FYI: If a service provider posts about accessibility, they get +50 to karma immediately from every disabled user 😊. I'll sign up to Sendamatic just in case, even though I don't need such a service right now. Thanks for caring!
A man goes to his doctor and tells him that his wife hasn't had sex with him for 6 months: The doctor tells the man to bring his wife in so he can talk to her. So the wife comes into the doctors office and the doctor asks her what's wrong and why doesn't she want to have sex with her husband anymore. The wife tells him. "For the past 6 months, every morning I take a cab to work. I don't have any money, so the cab driver asks me. 'So are you going to pay today or what?' so I take a 'or what'. When I get to work I'm late so the boss asks me, 'So are we going to write this down in the book or what?' so I take a 'or what'. Back home again I take the cab and again I don't have any money so the cab driver asks me again, 'So are you going to pay this time or what?' so again I take a 'or what'. So you see doc when I get home I'm all tired out and I don't want it any more." The doctor thinks for a second and then turns to the wife and says "So are we going to tell your husband or what?" 🤣
@Tutanota - I'm a paid customer of your e-mail service. And I noticed that using your e-mail app through web, is completely impossible by a screen reader user. Since last year it has become worse and worse, no way to intercept e-mails. Inbox doesn't show messages to screen reader users (Windows-based) it's a nightmare to navigate your web interface #accessibility
The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility
The mythical, it's text, so it's accessible
There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a terminal, it is inherently accessible. The logic assumes that because there are no graphics, no complex DOM, and no WebGL canvases, the content is just raw ASCII text that a screen reader can easily parse.
The reality is different. Most modern Text User Interfaces (TUIs) are often more hostile to accessibility than poorly coded graphical interfaces. The very tools designed to improve the Developer Experience (DX) in the terminal—frameworks like Ink (JS/React), Bubble Tea (Go), or tcell—are actively destroying the experience for blind users.
The Architectural Flaw: Stream vs. Grid
To understand the failure, we must distinguish between two distinct concepts often conflated under “terminal apps”: the CLI (Command Line Interface) and the TUI.
The CLI (The Stream): This operates on a standard input/output model (stdin/stdout). You type a command, the system appends the result below, and the cursor moves down. This is linear and chronological. For a screen reader, specifically kernel-level readers like Speakup, this is ideal.
The TUI (The Grid): This treats the terminal window not as a stream of text, but as a 2D grid of pixels, where every character cell is a pixel. It abandons the temporal flow for a spatial layout.
Case Study: The gemini-cli Madness
Let's look at a concrete example: gemini-cli, a tool written in Node.js using the Ink framework. On the surface, it looks like a simple chat interface. But underneath, Ink is trying to reconcile a React component tree into a terminal grid.
When you use this tool with Speakup (Linux) or NVDA (Windows), the application doesn't just fail; it actively spams you.
Because the framework treats the screen as a reactive canvas, every update triggers a redraw. When the AI is “thinking,” the tool updates a timer or a spinner. To do this, it moves the hardware cursor to the timer location, writes the new time, and moves it back.
For a sighted user, this happens instantly. For a screen reader user, this is what you hear:“Responding... Time elapsed 1s... Responding... Time elapsed 2s... [Fragment of chat history]... Responding...”
It drives the screen reader mad. The cursor is teleporting all over the screen to update status indicators, spinners, and history. Speakup tries to read whatever is under the cursor at that exact millisecond. You end up hearing random bits of conversation mixed with timer updates, making it impossible to focus on what you are actually typing.
Worse, lets pretend that you've somehow managed well with speakup so far, but that you want to do some work with nvda. Maybe paste an error you're getting on windows. So you open your terminal, ssh into your linux box, attach to your screen session and paste your text.
The result is an immediate crash of the screen reader (NVDA) or massive system instability. Why? Every time you type a character or paste text, the application triggers a state change. The framework decides it needs to re-render the interface. Because the conversation history is part of that state, the application attempts to redraw or re-calculate the layout for thousands of lines of text instantly. The more messages you have in a conversation, the more this will happen. And no, you can't just avoid this by using insert+5, the key combo supposed to avoid announcing dynamic change of content.
