survivable with that. Printing one-character lines in a loop still isn't, but that might be something else.
in reply to Jamie Teh

Also of note, if you haven't already, please install @tspivey's Kill NVDA add-on to the system Config so you can just Alt+Control+delete and kill NVDA by going to NVDA menu, Tools, Kill NVDA (NVDA+N, T, K):
Releases page: github.com/tspivey/killNVDA/re…
Direct download: github.com/tspivey/killNVDA/re…
@jcsteh @simon

In #curl land, @vsz made a CI job that builds curl with fil-C and it runs the tests fine. Just slightly limited due to lack of dependencies as they all need to be built with fil-C as well.

github.com/curl/curl/pull/1939…

#curl @vsz

Ich spreche heute die neue erste Folge meines Podcast @logbuchlaut ein.

Ich möchte Blogposts zu gewissen Themen zusamenfassen, aber womit fange ich an?

Sagt mal...
(Please Boost!)

Blog als Podcast. Welcher Blog?
blog.ring2.de

Welcher Podcast?
https://pod ring2.de

Look @Castopod I am back 😉

  • Thema: Mallorca (50%, 1 vote)
  • Thema: Dänemark (0%, 0 votes)
  • Thema: Segeln (50%, 1 vote)
  • Thema: Leben (50%, 1 vote)
2 voters. Poll end: 1 week ago

George, an 83-year-old man, was heading to bed when his wife pointed out that the light in the garage was still on. From the bedroom window, she noticed movement inside. Curious, George opened the back door to check, only to spot people rummaging through his garage, clearly up to no good.
He quickly called the police and explained the situation. The officer on the line asked, “Is your garage attached to your house?”
George replied, “No, it’s detached.”
The officer then said, “All units are currently busy. Please stay inside, lock your doors, and we’ll send someone as soon as possible.”
George hung up, paused for a moment, and then picked up the phone again. This time, he told the dispatcher, “I just called about the people in my garage. You don’t need to hurry anymore—I’ve taken care of it. I’ve shot them all.” Then he hung up.
Within minutes, George’s quiet neighborhood turned into a scene out of an action movie. Six police cars, a SWAT team, a helicopter, and an ambulance all arrived in record time. The officers swarmed the property and quickly apprehended the burglars, catching them red-handed in the act.
One of the officers approached George, clearly puzzled. “I thought you said you’d shot them?”
With a sly smile, George replied, “And I thought you said no one was available!”

reshared this

Here's the most efficient way I've found to make a video from an image plus audio file that preserves quality.

  • Get ffmpeg: Open the run box with windows+r, type "winget install ffmpeg" and press enter. ffmpeg will install itself.
  • Open the folder on your PC where your image and audio files are stored. Press alt+d to go to the address bar.
  • copy the below and paste it, Replacing the text in quotes with the names of your files. After pasting, press enter to run the command:


ffmpeg -threads 3 -hwaccel auto -r 1 -loop 1 -i "image.file" -i "audio.file" -c:v libx264 -preset ultrafast -x264opts opencl -vf scale=1280:720 -c:v libx264 -tune stillimage -c:a copy -shortest "video.mp4"
  • A command prompt terminal should open and the encode should start. You can check the status by reading the bottom of the window.
  • The window will close once the encode is complete. This could take anywhere from a few seconds to five-ten minutes. You should see a video file in the folder that is only a few MB larger than the audio+image files you started with.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)

reshared this

How Hubzilla 10.6 b0rked its own forums


Major breakage on Hubzilla 10.6 due to switching to FEP-e232 Object Links; CW: long (over 5,000 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta

Just because it works under your very limited and controlled lab conditions, doesn't mean it will work just as well under real-life conditions.

A few may remember the summer of 2024 when (streams) rolled out FEP-171b. It broke federation in every imaginable way because, as it turned out later, (streams) suddenly confused the many different IDs it had to juggle. Granted, the byproduct of trying to fix this was Forte, the first Fediverse server software to provide nomadic identity via nothing but ActivityPub.

