So I just stumbled on Accessi Frotz by Nathan Tech. An accessible Frotz interpreter that uses Accessible_Output2 to interface with your screen reader. Works great for playing all those old Z Machine text adventures. How did I not know this was a thing?! nathantech.net/products/softwa…
It's kind of absurd, though, that the AccessiFrotz package, at 16 MB compressed or 39 MB uncompressed, is (depending on how you count) almost two orders of magnitude larger than the largest Z-machine game ever released (512 KB). Yes, the requirements of modern applications, including accessibility, have their unavoidable cost, but I think it's possible to do better. I'm not yet ready to take on the project of shipping a smaller accessible Z-machine interpreter UI myself though.
The original Infocom Z-machine interpreters were amazingly compact. The Infocom interpreters for Apple II and MS-DOS were both about 12 KB of machine code. True, the Apple II interpreter didn't work with Textalker, since that interpreter was booted directly without using Apple DOS (the only way to squeeze it onto a 140 KB floppy along with the story). But, if I'm not mistaken, the MS-DOS interpreter did work with DOS screen readers.
But what does compact mean today? You can write a z-machine interpreter in pure JavaScript. It's tiny! But only because you're using the browser for accessibility and the user interface and everything else.
@fastfinge Fair point. The ideal that I aspire to, that I haven't yet been able to meet in any real product I've shipped, is to minimize both code size and dependencies, so the application is small and also doesn't depend on much beyond what's already loaded into RAM on the host platform, so it starts fast.
@matt @fastfinge There are definitely some ridiculous modern software practices that are incredibly wasteful in terms of energy, resource utilisation, state sponsored surveillance, and the like.
then again, constantly maxing out your storage medium and memory capacity isn't a great recipe for innovation either. You said it yourself; they literally had to leave out the assistive technology because it wouldn't fit. A state of affairs that people would quite rightly find astonishing if it happened today (outside of embedded hardware where the resource constraints are serving to make the tech more exclusionary).
@matt There was a way to break out of the Apple interpreter, type in Pr#1 and then route whatever text to your braille printer, and or braille display. Can't remember how I figured that out, but many hours of fun happened after that.
It also means that all supported OpenSSL versions and forks support
TLSv1.3 after this patch.
It reduces `openssl.c` size by more than 10%, or 400 LOC.
Ref: #18822
Closes #18330
Random comment.... I frequently have to access online sites with obsolete protocol support (ie. someone, usually a Big Government Agency, on something ancient and obsolete but absolutely necessary). We'll even end up having to curl stuff and force ignoring of invalid, self-signed, or massively out of date certificates.... Not sure how much impact here it is (obviously, not secure), but we even are putting using FTP (gasp) from some places where there is no other option. Anyway, random comment about deprecating stuff. I know it's a pain to support old stuff, but.... (no use cases for curl I specifically know of right now, since we haven't audited the SSL versions of the data sources we have).
@ai6yr of course it would be cool if we never dropped anything. But OpenSSL v1 gets no more security fixes in the open since a while back, it is insecure for open source to use so we don't want to assist that. And we offer commercial support if someone really needs it.
@galaxis that's part of the reason we do this. They don't step up and pay for this if we keep giving it away for free. One company told me this straight in my face.
Ich war immer darauf bedacht, daß männliche Ego zu schmeicheln. Wenn nötig hab ich mich dafür verstellt, mich naiv gegeben oder unwissend. Das hab ich nicht bewusst gemacht. Es hatte sich einfach als meine Aufgabe angefühlt. Wenn sich ein Mann durch meine Existenz, Witz, Wissen oder Intelligenz in seinem Ego gekränkt sah, dann hatte ich was falsch gemacht. In den letzten Jahren habe ich mit Therapeutinnen und Psychiater daran gearbeitet und konnte dieses Schema in diesem Jahr endlich ablegen 1/3
Sinead O'Connor Live at AB - Ancienne Belgique 30/09/20140:39 Queen of The Denmark5:34 4th And Vine9:53 Take Me to Church13:36 8 Good Reasons17:05 The Wolf i...
