Tonight would be a perfect one to get absolutely black-out drunk. No alcohol in the house, and I don't really do that sort of thing, but yeah... The days just keep coming, relentlessly.
Tórshavn - Čeští fotbaloví reprezentanti v předposledním z osmi utkání kvalifikace mistrovství světa utrpěli na Faerských ostrovech šokující porážku 1:2.
OK #Blind #Linux people, is it really worthwhile to consider dual booting @elementary or at least testing it out in a VM? I’m probably not going to be able to give up windows completely, correct? What can I do natively under Lennox and what can’t I do? How is word processing, spreadsheets, making presentations? How about editing music notation? what works, what doesn’t, and what am I going to be giving up in terms of time and efficiency? Boosts appreciated and input very much welcome. #BlindMasto #BlindMastodon #BlindFedi @mastoblind @blind #OpenSource #ElementaryOS #ScreenReader #Accessibility #A11Y
You have a couple of options that are accessible. #slint linux, #fedora. If you go the Fedora route install 41 then upgrade to 42 after it is installed. Use the #mate version. If you try #slint things should work out of the bo, but it is #slackware based so the package install process will be different than most systems if you need to install something that isn't there yet.
@mastoblind CC @zersiax & @fireborn; hope it's okay to ping. Sorry to bother, but I believe y'all are the resident Blind experts on Linux. Any input from either of you would be greatly appreciated if either of you is willing to give it.
@dhamlinmusic @zersiax @fireborn Used Linux, Fedora, for just about a year. If you're fine with Firefox and Chrome, Chrome being buggy sometimes, and Thunderbird, Pidgin, Audacious, Audacity, Emacs with Emacspeak, VS Code, stuff like that, you're good. Oh and LibreOffice for basic formatting and such. You'll be getting a pretty stable screen reader, with no official addon support. A small community of blind users, but a large community of people who can give you commands to run to get just about anything textual or automation-wise. You can even remap modifier keys on your keyboard. The biggest draw is the command line/Terminal, which works very well with Orca/Speakup. Orca in the GUI terminal emulator, Speakup in the console.
The biggest downside is that not many blind developers develop for Linux, and you may need to use the web version of some stuff like Zoom. Also the only accessible audio editor is Audacity, so no Reaper even if it is available for Linux. It's honestly shaping up to be a great home for anyone that doesn't need blind-specific software or games, and even games are pretty well handled by Audiogame Manager and such. But no Paperback, no Bookworm (blindpandas book reader), no Tweesecake, none of that nice stuff. And no Orca scripts, no built-in OCR or AI, none of that. For OCR, you'll need to track down OCR Desktop.
As far as Elementary, I tried it a year or so ago, didn't like something about it, maybe something to do with Alt-tab, and went back to Fedora because it's much more up-to-date.
A few tips:
* Choose a distro that has up-to-date Orca, ATSPI and such. Don't fight your distro just to have updated AT, unless you know about Backports and other Debian stuff. * Join the Orca mailing list. [1]. The Orca maintainer, and ATSPI maintainer are both there, and listen. For work I needed to navigate by tabs on a page, so the Orca dev made tab groups lists, and tabs list items. * Read Orca's documentation,
[2]For any Linux distro, Desktop Environment, or app maintainers reading this: If you want your distro to be accessible, ethical, for everyone, ETC., don't wait for blind users to come to you, join the Orca mailing list and ask for feedback. You'll get plenty as long as we know our feedback isn't going into a nebulous triaging system never to be noticed by anyone with the power and care to change things.
@mastoblind @zersiax your office productivity stuff will be fine. Anything music related is a non-starter. As for vm or duel boot, I'd recommend the latter. Vmware on Windows hates pipewire.
@fireborn @mastoblind @zersiax Good to know. Thank you very much. What about Braille? I'm very Reliant on the Duxberry Braille Translator. Is there anything that comes even slightly close?
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
@esoteric_programmer Touch typing as in being able to type on a regular physical qwerty keyboard with both full hands without looking at the keys - it's not a skill everyone has - so if you need to learn, the easiest way is generally with a program which goes through asdf then jkl; then g and h, then expanding outwards from there. Re the touch screen keyboard - I think it is accessible, though really even if it is, I wouldn't recommend it generally.
hmm, interesting. I mean, I don't look at the keyboard obviously :p, however I don't use the ways most people would to type, I rely on the positioning of the keys is the best way to describe it, and mostly use like...two or so fingers from each hand. I didn't know that's how it's called though, TIL
@esoteric_programmer That may not have a name :) You can name it! But if it works for you, and you can be pretty quick with it, that's great :) Traditional touch typing is something where you can be fast once you get used to it - but it does take time to learn.
@artin Interesting! I'd never heard the term "Blind Typing" myself - we've all just been happily using our own names for it :) I wonder what others call it?
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.
Martin
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