Google commemorated this year’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities earlier this week by publishing a blog post in which the company detailed “7 ways we’re making Android more accessible.
I have developed a fool proof system to not forget clothes in the washer at night
1) turn on lights in laundry room 2) load clothes 3) forget about both clothes and light 4) at bedtime, husband sees light on downstairs and furiously demands to know why lights have been left on 5) as husband starts to stomp off to turn off lights yell “oh while you’re down there can you switch the laundry?”
Provided to YouTube by Symphonic DistributionMy Last Fantasy · SpritelyLife's Not A Novel (but I sure want it to be)℗ 2023 SpritelyReleased on: 2023-01-27Pro...
Have you ever had to call someone by your own first name? My first name is very rare, so I’ve only met one person with the same name in my whole life, but I’m curious about other people’s experiences. I also wonder about people in romantic relationships that have the same first name. That must feel weird 🤔 I just read something about being around people whose name is your deadname and how that’s a surreal experience. That’s so interesting!
Boosts and comments are welcome 🤗
I’ve had a relationship with someone with my name (2%, 4 votes)
I’ve had friends with my name (37%, 63 votes)
It’s happened sometimes (46%, 79 votes)
I’ve never called anyone by my own name (20%, 34 votes)
My name is neither particularly common nor particularly rare. I've had classmates who shared my first name back in primary school, and that was a very annoying experience. I never knew whether I was the one called.
I'm really happy with the progress FLOSS communities have had over the past 3 decades in the kind of environment they foster. For the longest time they were spaces where "got good"/RTFM/PEBKAC was the abrasive default mode of communication between themselves and specially newcomers and that permeated down to the documentation and the software itself. Some places remain like that, but the Cambrian explosion of projects has led to alternative spaces, to the point where I'd say the places where being consistently a dick to each other is acceptable are now a minority. As an small anecdote that remains seared in my mind and I find representative, as a tech curious young lad I was scouring every bit of open source documentation I could find to learn. I recall reading GNU documentation that kept talking about the Meta-key. I could never figure out how to AltaVista what the hell that was, and it was of course not mentioned anywhere that it was "old-speak" for Alt. The mailing lists looked intimidating, specially when I saw how people treated each other, so I never asked there. Eventually I muddled with getting RedHat and Slackware that came with some magazine installed but would get stuck on gettting my winmodem to work. I never felt I could actually "be part" of the open source space, until Ubuntu came out, sent me CDs to share in school, with a more "meet people where they are"/"welcoming" attitude.
The two slogans which have done the most to destroy democracy and freedom in the United States: "Make America Great Again" and "Vote Blue No Matter Who."
Slight clarification about my last post... This only really applies to those of us who had purchased Mona Pro in the 6.x release cycle, not Mona Pro Max. The App Store guidelines I cited still apply, but the clarification needed to be made here.
I’ve been diving into the Mona 7 upgrade controversy, specifically the requirement for Mona 6 Pro users to buy a "Bridge Upgrade" to Pro Max ($10) in the old app just to unlock the *privilege* of buying the Ultra One-Time Purchase ($20) in the new app.
While a developer is absolutely allowed to release a new App ID and charge for it (that is standard practice), this specific "Bridge Purchase" mechanism appears to violate Apple's App Store Review Guidelines in two critical ways.
If you are frustrated by this, here is the technical breakdown of why this flow is likely non-compliant:
1. Violation of Guideline 3.1.1 (In-App Purchase Mechanics) The core rule of IAP is that purchases must be for content/features *consumed within the app*.
Guideline 3.1.1 states: "Apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality... Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase."
By forcing users to buy an upgrade in Mona 6 (App A) specifically to unlock a price tier in Mona 7 (App B), the developer is effectively selling a "coupon" or "license key" for a different app. * The $10 spent in Mona 6 is not primarily for Mona 6 features (since the user is abandoning that app for Mona 7); it is a fee paid in App A to modify the behavior of App B. * Apple historically rejects apps that sell access to other apps. The "Loyalty Discount" should be native to Mona 7 (e.g., detecting the Mona 6 receipt), not gatekept behind a fresh paywall in a deprecated binary.
