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Hahahahaha! #WhatsApp survey question I just received asks:

'How visually appealing is WhatsApp’s design (that is, the way the app looks) to you?'

in reply to Rebecca

These days apps are far more complex than they were in 2010, so if you don't explore by touch and at least try to know where common things are, you're going to have a very slow time indeed.
in reply to Andre Louis

Yep, sometimes, explore by touch is the only thing that would adiquately work in some apps, if VO loses focus or reaches some kind of boundary that doesn't exist, but it decided to do so. Same thing used to happen with talkback and other readers. It's good to know both. Speaking of using that, how would you teach someone the concept of explore by touch? I honestly can't explain it well I suppose, but I am trying to help someone from around here. What do you compare it vs swiping, for example? To me it's just like drawing on your screen, but drawing lines. also I am one of the people who uses explore by touch a lot, and also manages to guess half of the things on the screen if apps are well-made.
in reply to Мира🇧🇬🇭🇺

@tardis @jscholes Have they used tactile maps? If so you could say it's a little bit like exploring a tactile map but it's just your phone screen. I know speed dots have shut down but when I had them they really helped me orient to my phone at first.
in reply to Rebecca

Oh, these never shipped here, well, yeah I tried that approach but I guess they didn't get it, so I tried drawing. It's a person who likes working on a computer, so.
in reply to Мира🇧🇬🇭🇺

@tardis The majority of physical surfaces a blind person will encounter don't support sequential swiping. Explore by touch has to be the default for restaurant tables, kitchen counters, a new computer, etc. So I don't think you need a fancy explanation for how to find stuff on a screen; they can just be explored like those other things. I'm no teacher though so what do I know. @FreakyFwoof @silverleaf57
in reply to James Scholes

Yeah, trust me, neither am I. But at least I am getting paid. and I better be. I spent three hours trying to make this guy learn how to use iPhone, because he wanted an iPhone. And I could've done something else with my time, too. Plus, he insisted on paying, so, well, I don't deny.
in reply to Мира🇧🇬🇭🇺

the three hours were spent trying to disable subscriptions he subscribed to. Because Apple is, well, Apple, and the appstore isn't translated in my language. and then trying to disable the personal data thing icon. and it turns out it needed screen recognition, but I can do it with VO turned off, so go turn on that, swipe a thousand times through settings. and someone setup the iPhone by transfering from android, so now, it's a mess. Even the apps went to transfer. also, Apple photos sucks now. No idea what they did to it, but unless you use explore by touch, you screwed, unless you have like, two photos, but I have at least a few hundred even with the recent cleanup. So, yep, explore by touch in my opinion must be taught to people, the earlier the better. also, it's just easier. Haha.


Whenever companies “overinvest and underperform,” for some reason the people that have to go are never the execs who made these strategic mistakes.


Save the bachelor study Celtic Languages and Culture at Utrecht University from extinction!

Dear Fedi, we need your help!

On Monday, the University of Utrecht announced that they would shut down six bachelor studies, including the 'bachelor of arts' ("BA") Celtic Languages and Culture.
Current students will be able to finish their study, but from 2026 on no new students are to be accepted.

This was shocking news to receive.
We will not go down without a fight, though! :drgn_knife_angry:
We started a petition to stop it! (see the end of the toot if you want to skip all about why it is bad to loose Celtic in Utrecht.)

The Celtic BA at Utrecht University is unique in the Netherlands, and rare worldwide. Moreover, being able to study Celtic here in the Netherlands, away from the political context you have when you study it in Ireland, for example, allows us to bring new insights, because we can see it all from a slightly different perspective, which is very valuable for the whole field of Celtic studies.
It should be no wonder then, that the department of Celtic studies at Utrecht University is internationally respected.
The Celtic department also delivers important contributions to the field of Celtic studies that are much-needed worldwide.
Therefore, it would be disastrous to lose this beautiful and culturally important bachelor, that celebrated its centenerary just last year!

Hence, I emplore you all to sign this petition to save Celtic!
chng.it/tBwmVpYqMF

It is also possible to write a letter or email wherein you write why it is so important to keep the Celtic bachelor, to the Rector Magnificus of Utrecht University, who has to vote together with the 'rectores' of all other Dutch universities about the dissolution of the Celtic bachelor.
If you decide to write a letter or email, the staff of the Celtic department would love to receive a copy.