Grr! 10 minutes into The Last of Us and I'm already stuck? I get through the gates down the alley. So do the zombies and then I get killed without being able to do anything.
I agree. Just run like hell. Keep in mind though that sprinting in other parts of the game is a very bad idea since the idea in those situations is stealth and things will hear you.
@jfayre Hmm, is there a different noise when sprinting? It sounds exactly the same. Oh and when the game says to press any key, the shoulder buttons aren't recognized as any keys. Which make me thing they may not be working?
If you find you really enjoy this game, I would highly recommend getting one of the new PlayStation controllers. You’ll get a lot more feedback such as haptic cues, etc.
#fediverse question: Has anyone written a Bridge between #lemmy, #piefed, #mbin, #kbin, or other fediverse software and #nntp? I have #usenet access, and would be happy to bridge some of the various blindness groups on Usenet onto the fediverse.
It predates basically every centralized platform you've ever heard of. Forums/message boards, social media... all of it. The only thing it might not actually predate is email. In fact, time was you could get your usenet posts in the same client you got your email.
Oh I once tried Thunderbird and never really liked the UI. When I was reading the Usenet for beginners article on the Usenet Server site, they mentioned something called Newspin, or something like that, need to try that.
OK so to get on to eternal-september.org its giving me the following after entering my name, email and the user ID thing: graphic CAPTCHA Please enter the string that is displayed in the picture above ( Letters are all uppercase, the number Zero is not used).
November 16 will be the 85th anniversary of the National Federation of the Blind. To spark thoughtful conversation about the future, we are releasing the book Walking Alone and Marching Together in podcast form. This book provides insights into the organized blind movement during its first 50 years. Check out the podcast starting on November 16 coming to you every week! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/…
History Podcast · Updated Weekly · A history podcast of the National Federation of the Blind
Explore the victories, setbacks, and defining moments of the National Federation of the Blind. Through these episodes, we hope to not only sh…
After Debian archive was updated to 13.2 (yes, it's the second point release already!), the Debian CD team did the hard work of preparing and testing our installation medias to make sure everything is working correctly. Their work is now complete and the images are available at debian.org/distrib/ #debian #trixie #11
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The WD Black SN850X continues to stand out thanks to its strong sustained performance, improved efficiency, and full PS5 support. #hardware tomshardware.com/pc-components…
This sounds like plugging a service to an LLM is a way of doing away with UX people. Just hope that the word salad will somehow match what the service's (invariably badly written) human-readable descriptions of its API, because if you don't have to pay an UX and front-end team to ADD A BUTTON TO TURN THE LIGHTS OFF then it must be a win.
(I am not criticizing this person's experiments, which are fine, but the larger scheme of things.)
my husband made it so the home assistant voice assistant can use full-on ollama to interpret instructions. then he told it to turn the lights on. it's been explaining its thought process for over five minutes now and the lights are still off.
My friend @TheQuinbox has been working on an ebook reader for blind people called Paperback (github.com/trypsynth/paperback). So far it's all written in C++, using wxWidgets as the GUI toolkit. Now Quin is working on making it a Rust/C++ hybrid, with the UI still in C++ using wx. As far as we know, the Rust GUI ecosystem isn't nearly ready to support a desktop app like this, with perfect screen reader accessibility and native-feeling keyboard behavior.
Quin says Paperback uses the following widget types: "a menu bar, a tab control/notebook, rich edit, a tree view, both single and multi-column listviews, checkboxes, spinners, combo boxes, and a few others".
So, Rust GUI toolkit developers, we have a lot of work to do. I can implement the necessary things in AccessKit, and contribute to one toolkit, but I can't fill this gap alone.
Just noticed Dioxus 0.7 is out. Their Blitz native renderer is mentioned in the release notes as a WebView alternative, and specifically calls out accessibility support. They also publish a bunch of unstyled widgets that seem to be at least partially accessible.
