I've been using Pop! OS on my laptop because of the touchscreen support so I've been with it for the last year, but I used Manjaro for at least 3 years and I can say that still my favorite. However I'm planning to try MX Linux, heard a lot of good things 'bout it.
It may be late, but combined with CRLite (and its other Web PKI progress), it may soon be the browser with the most robust Web PKI support.
While I would still say that Chromium generally wins on the security front, I’m happy to see the gap narrow with time and to see Firefox occasionally inch ahead in some areas.
Firefox 136 looks poised to enforce Certificate Transparency. It may be late, but combined with CRLite (and its other Web PKI progress), it seems to now be the
🔥 Amerika, země kde nechcete být ženou: Trump po projevu na Pochodu pro život podepsal plošnou protipotratovou politiku. Mezi postižené patří i zahraniční zdravotnické organizace, které distribuují antikoncepci a pomáhají v boji proti HIV.
"Aye, the sirens," says the lighthouse keeper, picking a bit of tobacco from his beard. "Some nights, when the wind is just so, I swear I can hear 'em singing." "What do they sing?" I prod him. A faraway look in his eyes, he says in a voice barely above a whisper, "Tubthumping."
Dear #Android #App #Developers, as it still happens far too often (no naming, no shaming! 💩 happens to everyone of us) a reminder to take good care of your #signing keys – and also take precautions for the case that your keystore might get lost. Please take a look at: f-droid.org/2023/09/03/reprodu… where I outline this topic.
Earlier this year, we reported about our progress concerning reproduciblebuilds. Meanwhile,more and more apps are using this; you can find some statisticsher...
@S1m Key rotation does no longer work at F-Droid.org, but it does at IzzyOnDroid (as we implemented the suggested patches instead of accepting their implementation of the "POC fix" back then). If Key rotation is used, no notifications are needed; IIRC, Android handles that (we have only 1 such app yet). And establishing RB here does not require it either, as we only ship the APKs signed by their resp. devs to begin with (RB runs on a "parallel track" here).
@S1m I have my doubts towards the former (that would mean rolling back their implementation, at least in parts, and using the suggested patches instead, which they rejected. The argument was that f-droid.org itself does not need key rotation, IIRC.). And as long as we still use fdroidserver, the only way we can notify is via the inlined per-release changelogs (aka "Fastlane changelogs"), which is what we do.
@S1m which needs to be implemented serverside (fdroidserver writing the index) AND clientside (to show it). Without the index itself supporting it, there's nothing the clients can do. So: gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver… ? gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient… ? Does not look like this will happen.
I'll try to open issues for more specific messages then: metadata to warn about removed application, and metadata to warn about application that need to be reinstalled
@S1m Remember that WE cannot implement those. Everything that needs changes to the index, is out of our hands – at least as long as we're still bound to fdroidserver. So such issues would need to be filed *there* – with the tools that generate the indexes. Our client devs would surely pick up those data once available.
@S1m the f-droid client doesn't handle key rotation. I think neo store and droid-ify allow disabling the key fingerprint check allowing android to handle the rotation but all clients will by default consider the key incompatible and not offer an update as the index format itself does not support key rotation even when generated using an implementation that doesn't flat out reject all APKs with rotated keys like fdroidserver does
@obfusk @S1m Confirmed that NeoStore can handle that. Just checked: Droid-ify had a new release this year already, so it should now handle that as well by now (last time I've checked it was implemented but not yet published, now it should be both). I cannot tell about other clients or how they might handle it.
But sure, let's randomly assign incredibly loaded clinical diagnoses onto individuals who may have many valid reasons for not wanting to engage in-person with people, particularly ones who make damning evidence-free judgements of others and share them in a newspaper
Locatiegegevens vergaard door ruim honderd Nederlandse apps staan online te koop. Het gaan en staan van hun miljoenen gebruikers is zonder hun medeweten te volgen. ‘Hartstikke illegaal’, zeggen deskundigen.
Did you know that you can add and use "ephemeral profiles" where all messages get deleted after a set time? The "auto-delete from device" will keep your profile clean. It's a one sided ephemerality that you decide about, not your chat partners. Good for coordinating things without digital traces and where only "the current day" or "week" is important but not all the past history. Saved messages stay, though, until you explicitely delete them. #ephemeral #deltachat
I want you to know that your CAPTCHA is inaccessible for disabled people: - blind people can't see the clock; - visually impaired people may not be able to see it correctly too; - dyscalculic people (like me!!) have difficulties reading a clock (moreover when all numbers are not written on it)!