The Lag Loop
Furthermore, frameworks like Ink running on single-threaded environments (like Node.js) suffer from massive performance degradation when the history grows. If you paste a large block of text, the system has to calculate the diff for thousands of lines.
This causes input lag. You press a key, and you wait. You can wait up to 10 seconds for a single character to echo back. The system is too busy calculating how to redraw the screen to actually process your input.
Why The “Old Guard” Works (nano, vim, menuconfig)
Sighted developers often ask: “If TUIs are bad, why do you use nano, vim, or menuconfig?”
The answer is not that these tools handle the cursor perfectly by default. The answer is that they allow you to hide the cursor entirely.
1. Hiding the Cursor (nano, vim)
In tools like nano or vim, usability depends on turning off features that track cursor position. If you run nano with options that show the cursor position (like --constantshow), or if you use vim without specific configuration, the experience is broken.
When the cursor is visible and tracking is active, Speakup prioritizes the cursor's location update over the character echo. Instead of hearing the letter “a” when you type it, you hear “Column 2”. You type “b”, and you hear “Column 3”.
These older tools succeed because they allow you to disable this noise. You can configure them to suppress the visual cursor or status bar updates, forcing the screen reader to rely on the character input stream rather than the noisy coordinate updates. Modern frameworks rarely offer a “no-cursor” or “headless” mode; they assume the visual cursor is essential.
2. Single Column Focus (menuconfig)
Tools like the Linux kernel's menuconfig work because they enforce a strict, single-column focus. Even though there are borders and titles, the active area is a vertical list. The cursor stays pinned to that list. It doesn't jump to the bottom right to update a clock, then to the top left to update a title. The spatial complexity is kept low enough that the screen reader never gets “lost.”
3. The Lost Art of Scrolling Regions (Irssi)
Irssi is the gold standard for accessible chat, but not because of luck. Irssi was built over 20 years with a custom rendering engine that utilizes VT100 Scrolling Regions.
When a new message arrives in Irssi: 1. It tells the terminal driver: “Define a scrolling region from line 1 to 23.”2. It sends a command: “Scroll up.” The terminal moves the bits up. 3. It draws the new text at the bottom of that region.
Crucially, it handles this in a way that minimizes interference with the input line. It relies on the terminal's hardware capabilities rather than rewriting every character on the screen manually. Modern frameworks ignore these hardware features in favor of “diffing” the screen state and rewriting characters, which is computationally heavier and hostile to accessibility.
The “Stale Bot” excuse: A Case Study in Neglect
Google and the maintainers of gemini-cli pretend to care about accessibility. “Pretend” is the operative word here. If you look at the repository, critical accessibility regressions like Issue #3435 and Issue #11305 have been left to rot. There is no discussion, no roadmap, and no fix. Even worse is the fate of Issue #1553, which was supposed to track these accessibility failures. It didn't get solved; it got silenced. It was closed automatically by a bot with this generic dismissal: > Hello! As part of our effort to keep our backlog manageable and focus on the most active issues, we are tidying up older reports. It looks like this > issue hasn't been active for a while, so we are closing it for now.”
This is unacceptable. Closing an accessibility report because the maintainers haven't touched it in months is not “tidying up”; it is hiding evidence. It effectively says that if a bug is ignored long enough, it ceases to exist. It boosts the project's “Closed Issues” metric while leaving the actual software unusable for blind users.
Conclusion
If you are building for the terminal and care about accessibility, stop using declarative UI frameworks that treat the terminal like a canvas.
The “modern” TUI stack has optimized for the developer's ability to write React-like code at the expense of the machine's ability to render text efficiently.
If you cannot guarantee that your application allows the user to hide the cursor, or if you rely on aggressive redrawing to show spinners and timers, you are building an inaccessible tool.
For the blind user, a dumb, linear CLI stream is infinitely superior to a “smart” TUI that lags, spams, and scatters the cursor across the screen.
