📣 Do-It-Blind (DIB) online Besprechung am Montag, 13. Oktober, um 19:00 Uhr. Du bist eingeladen! bbb.metalab.at/rooms/joh-szv-o… Wöchentlich am Montag besprechen wir neue Formen der digitalen und inklusiven Zusammenarbeit. Mach mit! 🛠️ #make #blind #inklusion
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Just tried adding a friend on #XMPP. Turned out, my desktop client of choice (Psi) was too old to support OMEMO, which is apparently the cool new way to do encrypted chats. Had to open Converse.js in the browser while I moved shop to Psi Plus, and got an earful about it. Half the morning went up in smoke.
Because people have better things to do than worry about that crap. Look what I went through. I was using XMPP more than two decades ago, when it was called Jabber as God intended. Do you want to attract new people, or should we let the protocol die of old age with us graybeards?
If you're curious, here are 158 of Joshua's reported issues on #curl to give you an idea what we talk about.
We have manually gone trough them all and dismissed or addressed them. None of them has been deemed a security problem. Not all the PRs for the valid problems have been merged yet.
Nevíte-li, se kterým záznamem z #JOSCZ25 začít, tak bych vypíchl:
- Walking desk Leoš Přikryl - Event Sourcing akademicky Marian Schubert, první praktické poznakty @milanlempera - Pohled na vlastní zdraví Cipov Peter - Shadery @tomucha (jsem rád, že jsem mu mohl dělat předskokana, přitom jsme se fakt nedomlouvali 😉) - Přibližné výpočty @ivoshm - Jízda na spotřebu Jan Vondrouš
NVDA keyboard help vs JAWS keyboard help. When keyboard help is on in JAWS and I press media keys like Mute, VolumeUp and VolumeDown on the keyboard, JAWS announces the key names and functions but strangely performs the associated functions as well. So I may mute my machine with JAWS even in Keyboard help mode. NVDA also announces the key names and functions in Keyboard help mode, but doesn't perform those actions. I like NVDA's approach as it helps novices confidently master the media keys without worrying about accidentally muting the entire audio or altering the volume. @NVAccess
JAWS binds lots of things to scripts by default. This is why cursor keys don't work in games, I think. So it's quite possible that keyboard help doesn't actually trap native keys, just stops those already scripted from doing their thing. I don't have a working JAWS to test the hypothesis.
@cachondo The JAWS issue with games is because of the JAWS keyhook, which intercepts literally every key pressed. NVDA somehow does this...smarter? I don't know how that works but I do know that's why JAWS lags in some games.
Attention: Prudence Screen Reader, along with one of the most accessible radio apps, VRadio, are currently unavailable on the Google Play Store. We'll keep you updated once they're back.
Nvidia’s Shocking Cutoff: GTX 1060 and Windows 10 Support Ends Soon!
The Beginning of the End for Beloved Graphics Cards and a Trusted OS In a move that signals the closing chapter for an entire era of gaming hardware and software, Nvidia has announced a critical update for Windows 10 users and owners of its GTX 10 and 900 series graphics cards. While there's a short-term reprieve, the long-term future looks uncertain for gamers who haven’t upgraded their GPU or OS.
Love it! Just describe blurry or out of focus images, we'll be great friends! :D Oh and maybe, just maybe, describe everything in a lot of detail only using text. AI can be useful, also if you can recognise text pretty please. I just realised those are small things that probably won't require 100 servers to run on, maybe correct if I'm wrong. :) :) 💙💙
ЕЕЕЕЕЕ, недей така го пускай по надолнището, дай малко нагоре, че да има повече време за клипчета. Да, преди в ютуб имаше време според събовете, сега не знам как е с всичките им глупости. То и да не монетизираш клипове, пак пуска реклами, абе тъпотия. Но пък е готино да подкрепиш някой, все едно му даваш лайк и вече си фен. :) ;) Also, if you make that 59 I'll poke you, with a white cane, it hurts. :P
Intelligence truly is a weird thing, especially when it's super concentrated. I consider myself to be an at least fairly decent C++ and Rust programmer at this point, and I know many other programming languages as well to varying degrees. And yet, I struggle to spell words that many would consider basic in English, the one and only language I natively speak and grew up speaking. I do blame part of this on learning contracted Braille so young, as one example I didn't know how to spell "necessary" until I was like 13, but I also wonder how much of it is because I don't speak any other languages, and the part of my brain that I should be using for spelling English words is being used to remember all the syntax rules of C++ templates.
Ironically enough, spelling in your second language is often less of a problem because you're exposed to it through your native language's tts, which helps you remember spelling better.
This is common for other languages' blind speakers as well. Same is true for me in Brazilian Portuguese, my language. Actually, orthography should be completely phonetic: one letter for one sound.
Respectfully, I disagree that it has anything to do with either intelligence or the brain, it's just a question of priorities. Spelling was a priority for people between, say, 1600 and 1990 because to spell well was to appear educated. Before 1600, people didn't need to spell in accordance with any specific rules. After 1990, people didn't need to know those rules because the computer would do it for them. It's just the end of a relatively short period in the history of the English language when spelling was a proxy for education. There are other proxies for education at the moment, spelling just isn't one of them, I'm trying to think of anything, other than a pen/pencil, which doesn't allow checking. Once the people who were educated before 1990 or so are no longer here, nobody will care about spelling. Even now, a badly spelled text is an example of carelessness, it means nothing about how well a person is educated or how knowledgeable he may be except if you want to argue that more educated people are more careful, I suppose, which you can, but which I don't think is obviously true.
Boosting because this page says the first cURL release was on December 17, 1996 curl.se/docs/history.html
Almost four years (1996-12-17 to 2000-10-13) before a CVE was reported is really high code quality to me. Congrats to everyone involved that resulted in that high code quality.
Yes, I know that it might also partially be due to an initially small user base. But to me cURL is working in a "messy/sloppy" domain, especially in those days. So I'm celebrating good code quality.
We have very loud flushometer type toilets in this house, which I can no longer hear without amplification, apparently. New discoveries are fun. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case last week.
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.
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.
Mike Gifford, CPWA
in reply to Miranda Gray • • •