Written letters can be directed to:
Professor dr. Henk Kummeling
Universiteit Utrecht
Bestuursgebouw
Heidelberglaan 8
3584 CS Utrecht
The Netherlands

Emails can be directed to:
h.kummeling@uu.nl

You can send the Celtic staff a copy by:
Adding their email address in the BCC, or emailing a scan of your letter:
keltischezomer@uu.nl

Alternatively, you can send a physical copy to @drnike, Aaron Griffith, or Natalia Petrovskaia, at
Trans 10
3512JK Utrecht
The Netherlands

There exists an example draft for letters, if you would like to see that, please ask me!

#CelticStudies

This entry was edited (15 hours ago)

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I wanted to watch something else after Downton Abbey. So I' begun Upstairs Downstairs. It's good so far.
in reply to Brian Hartgen

My wife and I started watching Upstairs, Downstairs but we stopped sometime during either season 1 or season 2. It was a great show and I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed Downton. I really should rewatch it and keep going as I liked the characters. The episodes on Amazon Prime didn't have audio description, although the newer series from around 2010 does have it.
in reply to David Goldfield

@DavidGoldfield Hi David, you are right. We have both versions. Lulu has watched it lots of times. The 70's drama doesn't have AD, but like all the 70's dramas we have, there is plenty of dialog, more than enough to follow it.


New game added to the Accessible Android apps directory: BitLife accessible accessibleandroid.com/app/bitl… #Android #Game


Part of the ADHD tax is, for example, when I change the tyre that was
flat this morning, replace it with the spare tyre, and since I already put the supermarket bags in the car I start thinking of the route - whether to go to the store first or the tyre shop first - so I forget to make sure I have the fucking security lock nut with me - and so I eventually arrive to the tyre shop and discover I don't have it.
in reply to Federico Mena Quintero

So I go back home, park the car, retrace my steps to see if the nut is somewhere on the street, but of course it is a lost cause. So I unload the groceries and have a quick lunch and in a few minutes I'll go to the tyre shop again and tell them to please break the goddamned security bolts and replace them because I'm that doofus that lost the nut.

Also, fuck cars.



@freedomscientific It's been a while since I've used Face in View but when I try to adjust Face in View settings from Settings Center using the default profile, it indicates
Only available when Freedom Scientific Kernel Camera driver is installed.
When I attempt to enable it from the layered keystrokes insert+space, F O JAWS announces
Unable to initialize any camera. Face in View will now close.

This is the case with JAWS 2025 and 2024.
What do I need to get Face in View working?
I couldn't find an article mentioning this in your knowledge base.

in reply to David Goldfield

I just tried on my end & it worked. I'm now running #jaws2025. Is it possible either, A: your laptop doesn't have a camera or B: the camera quit working? That would be my guess anyway.
in reply to Jessica Dail

@KE8UPE Laptop definitely has a camera. However, I did wonder if it had malfunctioned so that's my next step.
in reply to David Goldfield

Is the camera internal or external? If external, try to unplug it & plug it back in. You may also want to try plugging into a different usb port, if possible.
in reply to Jessica Dail

@KE8UPE Fixed it. Camera Privacy Settings were off. Enabled them as well as the toggle to allow desktop apps to access the camera.
in reply to David Goldfield

@KE8UPE Well, while Face in View itself seems to be working, I still am not able to adjust Face in View settings from Settings Center with default.jcf opened. It still says
Only available when Freedom Scientific Kernel Camera driver is installed.
I'll continue to investigate but would welcome suggestions.
in reply to David Goldfield

@KE8UPE Yes, it's a camera issue as I get an error from Zoom when I try to start video in my meeting. I will troubleshoot.



So apparently Google is now generating over 25% of their new code via AI. Given Google's downward quality trajectory, that explains a lot.
This entry was edited (17 hours ago)
in reply to Lauren Weinstein

Google is roughly 28 years old. A founder/executive at the start who was then aged 30 is now pushing 60. Insofar as corporate culture is set from the top down, Google is now running on the fumes of the original vision. It's no accident that the life expectancy of a successful corporation is only half that of a human organism ...
in reply to Charlie Stross

Yep. Years ago I publicly predicted that Google would follow the usual arc (DEC, HP, Bell Labs, etc.) -- and that really the only question was how fast it would happen. Sundar really sped up the process.