As someone who uses Eloquence on all my devices, this was a very educational article on the state of Eloquence itself. This also includes other contenders which, at this moment in time, don't really exist. Sam's Stuff - The State of Modern AI Text To Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users stuff.interfree.ca/2026/01/05/…
I just got this response from NVDA's AI content describer addon, the addon that's uh, you know, supposed to describe images for people? "I’m not able to view images, so I can’t describe it directly. If you can either paste the image text or give me a brief summary of what’s in it, I’ll gladly help craft a detailed description for you." You had one job
@MariahL Yeah, sounds about right for the reaction I had when I saw this earlier. Even better? I can reproduce this reliably. The whole thing seems broken now, every time I try to send it something I get similar answers. Like I said, you had one job, and you ruined it
Which model are you using? It's working fine for me with Gemeni 2.5. It's not the Add On it's very likely the model. Sadly LLMs are dumb and mostly not capable of what they can actually do.
What kind of errors? I just created my API key from the AI console, selected some Gemini 2.5 Model in the AI MOdel configuration dialog in the Add On, selected in that prefered model list and it should work. I don't have the Add On here but I can check specific later.
Proof of Concept mod for Cities: Skylines1. The dev would love help from other C# developpers. This is not a mod ready for release, so don't go buying the game yet. forum.audiogames.net/topic/582…
Clarification, primarily for the benefit of any other programmers who come across this: the game and the mod seem to be written in C# (C sharp), not C. Those languages are more different than you might think.
Do you know someone who quietly makes the Django community better every day? Or maybe that someone is you? 👀✨
The Django Software Foundation appoints Individual Members to recognize contributions of all kinds: code, docs, reviews, teaching, events, community care, and more 💚
You can nominate someone you admire or self-nominate (yes, really!) 🙌
Individual Members are appointed by the DSF in recognition of their service to the Django community. They are added to the members-only forum and Discord channel, vote in our elections, and otherwise participate in Django community discussions.
There is a tradition in #Jilemnice town: when there is enough snow, they plow it all on a huge pile in the middle of the main square and scuplt it into a #Krakonoš, a mythical giant of the local mountains. There is enough snow, its being sculpted right now.
This sucks! I have around 15 spam text messages in my phone only from today. This has been happening like every day for weeks I get at least 1 spam message per day no matter how much I block and report as junk. Ugh. Has anyone had this problem before and have experience fixing it?
#IzzyOnDroid is about community. That's why we don't want our #FOSDEM visit to be just about us, but also about all the amazing apps that make IzzyOnDroid so great.
Do you have an app that's available on IzzyOnDroid? Bring some stickers with you to FOSDEM and drop them off at our booth! We'll make sure to display them so your users can pick some up!
@kepi Po těch trápeních na trenažéru, byla Apple TV nejjednodušší cesta, teda aspoň pro mě. Zapnu, připojím a jedu 🤷 A levnější něž kupovat tablet, který jinak nevyužiju. @cynik_obecny
Is see Danish citizens online are now proposing to invade USA and MAAG. (Make America Actually Great) Under occupation they would ensure Americans got. Universal healthcare Fairer wages + lower income inequality Paid parental leave Bike-friendly cities Free college options Fewer work hours Reliable public transportation Stronger social safety net - #Denmark #USA #USpol #Politics
Microsoft just turned all Office users into AI users. Lmao. It’s now called the "Microsoft 365 Copilot" app. Get ready for fee increases and having your data opted into training by default with confusing settings. Enshittification has peaked.
Just realized that the reason I have a hard time sharing personal difficulties with others isn't that I want to hide struggles, or I don’t want to talk about them. It's that as a high-masking neurodivergent person, I don't really have a script for initiating those conversations, so I kinda freeze
I am somewhere on the spectrum, highly functional but definitely somewhere on there and i don't generally talk about things i'm going through unless it's in response to things people share with me.
It's how i relate to others when they share things they are going through. I'm friendly but often a private person in many ways i suppose.
I've survived a lot in life and i usually just sort of focus on that, surviving it vs making sense of it with others.
@Sylocule @transicorn yeah, which makes sense since masking at least to some degree depends on having models to adopt that feel safe, and since we know there is a general vulnerability problem, there are few such models
I wish I could just start texting people. Be it just a hey how are you, what did you do yesterday etc, but I feel like that's not common anymore because it has been taken up by Instagram, SnapChat and what not other stuff. I don't want that. I don't want all this image based crap. Just give me back good old text messages. But why would people text stuff to one random person if they can share everything they want with one inaccessible image to all their friends?
Not for some higher reason, but the client I used it with mostly before is switching to Google Meet (yeah…) and so I am looking into alternatives.