2. Violation of Guideline 2.3 (Accurate Metadata & Misleading Terms) This is the "Bait and Switch" clause.
Guideline 2.3.1 states: "Customers should know what they’re getting when they download or buy your app... Don’t include any hidden or undocumented features in your app."
When users bought Mona 6 Pro as a "One-Time Purchase," the reasonable expectation was a perpetual license for that major version. By creating a *new* tier (Pro Max) and retroactively declaring it the *only* tier eligible for future loyalty benefits, the developer has obfuscated the value of the original purchase. * Forcing a user to upgrade a "dead" product (Mona 6) to access the "live" product (Mona 7) is a "Junk Fee" structure that confuses the purchase flow and misleads users about the true cost of the upgrade ($11.99 original + $10 bridge + $20 new app = $41.99 total, vs the advertised $20).
The Bottom Line: The developer has every right to charge $20 for Mona 7. They do NOT have the right to force you to spend $10 in Mona 6 to "unlock" that button.
If this flow remains, it sets a dangerous precedent where developers can tax users in legacy apps to gatekeep access to new ones. The "Loyalty Offer" should be available to *all* paid Mona 6 users, or the upgrade path should be handled entirely within Mona 7.
The similarities between #accessibility and #cybersecurity continue to amaze me. These are both areas of standards, recommendations, legal precedents etc. that SHOULD, in theory, give companies the tools, as well as the insentive, to do what their clients/customers need them to do. Is that the reality? Sadly, often, no it isn't. I just saw a renowned voice in the cybersecurity space repost a post that essentially states that if the infraction is cheaper/more lucrative than the fine, companies will choose the fine every single time. Frustrating, innit?
So what if I say the exact same thing is true for #accessibility and that the majority of GUI-based cybersecurity tools are not #accessible enough to be productive?
Here's a callout to #cybersecurity vendors. Are you going to fix this, or be a hypocrite? :) #tech
This is actually good to know as I was thinking about switching my major from CS to cyber, don't think I'll do so anymore, though. I like CS fine, and I'm doing well, at least according to all my professors lol, but I find the theoretical stuff not super interesting.
@ZBennoui Oh it's perfectly doable with a bit of elbow grease I would say. A lot of tools are commandline which, while not necessarily efficient out of the box, does dodge around some of the UI issues, and yet others are web-based which means one can get quick at them with a bit of practice, but there's also scary Legacy Java UIs that ...kinda work but are not exactly pleasant to use. I'd say if youre not passionate about it you probably won't have a great time, but if you are, it is certainly learnable/doable and quite fun once you get good at it :)
oh for F's sake! Damn it, I need to switch to Linux only devices including my phone. Years of them saying "Don’t be evil" has turned lets show them how evil we can be.
that's why I always have two devices, one for work and one privately. And in my company, if I have a work-managed device, bring your own device, I have to sign a document that they have the right to wipe it entirely and to surveille it to a huge extent.
> once they’re on your phone, they’re decrypted and available to anyone controlling the device. A company controls your device. Encouraging that using the appropriate language is starting to catch up with the mainstream, it's just a shame that they're 30 years late @rms #stallmanwasright
I don't think people are ready for what's coming: Bots that look and talk like real humans, which can actually control things in the real world. Imagine the unbelievable mess it's going to create in our society when we can't tell who is real anymore. We need to be thinking about these problems now, because the technology isn't far off. I've already had conversations that were in the "uncanny valley" where I wasn't sure if who I was speaking to was a bot. Those came and went, replaced by ones that actually crossed over the valley and sound real. Next up: "live" video.