Various approaches have been employed over many years to distinguish human users of web sites from robots. The traditional CAPTCHA approach asking users to identify obscured text in an image remains common, but other approaches have emerged.
We currently do not have an accessibility policy but we have brought this up with the team to consider. Regarding accessibility, our team is constantly working to improve it - including the captcha :)
Osvětim je za Ostravou. Na Krakov. Návštěva je nezapomenutelná. Měla jsem štěstí. Byla jsem částí školáků z Israele s vlajkou. Utěšovali mě. Ještě větší tábor je sousední Březinka. Průmyslová továrna na vraždění lidí. Jak někdo dnes může volit neonacisty je záhada?
As an aside, I also fondly remember your Bitstream jingle, as I was a subscriber to that magazine. I wonder what happened to Peter Ciali. Is he still with us?
Update: Thanks @pitermach showing a great demo that it's actually Mist World Upsampling to 48 in this demo, not NVDA downsampling to 16! I stitched together an audio file showing you how bad it is at ignoring the setting of -1 as the output. Instead #NVDASR tries to be too smart, enumerate the list and gather which you have set as your sound mapper output, and explicitly call that sound device when passing to the TTS outputs. I updated this to add a little more at the end and show how Mist World treats audio output switching properly, that I now know is not proper. Good night, Mastodon. This really ruined my weekend at first, until that amazing demo in my mentions by @pitermach clarified things. :) Update: People are asking, "how can I tell?" Listen for the sharpness of S's and other consonants. If you have the ear you'll notice.
What you're hearing isn't actually downsampling to 16, it's aliasing artifacts introduced by whatever resampling algorithm Mistworld's audio library is using. Vocalizer actually runs at a native 22 KHZ as far as I know. I recorded a quick demo of what it sounds like when you bring a 22 KHZ file to 48 KHZ with a low quality resampling algorithm versus a file that's actually at 16 KHZ.
@JamminJerry There isn't much of a difference between the old default 64 point sync interpolation and r8brain, but a more pronounced difference with point sampling and linear interpolation there's a bit more high end. Something else I just remembered is back in the day Klango also used to do this, so any voice you used with it would get resampled up like this with noticeable aliasing.
super informative, wow! I wonder if the default output set within Windows sound pannel to 48K causes the upsampling to 48 and not keeping at 44100, how odd. It could be that with the sound mapper Windows always forces its own sampling rate rather than sticking with the one set as playback in the program. But I'm not 100% sure. (Nope, not this, did a test run by force-changing a Bluetooth A2DP driver to 44) It's definitely odd that when you choose an audio device directly it's correctly sampling in the game though, and maybe Klango did the same thing.
Unless you're using ASIO and/or exclusive mode, some degree of resampling is unavoidable. Windows opens the device with a particular configuration of sample rate, number of channels, etc. and audio from applications is adapted as needed to match so you get a mix. If three applications are simultaneously sending audio output to the same device, the device is only opened once and receives the sum total of those sources.
It's also odd that there's a difference because with WASAPI, which even legacy WinMM now uses behind the scenes, there isn't really a separate sound mapper device. You ask the system for the default endpoint, it tells you which that is (the real endpoint, not some sound mapper thing) and then you open that endpoint directly. Thus, there should be no difference in how the device is actually opened. I guess it's possible the app makes different decisions about resampling based on whether the user wants to use the default device or not, but why would it do that?
I'll also flag there are different resampling flags you can specify when opening the device with WASAPI. By default, Windows uses a really crappy resampling algorithm, but you can request a better one. I learned this the hard way when I was first implementing WASAPI in NVDA. But again, why would the app fail to specify the correct flag based on which device the user chose?
and... if you want this aliasing, use Zdsr. I am trying to argue with people that this aliasing is bad. No, they know better, because they have more experience, and stuff like that... If i see that it cannot be hear for a long time... i stop using it.
yeah, I do think that the new R8Brain algo mentioned there does a lot better job at still making the voice have that higher crisp quality but not so much the sharpness on the actual consonants, which to me feels like the best of both worlds. You get a lot higher quality to the ear but also don't get those weird artifacts the older ways of upsampling to 44 or 48 introduces. I don't think people who don't like it are wrong, especially for some minds, sharper noises like that in the audio can really stand out and become annoying or a headache.
