Everyday I find more ways that the web has enshittified.... To people doing websites: each time you decide to make a popover that is not related to what you user is doing you should how much you hate your users.
One question we get asked from time to time is if we can recommend an accessible (with NVDA or self-voicing) program to teach touch typing. Can anyone recommend anything being used currently please?
Not for Windows, no. Talking Typing Tutor on iOS is great, though. I used it seven or eight years ago with an AT client. This person went from having never typed before to typing web searches, emails, and more in about three months. I don't know if it's still supported, but I hope so.
@remixman I had also used Talking Typer from APH 15 years or so ago, and recalled that it was self voicing, so I thought I'd mention both options - Most users just learning touch typing probably aren't overly familiar with / hooked on any given voice, so a typing tutor using a different voice to the screen reader they are or will use isn't generally too much of an issue
These Activists Want to Dismantle Public Schools. Now They Run the Education Department. ---
Under Trump, the Department of Education has been bringing in activists hostile to public schools. It could mean a new era of private and religious schools boosted by tax dollars — and the end of public schools as we know them. propublica.org/article/educati…
I decided to write a post where I talk about my experiences finding work as a blind person and attempt to give some general advice to blind people who are either looking for work or looking for a position that better aligns with their goals or values. I'm not sure why the strange URL; hopefully it doesn't cause problems. mikegorse.substack.com/p/4834h…
Everyone wants to blame Trump, and he's by no means blameless, but they're all guilty for not considering the consumers. And to shit on the people who work for you, GTFO
Debian will likely ship a GRUB with proper SBAT lines — maybe in the next point release or Debian 14.
Until then, every new laptop with the updated dbx revocations and stricter SBAT enforcement will reject Debian’s signed GRUB unless you set previous policy. This is making me very sad. Linux gets me, yet again.
This is one of those places where Linux accessibility drops off a cliff. The MOK screen isn’t accessible because it runs before the kernel (so no espeakup, no console, no Orca). Debian upstream knows about the issue, but it’s been considered “low priority” for years because most users just press the keys once and never touch it again. Unfortunately, for blind users, that makes Secure Boot basically unusable without sighted help.
Saw a Swastitruck on the 15, covered with advertising. There is apparently a fascist company renting that for that purpose. It's gross. Why do we even allow these on the road? They are unsafe.
Well I have done it. as of November 4, or 5 my JFW will no longer work. it is still on the laptop, but I will get that removed as soon as I am done reading the fan fic I am reading. So basically, I am now on #NVDA for the fore seeable future. there is a reactivate button, if I choose to do this before the fifth. the fifth of next month is when I would be charged for it, so there you go. If something doesn't work with NVDA, I just won't use it I guess.
@NVAccess well one program I love to use instead of task manager NVDA doesn't work with. when you up and down threw the list of processes, NVDA will not read them at all. the version I use is rather old, as the newer versions of it wouldn't even work with JFW. if you want to take a look at it, here is a zip file of the one I use. I run the 64 bit exe, but here is the zip file for process explorer. dropbox.com/scl/fi/jqrm784acnr…
I also found a couple of articles about alternative programs it might be worth exploring (note these are mainstream articles so don't necessarily consider accessibility):
@NVAccess I will say the one thing I really like ab out the program I use are two things. one is that I have it set up so that it shows up in my system gray, and if the CPU usage is over 2 percent, I not only see what it is, but what is using the most, so for example, it might say something like CPU usage: 10 percent, NVDA.exe 5 percent. the other thing I like, is another option I can have it show me in the system tray is how much ram I am using.
