🥳 Exciting news! @loops, the #Fediverse's answer to TikTok, receives a grant from @nlnet! 🎉

Get ready for a new era of personalized short-form videos, remixes, and community interaction - all with the freedom and privacy of #ActivityPub!

nlnet.nl/project/Loops/

#introduction

Hello! 👋

Meet the W3C Team w3.org/2024/09/w3cteam.html

We are a international public-interest non-profit where since 1994 the Members, staff and public develop open standards and guidelines for an interoperable web to connect and empower humanity.

Our focus: security, privacy, web accessibility, internationalization.

With your help and our proven standards process based on fairness, openness, royalty-free, we make the Web work, for everyone.

w3.org/

My main laptop is in the shop so I'm temporarily using another, and boy howdy do I miss how many ublock blocklists I've enabled on my main system that I haven't on this one yet.

Getting pretty damn sick of every other website stealing focus for their cookie consents/signup forms. How do people deal with this?

And buy your ublock blocklist maintainers a beer or other beverage of their choice, because they deserve it!

Aira X Meta Ray-Bans Beta: Over 75% of Waitlist Now Live!

Over 3/4 of our waitlist now has access to Aira’s professional Visual Interpreting via the Meta Ray-Bans smart glasses! Audio and video are working smoothly, but imagine how much more powerful these smart glasses could be with deeper Meta integration. That’s where we need your help!

If you already have Meta Ray-Bans, it’s not too late to join for Aira early access:
- Open the Aira app
- Go to “More”
- Tap “Smart Glasses”
- Select “Meta Ray-Bans” and complete the form

Your Voice Matters!
To unlock the full potential of hands-free professional visual interpreting, we need your advocacy for better integration with Meta.

Check out our blog for resources, launch details, and a link to our video overview on YouTube:

aira.io/ray-bans-beta/

#AccessibleTech #MetaRayBans #VisualInterpreting

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I couldn't find any tally counters for #GNOME, so I wrote one.

Tally allows you to keep an arbitrarily large list of counters, colour coded however you like, with a filter mode to hide what isn't needed at the moment.

Install it on Linux from Flathub ⇒ flathub.org/apps/ca.vlacroix.T…

Kasasa is an app for you're taking a screenshot for your own reference and you want it's contents easily accessible. For these ephemeral snapshots, the app can hold them in it's own window. It's best used when you set said window to "Always on Top". If it's blocking something important, just turn it transparent by mousing over it. Capture and hold screenshots with Kasasa!

You can get the app on Flathub here: flathub.org/apps/io.github.kel…

#gnome #apps #flatpak

Hey #blind #students of #Mastodon.

So I'm running into some accessibility issues in my algebra course involving graphing. I do not have the support of state services for the blind, however I'm connected with disability services on campus. Otherwise, I'm going at all this on my own and for the most part handeling things well.

However, I'm not exactly sure how best to overcome things where advanced math and graphing come into play.

My tools currently include a standard, non-graphic calculator, a laptop running NVDA as a screen reader, 80-cell braille display on lone from disability services and a whole lot of tenacity. So far, I've maintained a consistent A in my course, but with the graphing stuff, I'm concerned that might change.

So, what are your tools and techniques for dealing with this and more advanced calculatory things? What add-ons may be of use, what tools should I be looking at, and what questions should I be asking?

Thank you so much in advanced to anyone who offers any advice.

💔 Like this child's parents, I would never have considered rabies as a risk from a lost bat fluttering around inside the house, not leaving any obvious bite marks.

So, a reminder to all:
Rabies is nearly always fatal once symptoms develop, but can almost always be prevented if you get the shots soon enough after exposure. If anyone has contact with an oddly-behaved wild or stray mammal, get rabies shots as soon as possible.

And TIL: bats are the main vector in Canada.

cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/ra…

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Happy National Poetry Day to all those who celebrate.

Here’s a poem called ‘In Search of Poetry’. It’s constructed entirely from popular Google searches about poetry.

Two Chinese nationals were sentenced to prison for scamming Apple out of more than $2.5 million after exchanging over 6,000 counterfeit iPhones for authentic ones.

bleepingcomputer.com/news/secu…

I'm telling y'all, if sighted people had to deal with the kind of senseless bullcrap that blind people *have* to deal with, daily, there would be very widespread protests. Public ones. Miles of people.

So, imagine this. You go to Google. Or Kagi. Whatever you like. The text box has "search" as a placeholder text. When you type into the field, the "search" is supposed to be replaced with what you're typing. So you go to search one day, and find that when you search for "cat food", you get "csatf aroochd". No matter what you do, that "search" is there, messing up all your searches. If you backspace everything out and try again, you get the same thing. No matter what. Now, you can click outside of the box, and type and press Enter and it works, but you don't see what's in the search box. You can paste your search in from notepad, but do you *really* want to do that? And this has been a problem for weeks now. You start to wonder if anyone at Google, uses Google.

And while this isn't entirely comparable with what's happening with the iOS Facebook app right now, it's the closest I can get. Truth be told, I don't post on Facebook. I haven't posted on there in like a year or two. So I, personally, don't have to deal with this. But for some people, Facebook is their lifeline. And no, that's not some stupid cliche like it sometimes is when overused by marketing teams. No. For some people, Facebook is how they communicate with their communities. And you had better not come in the replies all "well they should use Mastodon." No. Humble yourself. So this issue is a huge problem for them. And when you have elderly people who just want to talk to the people they care about involved, who know how to do it one way, and just stick to that because technology is so vast that one can easily get lost in their view? Things need to change. People need to understand these things. And while bugs suck and new frameworks are cool and Facebook loves to move fast and break things, if you want to do that, you'd better have a testing team that includes blind people, Braille users, dictation users, as wide a net as you can cast. And you know what? Maybe that'd cut down on that damn blind employment problem too. Fucking listen damn it! And I could go on and post on Facebook about this, using my computer because I'm privileged enough to have one and know how to work around accessibility issues, while I could even grab my Android phone, or dictate into my iPhone, I'm not the general blind person. And this isn't even just about Facebook, or just about this one situation. Developers of anything of any size should take this kind of thing to heart. And I know people are tired of me all on here dampening the party mood with all this anti-fun accessibility talk since like 2017, but at some point, we need to take things seriously. Because devs' "fun", building, developing, trying new frameworks and new updates sparkle sparkle, effects other people.

#accessibility #blind #facebook