I’ll probably do @OpenTalkMeeting as it is hosted in Germany and has fun functionality like the talking stick and coffee breaks. Also half the price for a year.
I would love to do that as well, but accessibility in OpenTalk is still a bit of an issue and there don't seem to be such convenient methods to dial into meetings via phone, like there is in Zoom. Or I haven't found the info about it. With the mostly blind people I use Zoom for, this is eessential.
@marcozehe Dial-in by phone is certainly listed as a feature. I’d rather have a dedicated app instead of a browser-based solution, but apparently I’m alone in that. What will be annoying is no Calendar integration (Fantastical).
The open source video conferencing solution OpenTalk combines scalability, productivity, digital sovereignty and data protection with a modern and secure IT system architecture.
You're definitely not alone in that, I much prefer a dedicated app as well, not least because of the superior ability to build in VoiceOver support for the iPhone. In many respects, the web is still lacking terribly when it comes to making more complex apps accessible on mobile. Custom actions being one item.
Seit Kurzem ist die erste Stufe der Online-Buchbarkeit bei der Deutschen Bahn für Menschen mit Schwerbehindertenausweis und Merkzeichen B freigeschaltet. Bei der Online-Ticketbuchung (z. B. über den DB Navigator oder auf bahn.
In der Praxis ist das ein ganz schöner Blödsinn. Denn bei ¾ der von mir gesuchten Strecken kriege ich keine Preise mehr angezeigt, sondern die Ansage, dass ich das Ticket doch bitte über die MSZ buchen möge. Sobald ich die Ermäßigung wieder raus nehme, kriege ich Preise. Also echt ziemlich unnütz.
Apparently still 115 Catima users on Google Play (roughly 0.1% of the Google Play userbase). No clue about IzzyOnDroid and F-Droid users (downside of not tracking users, very little insight in these things).
Európsky parlament prijal uznesenie o dekarbonizácii a modernejšej podobe rybolovu v Európskej únii. Tento text reflektuje potrebu postupne znižovať emisie a zlepšiť environmentálne a sociálne fungovanie celého rybárskeho sektora v rámci Európy. Uznesenie nadväzuje na hodnotenie, ktoré pripravila Výbor pre rybolov, a spája ciele Európskeho zeleného dohovoru s realitou fungovania rybárskych flotíl a komunit závislých od rybolovu. 
Parlament pripomína, že dosiahnutie klimatickej neutrality do roku 2050 vyžaduje spravodlivý a udržateľný prechod celého rybolovného sektora, ktorý zohľadní environmentálne, sociálne aj hospodárske aspekty. Uznesenie vyzýva na vytvorenie realistického a postupného plánu pre dekarbonizáciu rybárskych plavidiel a zníženie ich uhlíkovej stopy, pričom sa berie do úvahy rozmanitosť typov lodí, operácií aj regionálnych podmienok v celej Únii. 
Text uznesenia zdôrazňuje, že prechod na ekologickejšie palivá, alternativne pohony a iné technológie si vyžaduje významné investície do výskumu, vývoja, infraštruktúry a školenia posádok, ako aj spoluprácu medzi členskými štátmi, úradmi a odborníkmi. Tieto opatrenia majú zároveň vytvoriť priestor pre inovácie a modernizáciu flotíl bez poškodzovania sociálno-ekonomickej stability rybárskych komunít, najmä malých a pobrežných operátorov, ktorí predstavujú výraznú časť európskeho rybárskeho sektora. 
Uznesenie tiež upozorňuje, že riešenie finančných a legislatívnych prekážok je kľúčové, pretože súčasné pravidlá a finančné nástroje nie vždy dostatočne podporujú modernizáciu a udržateľné praktiky. Parlament vyzýva Európsku komisiu a členské štáty, aby prehodnotili a upravili existujúce mechanizmy, vrátane fondov EÚ, tak, aby umožnili prístup k financovaniu, ktoré je primerané potrebám prechodu k nízkouhlíkovému rybolovu. 