Because of this harsh aliasing, i start to loss concentration while listening to speech. I don't know, but RHVoice uses its original sample rates IN NVDA or using sapi. also a screen reader which is not doing good with sample rates is jfw.
@asael I wonder if we'll ever get a true TTS that's not 22050 but true 44.1K sampling rate. Now I think I'm on the hunt for that. My guess is the newer AI voices might be the first of their kind this way if so. It's interesting because 22050 in actuality is 11025. The Nyquist frequency (or Nyquist limit) refers to the highest frequency that can be accurately represented by a given sample rate. It is half of the sample rate. The reason for this is due to how digital sampling works: you need at least two samples per cycle of the waveform to fully capture its shape. This is known as the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. So really, any TTS claiming to be 22050 HZ is really just 11025, and any TTS claiming to be 11025 is just 5.5 K-hertz, youch
@asael We had one, for a very brief moment, Innoetics. But they got bought out by Samsung. I think there's also a bulgarian TTS that runs at 44, saw someone use it once but not sure what it's called.
I have (had?) the Innoetics John voice. It's probably still installed on my old laptop. It was kind of odd and weirdly concatenated, but definitely had highs that nothing else did.
I've thought of making a voice of myself in RHVoice but I'm unsure about the intonation, I often talk iwth a higher inflection and want that to be reflected, and haven't quite figured out the ridiculously complicated pipeline. Plus I've only got WSL to train it so it will be sloooooow! @valiant8086 @BorrisInABox @pitermach @Tamasg Oh, has that replaced the one they'll ship for the NVDA add-on? I only see one version of SLT on rhvoice.org
@BorrisInABox @asael OMG. This was a thing? What year did that all get created? Feel like I've missed like, a major milestone in speech history. LOL. It may be that using actual 44K data is too large in size, so that's why even the human voices by companies such as Nuance stuck with 22050, as it's tolerable enough to not be an AM radio but not high quality to be even like an FM signal could be.
@asael @BorrisInABox Believe it or not I still have it here, yay for a Windows install on its 9th year now. Fun fact, that John voice was created from the voice of Jon St. John, aka the guy who voiced Duke Nukem, sadly not doing the Duke voice in this case. But that single reason is why we used it for a very long time either for reading chats or games while streaming with @talon. Here's a quick demo. Not a super responsive voice, but yeah there's a lot of highs.
@asael @BorrisInABox @talon wow yeah, that dfor sure has some lag, although have heard worse. Sounds more like what you'd get on a Piper voice. But yeah, the quality in this is for sure what I like about the up-sampled Vocalizer, and there's none of that sharpness crap at the ends of certain letters people can notice, wow.
@BorrisInABox @talon btw, there is something new about upcoming NVDA. The chinese dev, who is developing natural sapi adapter, started making improvements to speech protocols. He is going to add the silence trimming for all tts, making them responsive.
@asael @BorrisInABox @talon Oh neat. That's definitely something that's giving ZDSR a decent performance edge over NVDA with some SAPI voices it makes a very noticeable improvement.
@masonasons @asael wow did they ever do any demos with actual Innoetics voices to show that? Never heard of that company, but it would make sense why or how Samsung got such high quality voices and a major improvement from the sing-song Samsung TTS they had to the way better voices used now.
Comedian Bill Bailey reimagines the Doctor Who theme as Jacques Brel-esque Belgian jazz. Taken from his DVD 'Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra'...
In this laugh-filled and tech-focused episode of Technically Working, Damashe and Michael are joined by Sean Preece from Double Tap. Together, they explore: Sean’s journey into podcasting and how Double Tap evolved into a daily show.
Thank you for this lovely tribute to Ed Potter. I enjoyed hearing not only rare clips of Ed's work but your jingles, as well, which I haven't heard in years. We've lost a great talent.
My new opinion piece at Scientific American has just been published.
"Our refusal to aggressively cut greenhouse-gas emissions isn’t a problem for some distant uncertain future; it has become our present-day reality. It is time to disavow climate denial and accelerate building disaster resilience in our cities and homes.'
Decades of warnings went ignored about the threats from climate change. With homes everywhere now burning, flooding and washing away, it’s time we start listening to scientists’ climate solutions
A Survey of 'Know Your Rights' Resources for Immigrants and Their Families
'Know your rights' resources help communities prepare for escalating immigration enforcement activity. I reviewed dozens of these resources and identified 7 common themes.