The fact that I can just...decide not to go to a class and no one really cares is still so foreign to me. Even more foreign, though, is having a social life that actually makes me want to ditch class. College is a weird place.
in reply to Quin

It took me until my senior year of college to even try skipping class once, and I did that because of weather. More precisely, I skipped two of the classes I had that day because they were in different buildings than the one where most of my classes were at that point. And I knew I wouldn't miss anything at all by skipping those two classes.
in reply to Matt Campbell

@matt That's a very fair reason as far as I'm concerned. The digital age is nice, I knew I wouldn't be missing anything because she posted an announcement on D2L telling us what we'd be doing that day, went on and read the posted notes in 5-10 minutes, and that was that.


got laid off in the big dropbox layoffs today.

if anybody is looking for a staff-level engineer who loves mentoring and who is an expert in web security, email security, TLS/PKI, key and secrets management, and general defense security stuff, please feel free to hit me up.

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The late, great Teri Garr put her foot down on #StarTrek when creator Gene Roddenberry let his sexist tendencies get the best of him. slashfilm.com/1700446/teri-gar…


Received my yearly rejection from @Rustnationuk yesterday. This time I was sure my talk will get shortlisted since IMO it's a very interesting topic but I guess it's not as interesting as other submissions. 🤷‍♂️

Before you ask, my submission was titled "Profiler-drive optimizations: how I optimized away 94% CPU from zbus".



PSA

Thanks to the GNOME Infrastructure team's ongoing improvements, the GJS API Docs (gjs-docs.gnome.org) are being migrated to new infrastructure.

There may be some slight downtime, but it will be back up very shortly! Sorry for any inconvenience!

#GNOME #GJS #GNOMEShell #GNOMEExtensions




Is there a good source of free/paid generic HTML/CSS themes for tasks like apps/blogs that aren't tied to a given SSG/framework?

Specifically, if I as a blind person want to put together a decent-looking prototype for something in whatever framework I happen to be working with, I'd like to grab something with a simple set of pages/stylesheets and carve them up for whatever templating engine that framework uses. I know these sometimes exist for individual setups like Hugo, but it's harder to work backwards from a framework-specific theme to something more generic. Should also be friendly for editing by hand since the first thing I'll do is separate the layout from the content.

I think I'd prefer Bootstrap for CSS, or something a bit less semantically dense than Tailwind, which always sounds like alphabet soup to me.

in reply to Nolan Darilek

Have you checked out simplecss.org/

I haven't used it yet, but my understanding is it tries to do as much as possible using just standard HTML elements, not classes.

Nolan Darilek reshared this.

in reply to Matt Campbell

I have not, will have to check it out. I like that Bootstrap's JS plugins for more advanced widgets generally do the right thing for accessibility, and that it looks decent. If this ticks both boxes then I may give it a shot. Thanks for the pointer!


In #CzechRepublic there is a traffic rule that cars have to keep 1.5m distance from a #cyclist. Nobody gives a shit. And even worse, cars often push cyclists out of the road. It's hard to find a day when I didn't have to do emergency braking like on the video...
in reply to Štěpán Škorpil

Interesting. I cycle around #Brno quite a lot and my experience is almost completely positive. I cannot recall a situation when a car driver endangered me. Most also try to keep a 1-1.5m distance if possible.
My worst experiences with aggression on roads are from Prague.
#brno
in reply to Štěpán Škorpil

send it to Police. There's the car identification plate clearly readable on the video.


Víte co to je #jokgu? Je to sport příbuzný s #nohejbal, který vznikl paralelně v Jižní Korei. Hraje se 4v4 s menším míčem a nesmí se hrát za sítí ani blokovat. Další porovnaní a reportáž z návštěvy českých hráčů u Jihokorejců najdete tady:

youtu.be/nFFTKXX7TYc



So many companies implementing PassKey so wrong that it’s mind boggling. What’s so hard to just ask for PassKey and not use it as a second factor?

It is a secure token, it doesn’t really need entering username+password and PassKey. I’ve even seen PassKey + TOTP on top (PayPal).

I am almost wondering that it is not incompetence but the corporate minds want the PassKeys to go away by making them hard to use.



Exploring Samsung Galaxy AI’s Live Translate: In-Call Translation Put to the Test accessibleandroid.com/explorin… #Samsung #AI


Actually don't even get me started on "transandrophobia."