TruGen AI delivers hyper-realistic Video Agents that see, hear, remember, and act in real time - transforming conversations into natural, human-like interactions. Scalable, secure, and API-first, it adapts across industries and languages.
do you think millennial or gen Z leaders can build on the legacy of the civil rights movement and build a better world, or will expectations keep being diminished?
the good thing, definitely (50%, 4 votes)
the bad thing :( (12%, 1 vote)
maybe a big rock will hit the earth instead (37%, 3 votes)
Tough scroll for FOSS this morning, something shady going on with Calibre, something shady going on with SyncThing, something shady going on with F-Droid, it's almost as if free software has a functional society as one of its dependencies and none of this shit works in a social environment where people are emboldened to be arseholes
If you want to learn how not to write dialogs in a SciFi show, watch Invasion. All characters are eqully brain dead, and their only purpose is to make idiotic moves and talk about their feelings ad nauseam with a lot of dead air in between.
Big brands and petrochemical corporations keep selling the public a convenient and comforting story to hide the hard truth: they simply have to STOP PRODUCING SO MUCH PLASTIC.
I'm going to make this loud and clear for every single one of my blind brethren out there in the world. No! Absolutely not! I will not, and do not at all feel comfortable touching a person's face to see what they look like. I do not spend my time being curious about what others look like, and I'm not going to walk around touching people's faces like a weirdo. That is a myth. A creepy, awkward myth. Nothing more. Not one blind person that I have ever spoken to in life has ever been comfortable being put in this situation. Not one! Do not do this! Do not put any of us in that situation.
This, although I don't think there's anything wrong with being curious about what people look like, but don't touch their face that's just weird and insane.
Oh boy! You certainly know how to liven things up on a slow day. Funny, I was just having a conversation about this with someone this morning. Oddly enough, I love to touch babies faces. I'm talking a couple months or younger. But it has nothing to do with figuring out what they look like. I just love that their little noses and ears and everything are so tiny and so intricate. When I was about seven, a blind man I met through a mutual friend asked if he could touch my face. It seemed kind of strange to me, but I said yes. He was very respectful, and in a way that's hard to put into words, I felt very seen. Now the people who take my hand and just put it on their faces, those are the people just asking to be slapped!
@Lisasali I knew someone that would walk up to me in the street, take my hand and put it on her face every single time. Admittedly she was a friend of my mother's but that's not the point. I never cared for it, just say hi like a normal person. You had one job...
@FreakyFwoof The first time someone did this to me, I was a very self-conscious teenager. Turns out this woman had the biggest nose I have ever seen. It felt like it was spread across her face. I had to work really hard to stop the nervous giggles, and I still wanted to take that nose between two of my fingers and say, "beep! "
Hmm, does it delete posts which are older, or, so rephrase it. Does enabling this also count for posts sent before enabling it. Hope that made sense. I don't know. I think I like to go back sometimes, and at some point I feel like it could be cluttered having several archives with different spans of data, but on the other hand, Mastodon kinda flows on anyway. I don't think I'll do it, but I totally get why you would...
I am really saddened looking through issue trackers and finding how many people have done things like `pip install` to get Calibre dependencies, then been sad when nothing works. The fact that it's so far from standard build tooling has consequences, even if it's an understandable part of being a long-running project with a history.
The root cause for many of those errors is that Calibre depends on another of Kovid's packages, html5-parser, which in turn relies on lxml in a very odd way. In particular, it's only compatible with lxml if it's installed using `pip install --no-binary lxml` rather than from pyproject.toml.
That in turn seems, according to html5-parser documentation (not yet taken the time to confirm this myself), to cause *both* lxml and html5-parser to dynamically link libxml2 so that they can share the same C-level data structures.
Effectively, html5-parser seems to rely on internal implementation details of lxml in ways that completely break Python packaging. I get it gives a performance advantage, but at a steep cost.
I don't want to be too mean about this... Calibre is almost half a million lines of code, and has been around longer than Python 3 has. But also? I'm trying to point out that a large part of how we archive and read electronic books without fear of retroactive censorship is load-bearing on those five hundred thousand lines.