TIL big specialized forums have started backdating millions of LLM-generated posts. Now you cannot be sure a reply from 2009 on some forum for physics or maps or flower or drill enthusiasts haven't been machine-generated and totally wrong.
An exposé no one will read, about the widespread falsification of user posts in PhysicsForums, a scientific community founded in 2001. This is a microcosm of the death of the human-written Internet.
This Microwave Conversion Kit from the Canberra Blind Society (Australia) converts microwaves that are less than 5 years old in to a Talking Microwave for folks that are blind or low vision. The page also has recommendations on which microwaves may work best. I've not tried having this done myself as I'm quite happy with my tactile buttons on my standard microwave, but its an option. $230 or so plus having an appliance technician install the kit for you.
Even completely headless, command line #linux doesn't prioritize #accessibility in any way. Today I had to reinstall an entire #debian system from scratch because a drive listed in my /etc/fstab died. That makes #systemd boot into emergency mode, where you get no SSH, no network, no sound, and no screen reader. There is no quick way to force it to try and boot even though drive 7 of 11 has died, and it could absolutely bring up SSH and the network to let me fix it if it wanted to, just like sysvinit used to do. You can't even force systemd to add SSH and the network to emergency mode because of circular dependencies. nofail will only continue the boot if the drive doesn't exist, but if the filesystem has issues...emergency mode for you. In short: if your drive dies on Linux, fuck you. Be able to see, or reinstall your entire system, because nobody in Linuxland gives a shit about #a11y or your needs.
@tripplehelix No, because to boot from that live USB stick, you need to get into the BIOS. If you're blind, you can neither access the boot menu or change boot priority. Reinstalling involves unplugging your system drive, plugging in a USB drive with the installer, getting it to boot off that when it can't find anything else bootable, then plugging in the boot drive again. And the installer offers a screen reader, but it doesn't offer any sound drivers, so the screen reader is not useful. No live Linux images have working sound and a screen reader. I have a installer with a preseed file that I created so it won't ask me any questions, assuming I can time it exactly correct to get it to boot off the USB stick and then plug in the actual drive I want the OS installed on before it starts writing data.
@Samuel Proulx I won't boost this, due to the needless vulgarity, but I am quite shocked to hear this. I would think that, since they've been around for decades, Debian, of all distributions, would have such accessibility as a default! I played with it a bit, but I am really a Windows user who is just curious about Linux. And yes, I do need a screen reader as well. Fortunately, mine is within VmWare, so if something goes wrong, it's not serious, just annoying. But if that were my primary machine, that would be horrible!
@dandylover1 I disagree that the vulgarity is needless. In the year 2025, when OSX, Windows, IOS, and Android can run screen readers in recovery mode, it's obscene that Linux can't. Far more obscene than the use of the word fuck.
@Samuel Proulx If someone has to resort to obscenities to make a point, it devalues his argument. That said, I do agree with your sentiments. It is quite ridiculous, in this day and age, that something like what you've described must be done.
@dandylover1 I generally allow myself two or three obscenities per year. In my opinion, when you're known to not use them, and suddenly do, it actually ads force to your argument.
@Samuel Proulx Ah, okay. That is, indeed, very different! And you're quite right. If I started writing like that, those who know me would definitely take notice!
@dandylover1 I also feel strongly that vulgarity is the punctuation to the argument, not the argument itself. It should always be at the end, not the beginning, once you've finished saying your bit, not when you're just starting. Establish your opinion, then hit 'em in the face with the cursing while they're leaning in and listening.
You keep saying "cannot" when you mean "does not". It's not that the capability does not exist. It's that it is not set up and configured for this case. That can be changed.
@dashdsrdash@dandylover1 If I understand systemd correctly, this would require massive changes to multiple units. Because systemd makes the entire file system a single dependency, with no way to depend on only the root partition. Just for ssh, you’d need to change it from wants to requires networking, and then screw around a bunch with the networking unit. I think saying can’t is fair here. Systemd just wasn’t designed to boot at all costs; it’s a fragile dependency graph that breaks if you sneeze at it.
I agree with your last sentence, but the project tries to take over everything, so I think it is fair for them also to take responsibility to implement a rescue mode with a screen reader.