Z dlhodobého (aj strednodobého!) hľadiska by sme radšej mali prestať zabíjať zvieratá len pre to aby sme sa najedli. Rybie mäso je zdravé a bola by škoda ho úplne vynechať. Oveľa lepšie by bolo rybie mäso hlavne kultivovať v bioreaktoroch - to by mohli robiť veľkoproducenti. Malí rybári nech kľudne ostanú pri svojom remesle - som si istý, že mnohí ľudí bude ich mäso kupovať aj v čase ľahko a lacno dostupného kultivovaného mäsa.
"President Donald Trump may have made a major miscalculation about Venezuela’s oil.
Trump has expressed excitement over the prospect of US oil companies getting their hands on Venezuela’s vast oil resources.
But industry sources tell CNN that American oil executives are unlikely to dive headfirst into Venezuela for multiple reasons: The situation on the ground remains very uncertain, Venezuela’s oil industry is in shambles and Caracas has a history of seizing US oil assets.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that oil prices are too low today to justify spending the gobs of money – possibly tens of billions of dollars – that would be required to revive Venezuela’s decaying oil industry.
“The appetite for jumping into Venezuela right now is pretty low. We have no idea what the government there will look like,” one well-placed industry source told CNN on Monday. “The president’s desire is different than the industry’s. And the White House would have known that if they had communicated with the industry prior to the operation on Saturday.”"
David Rosen, co-founder of SEGA, just died. He was 95 years old.
Wait. He wasn’t Japanese?
That’s right. SEGA started as an American company. The reason SEGA is capitalized is because the original name was Service Games. And the “Service” in that name refers to the American military—its first customer base.
SEGA remained largely American until the 1980s, when David Rosen—along with Japanese business partners—bought the company from its parent, Gulf+Western, which also owned Paramount Pictures.
This initiated one of the most innovative and creative periods in video game history. SEGA produced classics like Space Harrier, OutRun, Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage, and Virtua Fighter.
For nearly two decades, SEGA was the primary rival to Nintendo, separating itself through speed and attitude.
Along with Atari, it was one of the companies that defined my childhood.
R.I.P., David Rosen. May you enjoy that great arcade in the sky.
Three years ago I bought @juliette an electric kettle for her birthday (because romance is not dead).
Looking for a stainless tank, hidden heating element, and temperature settings, I found the Krups KE07. Bit expensive, but it'll last decades. Right? Button 1 broke after a year. Button 2 today..
Thread in three parts
1. How it broke
2. Why I think you should not buy a Krups / Tefal appliance
I have the same looking kettle, but branded as Tefal. What made me to buy it was, that they claimed 10 years of spare parts availability. Not having that is a scam on customers. 👎
@bert_hubert I think this can use some extra attention: The .be registry wants to leave AWS and has created an RFP with lots of details of what they need. I think this could be the first sheep over the dam. I hope you can bring extra attention to this and a precedent can be created. dnsbelgium.be/en/news/dns-belg…
this varies a lot by the size and nature of the startup, and by what is being purchased. Must often it's the ceo or cto in smaller sartups, but it realy depends
@dk Lets say google was to buy subscriptions for its designers on a contrast checking plugin for figma example getstark.co/. Who would approve budget for it
something small like would just be whoever manages the designer's team, sometimes the designer could just buy it and expense it. If a lot of users wanted it, then it would be whoever manages the figma account, total amount is the main question, the bigger, the higher up it would go.
Basically I was wondering around how many people does the startup economy of SV really depend on. For that I wanted to know who in a big org is mostly responsible for approval budget for recurring saas subscriptions
If its mostly director, principal level folks in big orgs and cto in mid size startups then really how many of them are there
many startups depend on a bottom-up motion, where signup is free, then the designer, developer, etc becomes the internal champion while the startup's gtm team tries to works with the champions to pitch the decision maker, who is often also different than the final signatory, but these are the three typical personas.
I do have to say, that playing a mud remotely from my desktop, using NVDA Remote Controller, in the car, with a Bluetooth keyboard, to and from work, with an hour long commute, is a very entertaining thing. I know, I'm a nerd.
Zájem amerického prezidenta Donalda Trumpa o převzetí Grónska je myšlen vážně. V pondělí večer na to podle agentury Reuters upozornila dánská premiérka Mette Frederiksenová. Připomněla, že Dánsko a…
https://www.denik.
@cynik_obecny @Cooba13
André Polykanine
in reply to Sendamatic • • •