That is not sustainable, and not something that ever should have been placed on one person's shoulders.
a high-profile software project proudly announcing that it's going to start "using AI" is basically the same thing to me as seeing a big "this repo is archived" banner. perhaps even worse in some respects? intentionally or not, the message it sends is "we don't really enjoy programming and we don't want to work on this anymore, but rather than retire the project we're going to do a really lackluster job from now on". like if your favorite coffee brand proudly announced "now 20% more sawdust"
While I agree generally, it would be an unfair bar to set for open source software projects that they cannot/should not use LLMs when the majority of massive software projects (and by extension, their peers) around them either currently or eventually will.
The truth is the value of them is very low to none in innovative or novel tasks, yes, but there is certainly potential value in using them for areas where it's solved problems or highly structured outcomes (such as adding code notations, or test cases to well defined code bases).
Like you, I'd prefer this not be the path people had taken with LLMs, and I wish more people regarded them with caution.
bar to set for open source software projects that they cannot/should not use LLMs
they actually not cannot/should not, they must not as LLM output is illegal (unless they trained the LLM from scratch with only licenced code with matching licences and apply all these licences and reproduce all these copyright notices with the output
This is really turning me off Debian or contributing to FOSS other than my own projects. This destructive attitude, this, this ARRGH idk 🤬😾😾😾
But anyone who says so, who honestly attempts to excuse the plagiarism machine by comparing it to human creativity, is in effect a TESCREAL fascist. There, I’ve said it. I guess I can be thankful that this is not a Debian medium with their CoC enforcement team.
@mirabilos And of course with the rather usual but nonsensical combination of defending LLMs for coding, and pushing for Rust via the sales pitch of memory-safety (while it's a net negative for basically everything else).
Sometimes I'm glad Rust toolchain barely ever worked on my systems and so far can just ban it outright on Gentoo, although it does mean having to switch software and rewrite some (and hoping I won't have to rewrite parts of linux kernel, mesa, …).
@feld @mirabilos It's not even the hype, a language might need that in a way.
It's more like: - Cargo and the packaging ecosystem is a disaster, stuff like Tarmageddon will probably stay an exploitable vulnerability for years even on the open-source side of things. - I've had to edit parts of the Rust stdlib once… urgh, I hope I never look in there again. - They love citing gccrs as "hey it'll be there soon as an alternative!" while they've been at it for years and are still at doing core (so stdlib… yeah that doesn't seems soon): rust-gcc.github.io/2025/11/17/…
@lanodan @mirabilos just be glad that in a few years we'll be able to make an LLM completely rewrite it in a better language with better packaging and compile times
I love in-character intra-party conflict in tabletop games. So many opportunities for players to play off of each character's goals, convictions, and flaws.
I can recommend! There are opportunities for role playing, backstabbing and collaboration over several sittings. You act as representatives for different regions in a fictitious country on the Kings advisory board. It's one of the most novel experiences I've had playing a board game and it's just great fun to boot!
While checking my available updates in the App Store, I was initially impressed that the Libby app was only 3.1 MB.
Then I remembered my experience of actually using it and realised that a 31 or even 310 MB native app would probably be preferable to their overly verbose web container thing.
In some web platform circles, there's a push for a move away from walled garden distribution methods like the App Store and native apps in general.
Broadly, I think progressive web apps (PWAs) should be easier to distribute and install. And Apple should definitely do more to make those a viable option on iOS.
Unfortunately, purely web-based apps are currently not able to take advantage of several important #accessibility features, primary among them the ability to add actions to elements (e.g. for the VoiceOver rotor).
Totally that. A webapp on a desktop can be a joy to navigate if it has enough keyboard shortcuts. On mobile, something like Mastodon is just not as efficient. Even if you have posts marked up with headings or articles performing other actions requires a lot more gestures. Both iOS and Android have a version of actions so a web API for them would make a lot of sense.
@pitermach To be fair, there are web apps that almost look native, even on iOS. See e.g. the game called "Magic Research" for example. You can still tell, but barely.