Certainly other projects, like the Debian installer, have accomplished it.
Have you considered installing a rescue image as a boot choice? GRML has grml.org/grml-debootstrap/ which includes an ssh-in path.
@dashdsrdash@dandylover1 The issue there is that I now have to do strange and undocumented things in grub in order to know when the boot menu comes up, or make it wait for an extremely long time and slow down the boot. Also, sometimes Debian updates add boot choices, risking changing the order of choices, and meaning that pressing down arrow twice and then enter might not boot into the choice I expect.
Right. It might be more consistent to put a rescue image -- or a live image, configured the way you want -- on a USB stick and tape the USB to the box, ready for when you need it.
@dashdsrdash@dandylover1 I'd still wind up reinstalling, though, thanks to drive encryption not allowing me to unlock the discs from recovery media. Or at least, if this can be done, I'm unaware of how. If I want to actually fix the problem (in this case, edit /etc/fstab), I need to boot in from the actual system or its emergency mode.
@tripplehelix All of them suck, honestly. Debian sucks the least because of preseed, but that only works because I've been running Linux servers for 20 years, have another computer to create the preseed file on and make the custom ISO, and know *exactly* what I need the installer to do. No normal blind human could recover from any type of failure on a Linux system at all, assuming they could even get it installed. There are ways of getting arch and Ubuntu to come up on the live image with sound and speech, but they involve precise timing, memorizing keypresses, and typing commands into the console by wrote.
@dev_ric@tripplehelix I have not, largely because I’m not sure how to go about creating a completely automated installer other than with network boot and having a second server to run tftp and serve the image.
curious if you've tried Gentoo? I've absolutely no idea how you'd go about actually setting it up as a blind person, but it's about as customisable as Linux gets and that means, among other things, you can still opt to use OpenRC and sysvinit rather than Systemd.
@dev_ric@tripplehelix Or having some kind of data center network kvm type setup. But if I could afford infrastructure like that, I could afford to just pay a sighted person to come to my house and read the screen lol
@freya Nope. USB images don’t support sound or screen readers. So reinstall involves creating a preseed on another machine, making a custom image, and reinstalling. If I can’t have SSH and network, or sound and a screen reader, reinstall is my only option. And the systemd emergency target denies me both of those things, as do live images.
@freya Only if you have a hardware synthesizer. I’ve never, in 20 years of running Linux machines, had sound work out of the box. Not once. Serial console output used to work, but not so much, these days.
we dunno what machine you're running on, but the integrated speech in the installer for Debian and arch works all the time every time. And again, not sure what hardware you're on, but we've got 3 machines right here with serial consoles and, when they were running Linux, they all worked. They're all running Solaris now but still
I haven't seen something that doesn't work with standard HDA sound drivers in... decades? If you're stuck with some hardware that bad, external USB sound device (they're cheap and I've used them for multichannel signal generation stuff separate from system sound) might be a good idea to have on hand. AFAIK they're driverless (standard USB device class driver works for any of them).
@dalias@freya Heck, the standard Debian bookworm install media doesn’t have onboard sound chipset working on my framework AMD laptop. And framework intentionally supports Debian.
@serrebi Actually, systemd's emergency mode is broken on some distros even more than that, you end with a locked root account on many distros, so even sighted have to do these repairs from a live medium. But, yes, convincing mainstream adoption of at leas BRLTTY in the initramfs will be a challenge, adding a TTY screen reader will be another challenge (which one you want, for example). Yes, I know, that speakup exists, but some distros (thank you, Fedora), are not building the support, because this infrastructure has basically no maintainer, and they do not want to risk this.
From a totally technical standpoint, I think it's pretty difficult to achieve some sort of a nice recovery mode. From what I know Windows would boot into a recovery partition (which does not always exist, so it doesn't always work). I don't think such implementation exists yet in the Linux world unfortunately (in some way systemd would need to fallback to a separate fstab or a separate target that instructs the system to mount and switch-root into a separate recovery rootfs).
Or you could try to include networking and other tools into the initramfs, but obviously that would greatly slow down system boot up times.
I am not so sure how practical the separate fstab thing is, I don't even know if that's supported by systemd currently, but I think that's the only way to have recovery mode implemented properly for both command line and graphical situations.
An alternative approach is to have the bootloader count the number of times the system has not booted up properly somehow, and automatically select a different target or kernel. But again obviously I don't think such implementations exist yet.