I have entire _rants_ about the latter part of that word.

in reply to Hrefna (DHC)

Part two: some of the people who were responsible for popularizing the term originally were, uh.

Let's call them hellishly problematic and leave it at that?

Which is one thing, but then that legacy lives on in how the term gets used today.

Because, much like with MRAs, there are real things to talk about but I almost _never_ see the advocacy in those contexts. Rather it is almost always "time to talk about how trans women are terrible."

5/

in reply to Hrefna (DHC)

Much like how MRAs could talk about, say, circumcision or toxic masculinity but they usually end up spending their energy going after women and/or feminists, usually when I see "transandrophobia" (or transmisandry) it is going to be followed by talking, not about the medical establishment going after trans men, it's going to be followed by talking about "bæddelism" (in this, the year 2024) or—at best—how trans women "get to be loud and proud but not us."

6/

This entry was edited (1 day ago)


ACL Awards Four Assistive Technology Alternative Financing Program Grants | ACL Administration for Community Living acl.gov/news-and-events/announ…


Webinar, November 14 at 10am ET: User Centered Testing with User Journeys tpgi.com/webinar-user-centered…


MacOS 15.1 brings a nice handful of bug fixes to Apple’s audio system, which will benefit users of all of our products. See this post for full details, then update your Mac to 15.1.

weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2024/10…



Webinar, November 6 at 12pm ET: Catching up with ADA Title II Regulations for Web Content and Mobile App Accessibility tpgi.com/webinar-catching-up-w…


Apple Introduces Redesigned Mac Mini, Updates iMac and Mac Accessories applevis.com/blog/apple-introd…


Increasing Electronic Possibilities: Connectivity on the Monarch aph.org/increasing-electronic-…


I am told that this solution is currently only for low vision users at this time. I have not investigated this.

Delta introduces flight map for flyers with visual impairment: Travel Weekly travelweekly.com/Travel-News/A…

This entry was edited (16 hours ago)


Is it considerate or is it passive aggressive to reply with alt text when the original poster neither wrote any nor asked for any?

[boost if you're so inclined]

  • considerate (0 votes)
  • passive aggressive (0 votes)
  • some other thing (0 votes)
Poll end: in 5 hours

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We just got back from a great #LibreOffice Conference 2024 – but we're already thinking ahead to next year's event! You can host it in your location: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl… #foss #OpenSource




Acabo de hacer el examen del curso básico de derecho social europeo y tengo un 10. Que gusto. Aún valgo para estudiar y todo.


phoronix covers my work on OpenPaX, a patch to restore userspace W^X and some other common sense functionality from PaX: phoronix.com/news/Edera-OpenPa…

this patch is the cornerstone of the new “alpine hardened” project, which is intended to produce a spin of alpine which is similar to the old grsecurity days of alpine.



Devastating scenes of piled-up cars in #Valencia, #Spain today after yesterday’s historic flooding. A year’s worth of rain fell in a few hours with a peak of 500mm.

#weather #wx #ClimateChange



🔥 Release Time 🔥

📨 Quick Actions for Email Notifications
🎉 Calendar Updates to Celebrate Birthdays!
🎨 Tinted Colors on iOS
📱 Import vCard Contacts on Mobile

Check out all improvements: tuta.com/.../release-actions-n…

in reply to Tuta

Will you release an update for the dedicated Tuta Calendar app so that the birthdays are also displayed there? 😃


1. interview with the vampire
2. HR screening with the vampire
3. technical interview with the vampire
4. team interview with the vampire
5. Good evening vampire, unfortunately we're not able to extend you an offer at this time. We'd like to keep in contact and notify you of any available positions in the future
This entry was edited (20 hours ago)


If you want to mug a software engineer, ask them if a static code analysis tool should consider `if time.time() > 0:` to be considered the same as `if True:`

Then, while they're writing a 40,000 word blog post on the topic, hit them on the head and take their wallet.

This entry was edited (20 hours ago)


There’s a certain kind of person who excels at staying just on this side of any bright lines in a community code of conduct, but nevertheless manages to be so unpleasant as to drive other people away. I don’t have any good ideas about how to deal with those people, especially if they get into a position of power.
in reply to jacoBOOian 👻

I was just reading about this - intenseminimalism.com/2020/the…


Oh, that's great. Had to put BSI back in my roter, because the command to invoke it has broken in the latest iOS update. Not amused.