@NVAccess here is a perfect examplel. right now, here is what it is showing me. CPU Usage: 8% bztransmit64.exe: 6% and if I look at the other icon in my system try, I see this. Physical Usage: 10.1 GB
Someone just sent me something to review for feedback. It's a PDF, but it's the kind that have absolutely no text. I'm guessing it's an image or scan. Paperback doesn't yet have OCR, so I'm kind of stuck. I want to reply to the sender (someone I've known for years), but I honestly don't want to try to explain the problem. To sighted people, if they can read the text, that's readable. People who aren't good with computers can't understand why some PDFs work and some are useless. I hate this stuff
xAI to Raise $20 Billion After Nvidia and Others Boost Round
> Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is raising more financing than initially planned, tapping backers including Nvidia Corp. to lift its ongoing funding round to $20 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter. archive.is/2025.10.08-081137/b…
This asset-backed financing model could serve as a template for other tech firms looking to manage high debt exposure while building expensive AI infrastructure. Published: October 8, 2025 Elo…
Hi! Is there any chance we can encourage you to trend #NVIDIA when that's the company you mean, please? I know what their NASDAQ handle is, but #NVDA is much more widely known as the name of the screen reader we make and the #NVDA hashtag is very widely used for the screen reader. It will save both our communities polluting each other's feeds. If you'd like to find out more about the screen reader, our website is nvaccess.org/ - Thank you!
In many countries there are laws against dumping. So why do we allow all this AI crap to be sold under cost? Why are Governments complicit of this ecocide?
If every country starts requiring that people provide official ID in order to "verify their age" to use social media, there will be no way to use any social media without associating the account with a legal identity.
This is horrible for democracy, and should terrify everyone.
It doesn't matter if platforms use third-parties or not. It doesn't matter if they use some special encrypted code, the result is the same. This gatekeeps open discussions and government criticisms free from reprisals.
This is not true, there are cryptographic protocols that let you verify some assertion about your identity without revealing anything else about yourself.
The simplest, low-tech solution would be to require a single-use scratch card to sign up for any website. Stores could then be required to verify ID before such a scratchcard could be sold, just like they do now for alcohol and cigarettes.
@feld Back when OSS was designed, keeping an output buffer filled to avoid stuttering or reading from a microscope input source before the ring buffer looped and you lost samples was hard. You basically wanted to read or write whenever you had cycles because otherwise you couldn’t keep up.
Since then, computers have become a lot faster and now sound is a very low data rate device. Rather than hammering the sound device as often as you can, you want to be told the microphone buffer has passed some watermark level (so you can process a reasonable number of samples at once) or the sound output buffer is below a watermark level (so you can give it a few ms more samples to write for interactive things, or a few seconds for things like music playback).
Things like music are great for this because you can decode a few tens of second and then sleep in a kevent loop just passing a new chunk to the device whenever it has a decent amount of space.
@meka@bsd.network
It is always welcome to see more kevent(), if only because it lets other people share my pain, in the hope that that increases the push for kevent() to be fully completed and as good as select().
Periodic self-repetition: As a data librarian I can say that "AI" is not a matter of personal preference -- whether you like it or not, or whether you have found some use that you think is useful. It actively destroys organized knowledge, and therefore it actively destroys civilization.
Whenever someone looks for a human written text and can't find it because statistical near variants have been created and indexed, whenever "AI" "hallucinates" a reference, knowledge has been destroyed.
I think background music in public places -- stores, hair salons, dentist's offices, etc. -- might be generally a bad idea. It's impossible to pick music that pleases everyone, we can listen to music as much as we want in private, and background music tends to just add to the noise (on that last point I'm reminded of this song: youtube.com/watch?v=yzEncLnmUe…).
Was thinking about this as my mother and I were at Great Clips waiting to get our hair cut. I'm guessing she didn't like the music.
Provided to YouTube by ColumbiaAdding to the Noise · SwitchfootThe Beautiful Letdown (Deluxe Version)℗ 2003 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENTReleased on: 2007-12-...
It's a coordination / discrimination problem. It ultimately adds more profits than it takes away, hence why business owners won't stop doing it on their own. While the positive impact is spread through society, the negative impact is mostly concentrated in a few particularly sensitive individuals. This makes it an ideal target for regulation, and one of a few situations where I actually think regulation makes sense.