@madomado Or it could just log the error and keep going. 99 percent of the time ssh and network will come up even if a drive is dead. There is no reason to halt the boot unless the primary partition is broken or the kernel panics. Otherwise, boot at all costs. Just like sysvinit used to do, and just like windows and mac still do.
IIRC the Windows recovery partition is the ESP, so as long as the bootloader partition exists Windows may load.
Also fstab has an option to silently fail mounts, but you need to set a custom mount option (nofail).
systemd has a mount unit feature where you could just write a bunch of separate "services" that mount partitions on the disk, and even most distros depend on it because guess what, systemd actually generates these service files from... the fstab itself!
I think the main issue is probably just distros not having a fallback for failed mounts by default and expecting you to have an always-healthy disk. That and recovery mode being completely lackluster because it's a minimal RAM disk image.
Someone could probably implement a decent recovery mode, but people would be arguing on whether it's even necessary because "bloat".
systemd had and still has that issue with people thinking it's unnecessary and bloated.
@cappy@madomado I'm aware of nofail. It skips discs that can't be seen by the system because they no longer exist or because of hardware failure. However, based on the experience I had yesterday, nofail will not skip the disc if it encounters a corrupted filesystem while mounting. And I would completely agree that systemd is unnecessary and bloated; what happened to the Unix philosophy of do one thing and do it well, while having well-documented interfaces and thus being completely replaceable? Systemd does everything, and does it all badly, while also being effectively impossible to replace portions of it, or make changes to parts of their one true design that you disagree with...like, for example, forcing it to boot even on dependency errors. My spicy hot take is that it would be impossible to create a fully accessible boot process while we have systemd, because it's neither modular 'nor easily customized, and the one true systemd way of doing things doesn't take accessibility into account.
@madomado@fedi.fyralabs.com Well... Linux was always a monolithic operating system. systemd is not even actually monolithic as most people think. Funnily enough people only think systemd is a big bloated pile of mess because they look at the repo and see all the programs.
systemd-init is literally just a single program. Everything else is just a bunch of separate little pieces of almost-standalone software. Once you look into how systemd actually works, it's not actually even that big.
It's like coreutils, just a suite of tiny little programs working together and doing what it does well that speaks a common language.
That language just happens to be systemd sockets, because it's made by the systemd devs.
@cappy@madomado Then why has nobody come up with a sane replacement for systemd-init? Honestly, I suspect that I'd be happier on freebsd if only it had decent hardware support, and any screen reader at all. Using jails seems exactly like how I use docker for everything today, but better.
Then why has nobody come up with a sane replacement for systemd-init?
OpenRC, s6-init. Or you can do it the old-fashioned way and write an rc script in Bourne Shell.
I'd be happier on freebsd if only it had decent hardware support, and any screen reader at all.
You do you, people don't usually implement a11y features because it's most of the time an afterthought. It's not even a Linux/UNIX problem it's just able-bodied people forgetting we exist.
Using jails seems exactly like how I use docker for everything today, but better.
You don't even need to use "just" Docker for jails. In fact there's like a million OS-level hypervisor implementations that work just like BSD jails. Sometimes even better because the kernel itself has a thing called namespacing.
Bubblewrap for rootless jails, Flatpak makes heavy use of that.
You want something similar to jails? Ubuntu makes LXC, That already existed. Even systemd has their own thing, it's called systemd-machine. Guess who uses and maintains systemd-machines? Meta. And basically almost every mainstream Linux-based hypervisor distro has some support for LXC (looking at you, Proxmox and libvirt)
Docker/Podman is just an implementation of a standard that people use because it's easy to set up, it's a set-and-forget thing because OCI images are meant to be pre-configured to run a specific service.
@cappy@madomado I would say that accessibility *is* a Linux problem. In theory, the Unix way of doing things *should* allow for accessibility support that can be easily customized to meat each person's needs. But Linux has moved so far away from that ideal, with seemingly no interest in returning to it, that accessible Linux is difficult to impossible.
Linux is always about options. I suppose, technically, during install, one could be asked if they wanted the feature, and a brief explanation would be provided about how it worked and what changes would be made. 🤔 But that would be something for another time.
Hence why lots of distros use systemd. It's the better init at the time (at least better than sysv) and we all got stuck with it. It's why some of us stick with X11 (Looking at you, NVIDIA), because UNIX workstations have been using it for years at that point because XDMCP is a thing.