Now Hubzilla rolled out FEP-e232. And there's breakage again. Not quite as badly, but in places that really hurt.

So the talk of the town in the Fediverse is Mastodon 4.5 introducing quote-posts. (Mastodon 4.5 allegedly introducing quote-posts to the Fediverse, and how that's wrong, is another story.)

Interestingly, almost at the same time, Hubzilla 10.6 was rolled out. Money quote from the announcement:

  • Implement FEP-e232 (object links) for quote posts


FEP-e232 Object Links in practice usually = "quote-posts like Misskey" = linking to the original with "RE:" before the link.

Apparently, rather than what Hubzilla had been doing since 2012 when it was still Red. What Friendica has been doing since its own inception in 2010. Namely insert a dumb copy of the quoted post into the quoting post.

While (streams) and Forte have been supporting FEP-e232 under the bonnet for quite a while while still quote-posting with dumb copies, Hubzilla has decided to go all the way and replace the old-fashioned Friendica way of quote-posting entirely with the Misskey way that's all the rage in the Fediverse now.

Yes, this has its advantages. If the original is edited, then the edit (in theory) is reflected in all posts that quote-post it.

But here on Hubzilla, this switch causes trouble.

Mastodon rolled out rendering support for Misskey-style quote-posts before rolling out quote-posts themselves, so those Mastodon servers that can't render these quote-posts are hopelessly outdated.

Hubzilla, on the other hand, rolled out Misskey-style quote-posts with version 10.6 while 10.4 and older can't even render Misskey-style quote-posts, not even when they come straight from a *key. In this regard, it would have been smarter to first make sure that Hubzilla renders this kind of quote-posts, then wait for a few minor releases and then change the way Hubzilla quote-posts.

You may see this as just a minor nuisance. But on top of that, it breaks Hubzilla's forums.

See, Hubzilla's forums are based on quote-posts. You start a new thread by DM'ing to a forum, and the forum will automatically share (quote-post) your start post to all forum members. If it's a private, limited-access forum, only the forum members are permitted to see the post with your quoted post in it.

I guess it's kind of obvious that this can only work by quote-posting a dumb copy of the start post unless a few more stops are being pulled.

Now, however, forums on Hubzilla 10.6 quote-post start posts by linking to the original. Remember that the original is a DM to the forum. As in only the forum is permitted to see it. You can click the link to the original all you want. But unless you run the forum, Hubzilla will not let you see it, not even with all the OpenWebAuth magic sign-on that you have on yourself as a Hubzilla user. In fact, I'd be very worried if I could see it now.

If there was even only one active forum on one of the two public hubs that run development versions, this critical bug would have popped up earlier and been fixed before it would have hit a release. But apparently, nobody is crazy enough to run a forum on a dev-grade hub, not to mention how few active Hubzilla forums there are in the first place. Seriously, I wonder if there's any feedback coming from the two dev hubs because I never see any hit the Support Forum. Does it all go straight to Framagit?

Good thing hubzilla.org is still running Hubzilla 10.4. hubzilla.org is not only the official Hubzilla website, it's actually a Hubzilla hub itself. The official Hubzilla website is built on a Hubzilla channel, using the Webpages app. And hubzilla.org is home of the Hubzilla Support Forum. It would have been a disaster, had this forum been broken, too.

I guess there's a hotfix due now, even if it means reverting FEP-e232 support (although changing the permissions of a DM to a forum channel would do the trick, and looking at how (streams) and Forte do it would be even smarter). And I hope it'll come before hubzilla.org is upgraded to 10.6.

By the way, while it's at it, maybe Hubzilla could also permanently set that GoToSocial/Mastodon flag that allows being quote-posted. I mean, if you come to a place that has been able to quote-post for a whopping 13 years, that can quote-post any public content from anywhere in the Fediverse with zero resistance, and that has no control over whether or not your stuff can be quote-posted (other than not posting in public), it's safe to assume that you're okay with your stuff being quote-posted anyway.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Misskey #GoToSocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Forums #Groups #FediverseGroups #FediGroups #FEP_e232