**Tears of joy alert!!! "On Alaska's frozen shoreline, oil rig workers made a discovery that stopped them cold—a walrus calf, alone and wailing, separated from his mother in waters over 50 miles away. Most walrus pups don't survive 24 hours without maternal contact. This one had already been crying for days. The Alaska SeaLife Center team didn't hesitate. They designed something unprecedented: round-the-clock "cuddle therapy." Staff members now work in rotating shifts, bottle-feeding every three hours while cradling the 85-pound infant against their chests, mimicking the constant warmth he'd know from his mother. They hum. They rock. They never leave him alone. The transformation has been miraculous. Within weeks, the calf—who arrives limp and dehydrated—now nuzzles into his caregivers' arms, makes happy chirping sounds, and has gained 12 pounds. He recognizes voices. He reaches for familiar faces. Sometimes survival is just about showing up with love." #Alaska #AlaskaSeaLifeCenter #WalrusPup #Love
"Canada Post exists to serve people, not shareholders, just like other many essential services that 'cost' Canadians millions per day. Think about it: Long-term care and personal support workers cost Canadian taxpayers millions a day. Should we close the old folks’ homes and put our seniors on the street? Public transit costs millions a day. Should we fire the bus drivers and make everyone walk? Public school support staff — crossing guards, lunch monitors, custodians — cost us millions a day. Do we fire them all and make those lazy teachers do everything?"
Maybe we'd finally be 'productive,' or 'ambitious,' or 'competitive' enough, then.
I’m a letter carrier. Canada Post exists to serve people, not shareholders, just like other essential services thestar.com/opinion/letters-to…
Reclassifying Canada Post as a "corporation" that needs to support itself is a prelude to declaring it bankrupt and then selling it. And once it's gone, it's *gone*. There's no going back to a public mail service. We're on a knife-edge, here.
Bored this Sunday? Use your downtime to learn How to Synth! Dive into the wonderful world of making weird synthesizer noises with my simple, hands-on guide. Still a work in progress, but there's plenty there to get you started!
Гэта сапраўднае кіно пра культавы беларускі гурт NRM. Яны пачыналі на аскепках свабоды і Мроі, вялі партызаншчыну і запісвалі найвядомейшыя песні ў гісторыі ...
> we used to drink in the office and datacenter regularly
did you guys ever get too rekt and start pulling ethernet cables out for 1000ms at a time? that's the sort of thing i would possibly consider. "oops latency, burp"
for you hax0rs: Google "AI" is currently vulnerable to prompt injection by "ASCII smuggling"—this is when you convert ASCII to Unicode tag characters, rendering them invisible to the user but visible to the LLM. here's how it's done: gist.github.com/Shadow0ps/a7dc…
here's someone using this to make Google Calendar display spoofed information about a meeting: firetail.ai/blog/ghosts-in-the…
others say summarising functions were affected too, so I wonder if you can add tag texts to your website and poison the Google so-called "AI summary" anti-feature.
ChatGPT filters out tag character but, usefully, Google is refusing to, so unless they get a backlash this might be a fun exploit to explore: pivot-to-ai.com/2025/10/11/goo…
Researcher Viktor Markopoulos discovers ASCII Smuggling bypasses human audit via Unicode, enabling enterprise identity spoofing and data poisoning on Gemini & Grok.
Bill Dengler
in reply to NV Access • • •David Goldfield
in reply to NV Access • • •braillebookstore.com/Talking-T…
Talking Typing Teacher Standard | Braille Superstore
www.braillebookstore.comMartin
in reply to NV Access • • •Typer Online
typer.aphtech.orgAlex Hall
in reply to NV Access • • •Andy
in reply to NV Access • • •Some people are using this: accessibyte.com/typio-online-p…
I know some who are using this: typingclub.com/
Finally, I thought I'd bring this up: typer.aphtech.org/
Typio, the accessible typing tutor for all learners
AccessibyteAndy
in reply to Andy • • •NV Access
in reply to Andy • • •