@madomado@fedi.fyralabs.com If you think the current way of doing things is bad. All you can do is (maybe possibly) take initiative, create an alternative, and then prove your version is better than the status quo.
Of course nobody has time to do that, so the status quo remains.
@cappy@Linux_Is_Best@madomado This is the key flaw in open source. People only have to work on what they, personally, care about. Well-regulated (not free market) capitalism allows society to force people to spend time on things that don't effect them, in exchange for money. We're never going to have enough qualified blind programmers with the talent, time, and resources to improve Linux accessibility. So the majority of us will be stuck on Windows and mac. I wish there was a way out of this, but I can't find one.
@cappy@Linux_Is_Best@madomado I used sysv for years. I have yet to find any advantage to systemd. It doesn't even store plain-text logs, requiring you to use a special utility just to examine the state of things.
That's frustrating. I wonder if upstream would accept changes to start the screenreader stuff even in rescue mode? That seems like it wouldn't be too hard to do (so long as you're fine having espeak & co. in your initramfs, which, tbh, sounds like a reasonable tradeoff)
@mary The issue is that not only do you need espeak, you also need a metric buttload of sound drivers and so-on. I suspect we'd have better support with getting SSH and network in the rescue image, because we might at least be able to get the people collocating in data centers on-side. Also, network chipsets seem to be more standard than the various flavours of onboard sound, meaning fewer drivers are needed.
After doing a little research it seems like rescue and emergency mode both happen after the pivot from initramfs, so I was totally wrong in my earlier message. It would seem like the drivers and userspace components for either option (espeakup or ssh) are all there, just not started. If that's the case, I suspect it wouldn't be super tough to make either work if only they could get the dependency ordering thing sorted out (or have a separate "emergency" version of the ssh and networking services or espeakup service if it's impossible to represent the graph any other way).
@mary Maybe/probably. The real issue here, as I've been complaining about in other parts of the thread, is that systemd is so monolithic and complex that it makes customizing things in this way far more difficult than it should be.
I had to use a Ubuntu Live CD once for something similar. I wonder how hard it would be to have it automatically start up an OpenSSH server so that you can SSH into it, that seems to be the easiest solution.
I tried setting up a screen reader once to test my website and concluded that Linux is just not very usable for people who actually need a screen reader to use their computer
it took a lot of effort and getting through a bunch of very confusing setup to get it working at all, and then getting a voice better than barely-understandable was a whole another challenge
I feel like getting this working well and making the setup easy would require having some single organization work on improving every piece of the system to make it all coherent and easy to set up
@lunareclipse Actually, the voice really isn't a huge problem. Espeak is fine, and it's the default in a lot of places. The real problem is getting sound support that both works, and stays working. And giving the user a way to recover when something random fails during boot. And also, of course, Wayland disabled a ton of stuff that screen readers need in the name of security. The best way to use Linux as a blind person right now is via SSH on a Windows machine that's dedicated to the purpose.
While the entire way the emergency and rescue modes work really needs to be re-worked taking accessibility into account, until that happens (if ever...) you can disable it entirely by masking emergency.target and emergency.service, (systemctl mask emergency.target emergency.service,) which will make your system keep booting instead. (Though then it becomes extra important to make sure that services requiring those mounts have explicit dependencies on them, so they don't get accidentally started and start doing things on the wrong filesystems.)
@remmy Instead of messing with the terrifying mess that is systemd dependencies, I just have permissions set on the mounting directory so processes can't write there. They can only write to the actual mounted filesystem. So thanks for the tip! This will help.
As someone who has used serial ports frequently for remote diagnosis of systems in various bad states (which would be set up in emergency mode), I wonder if braille devices that can behave like a VT100 terminal are still made
I imagine "nice termcap guis" would still be a pain, but at least the emergency mode tools don't use many of those that I've seen?
It strikes me that the design of PC hardware shares almost as much blame for this
@jhwgh1968 Perhaps. But both Windows and Mac manage with a design goal of "Boot! No matter what!" and seem to do okay. I've booted deeply, deeply broken Windows systems and still gotten Internet, sound, and my screen reader. So I tend to blame Linux for the current state of affairs.
@jhwgh1968 I remember once getting pulled in to fix a Windows machine that had been booting in safe mode for years. The owner could still surf the web and get her email, so she just ignored it. If Linux wants to be used by "normal" people, this is the kind of bullet-proof it needs to aspire to.