@pitermach aria-actions is now a thing and has been implemented on desktop in both Chromium and Firefox this year. Screen reader support is still pending though. There are open questions about how this would translate to mobile, but the door is at least open now.
@jcsteh @pitermach It's a start. It's not quite the same, given that for privacy reasons it can only invoke concrete controls in the DOM rather than arbitrary event handlers, and it's not clear how those controls can be adequately hidden from SR users without disadvantaging other audiences.
When I most recently discussed it with a member of the ARIA WG and a screen reader engineer (in October), it seemed there were quite a few open questions about the relevant side effects too, like focus movement and restoration for e.g. actions that are toggles or open a piece of UI that can later be closed.
But as I say, it's a start and I'm hopeful it will make a difference. I like web apps, both as a developer and a user.
@pitermach Yeah, I've been thinking on those points. The privacy issues are pretty significant, so we really can't have it activating stuff that isn't visible in the DOM. I know native apps can, but native apps don't provide any privacy guarantees whatsoever, plus you explicitly choose to install them. One thing I've been wondering about though is whether we could just hide any target of aria-actions for mobile screen reader users or at least provide an attribute to enable that.
@jcsteh @pitermach The privacy aspects are definitely critical. Not to mention the fact that while this may be a solved problem on mobile for screen reader users, other groups haven't traditionally had a great experience when controls have been hidden or offloaded to custom gestures. AFAIK keyboard users on iOS only got access to actions when Full Keyboard Access was added, but on the web we're approaching it from the angle of having at least some keyboard access already.
@jcsteh That is I believe one way a developer can add actions in a SwiftUI app, where when you make a container and fill it with buttons there's an attribute that makes both VoiceOver and switch control expose them only as actions. So there's already a president for something like that in native apps.
Morning all. The first coffee is already down the hatch, and the second 750 ML mug is about to be poured. iPhone 17 Pro Max performance is pretty mind-blowing. iOS 26.1? Not so much. The focus jumping has me at least half way driven to toss this damn iPhone off the eleventh-storey balcony. But that wouldn't be too smart. But they had better fix this stupid thing in the next point release.
@fastfinge Not surprised. Its as if the navigation is happening too quickly for some part of the process to complete, so that secondary part of the process resets the position to some other element, usually the one or three post actual position. Its really weird. I imagine you've heard where focus hits the position you want, then quickly jumps out of position. Bah! It drives me batty!
2025 is drawing to a close, and with it my 6th year of covering accessibility in the video game industry. The year’s not quite over, but I’m going to try and take a few weeks off at the end of the …
This is getting better and better, I come to find out that @MonaApp is expecting customers who bought Mona Pro in the current version as a “one-time purchase” (note the quotes around that phrase) to pay both for Mona Pro Max in the current version, and Mona Ultra in Mona 7 to maintain the same functionality as you currently get with Mona Pro already. Let’s add this all up, in US dollars of course since that’s my point of reference. The initial purchase of Mona Pro was $12.99 plus whatever Apple tax you have to pay as part of the purchase. The upgrade to Mona Pro, Max in the current version according to the developer is an additional $10 plus the Apple tax. Oh, but hold on now in order to upgrade to Mona ultra in Mona, 7, you have to shell out an additional $20 plus the Apple tax. Hope you can afford it… what was originally a high-quality, accessible Mastodon client now will cost you the same price as a halfway decent dinner at a nice restaurant. Essentially, you’re being punished for purchasing the more affordable tier of the premium version of Mona6. Yes, I know it sounds like I’m bitching about this, but something seems wrong about having to pay twice just to upgrade. The developer could have done a much better job of providing an upgrade path for customers who’ve already paid for a premium version of their software, but decided that double dipping into their customers wallets was a better idea 
miki
in reply to Rouge • • •I'm a blind person, so this is even worse for me.
My name is neither particularly common nor particularly rare. I've had classmates who shared my first name back in primary school, and that was a very annoying experience. I never knew whether I was the one called.