@lizzy Yes, as I said in my post, that works if the hardware is dead or removed or otherwise borked. But if there's issues with the filesystem, it'll halt the boot and ask you what to do/how to recover it, landing you in emergency mode.
A bit late, but "x-systemd.automount" should work here by removing the disk from the global fs unit and creating a separate automount unit for it, which is allowed to fail without blocking things.
It basically postpones mounting until anything accesses the path.
It will however fail depended units needing files on that filesystem.
"because nobody in Linuxland gives a shit about #a11y or your needs." -- has Debian rejected your patch to fix the issue and told you to screw yourself? What a bunch of dumbass!!
Joking aside, It's frustrating for sure, but no one is trying to get one over you or maximize shareholders' return. No one owe you anything for the free work they are doing.
@shironeko Actually yes, attempts to fix the issue in the past have been shut down. Because accessibility isn’t worth adding a couple megs of bloat or slowing the boot down a few seconds. It works this way because Leonard and the other maintainers want it to, and intentionally decided accessibility isn’t a design goal.
You've got a few options here. 1. Serial console on the motherboard, needs support from your motherboard and a cable. You also need to take your computer apart to install it. That's probably your best option. I don't know if Linux can use a USB to serial adapter that early in the boot process. There's netconsole, but I don't think it supports input. This would give you bootloader and console, no BIOS though. 2. Buy a real server board. They usually have some kind of remote management in them. They're expensive and there are very few options, but you should get an accessible BIOS out of it. 3. Write your own thing and hook it into the initrd. If I was going to do this, I would try to have it bring up the network and start some kind of shell. Getting everything I would need for sound would be too complicated. It might also interfere with things later in the boot process. 4. Capture card, hook it up to AI, or OCR.
@tspivey What I did was use a preseed to just reinstall. All the data wasn't on the root partition, so all I lost were some random config files like upsmon.conf that I forgot all about.
@hyc Interesting that it continues to exist, and is the default in every major distro, then. Apparently Linux is just as subject to enshittification as everything else.
Accessibility on a Linux desktop is not one of the strongest points to highlight. However, GNOME, one of the best desktop environments, has managed to do better comparatively (I think).
@tuban_muzuru Oh, he's the FMOD guy. I'm surprised FMOD still exists! If he's the guy I'm thinking of, he did a bunch of work in VB6 to get FMOD working in mIRC and mushclient. And that sentence made me sound like an internet grandfather. It's time for me to toddle off to bed in my fuzzy slippers.
@Samuel Proulx @tuban_muzuru Hmmm, I am really really surprised the situation is as bad on your side. I do have a little different experience however I like your points related to inaccessible emergency shell access. I am using single arch linux install from like 2012. Each time I get a new laptop I'll just boot off of live Arch Linux USB by looking up the boot menu keyboard shortcut in the manual of that laptop and OCR the screen once to find out which option is my USB device I have just connected. Every laptop I have used since 2012 had a sound working on the live media with included speakup. When fully booted into the live USB I connect to the network prefferably via ethernet and use rsync to transfer my install into place regenerating initramfs at the end and adding linux kernel with its efi stub into the uefi partition to boot also setting uefi boot order by using efibootmgr. I know I am not doing encryption since there is no accessible UI to enroll my own KSK into the bios or at least I don't know about it but I am otherwise used to do all of this on my own with no sighted help. And of course this is my primary system of choice. On those few additions that I broke something during an upgrade I have booted off the live medium again, chrooted into my broken system, fixed it and continued as normal. I must say I very much like this setup that I don't have to reinstall.
#TIL There is a solution called @yunohost. It's kind of an environment that allows you to install lots of apps. And my main insight was: there are LOTS of open-source web apps for everything. If I have enough time, I will definitely test many of them and document their #accessibility. I do remember struggling with some of them definitely, but some (like #NextCloud and #Miniflux) are decent. Here is their catalog: apps.yunohost.org/catalog
North Dakota Sued the Interior Department at Least Five Times Under Gov. Doug Burgum. Now He’s Set to Run the Agency. —
The state was hostile to Interior Department policies during the Biden administration. A review of its lawsuits under Burgum reveals an aggressively pro-fossil fuel agenda.
Daniel
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But my config *so* close to being perfect! (This is the only possible state of NixOS configurations)
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