I haven't investigated either of these, other than poking at their widget samples and noting at least some ARIA support, but plan to soon. My current Dioxus projects are all web-based, but Blitz is definitely on my radar now for native.
That said, I don't know whether Paperback's widget subset is supported, but my hope with something like Blitz is that we could get a web-like experience without some of WebView's papercuts (E.g. no saving/restoring of cursor position) and that implementing new widgets is easier in something like RSX.
Good luck! The sooner it becomes pure rust, the sooner Rust has to push an accessible GUI package to Cargo. :D Seriously though, best of luck. I've enjoid using Paperback, and it's been able to replace my old commercial ebook reader (you probably know the one) completely.
Gmail has been my main email since like 2008. Clearly it’s time for that to change. Anyone have any email recommendations for this next life stage of the internet, something not poisoned by fascism, data theft, and AI? 🧐
Nic netrvá věčně. Zrovna se táta hádá se hřbitovní správou. V nájemní smlouvě je, že se rodinná hrobka pronajímá "na věky věků" a už ji takto rodina drží několik generací. Hřbitovní správa se to pokouší vykládat jako "na 100 let", nebo "po 4 generace". Tak jsem zvědavej.
Auf LinkedIn verteilt ein Sehender ein KI-Tool, mit dem man Braille-Schilder für den 3D-Drucker generieren kann.
Dazu hab ich eine Frage: Wie?
Kein LLM dieser Welt kann auch nur einfachste Dinge fehlerfrei in Braille-Basisschrift übersetzen.
Sehr wohl aber kann man Schriftpunktmuster einfach mappen. Wofür muss so Scheiß dann also aus einer KI rauspurzeln, wo niemand der das anwendet auch nur die Chance hat, das zu prüfen?
Ich dachte ja eigentlich, der ki-kompass-inklusiv.de sei trotz des Involements der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Werkstätten für behinderte Menschen ein ganz akzeptables wichtiges gutes Projekt, aber die machen immer mehr Käse und erzählen mittlerweile genau denselben Quatsch wie die großen LLM-Labore.
Ich dachte aus irgendeinem Grund bis gerade eben auch, dass da Menschen mit Behinderung beteiligt sind, aber auf dem Teamfoto auf deren Website ist keine einzige Person mit sichtbarer Behinderung drauf.
Natürlich. Weil es quasi unmöglich ist, dass Behinderte da mitmachen. /s
Hier, KC Test Ventures hat mal wieder gevibecoded und aus exakt diesem Tool eine Website gebastelt, die viel weniger Ressourcen verbraucht aber genau dasselbe tut. Offensichtlich ist Bedarf da, also let's go und generiert euch lustige 3D-Drucker-Braille-Schilder: case.wf/braille-schilder/
After all that I hope big companies will understand and will not start to cry and ask from the governments mandatory laws so people have! To use their technology products because they loosing money and power because many people will stop or don't want to use them any more...
Why do I get the feeling that lately, in so many countries, new regulations are popping up with only one purpose - to erode privacy 🔓? It feels like a bad joke. I can't keep up anymore.
I wish I could fight them all at once, put pressure everywhere 🌍, no matter where I live. But I don't have the time. I'm already drowning in an endless to-do list.
Why couldn't the government set a different deadline? Why are they so determined to push this through? My mind can't wrap around it I just hope they come to their senses and never implement it 🙏
Oh fuck! What does this mean for all the Swiss-based privacy and security platforms, like Proton?
I mean, Proton's CEO Andy Yen already showed his true colors by advocating for Trump's support of little guy "tech startups" (read: Sillycon Valley broligarchs), so I'm already transitioning out of Proton's ecosystem.
Update: See thread below. I'm incorrect with the above statement regarding Proton's CEO.
Kese hai sab main aap sab ki liye ek reall platform leki aai hu asal me ye ek nft selling platform hai or as per ek or bohad hai Acha earning karni ka option hai apko reffer karni per apko earning deta hai 1 reffer $1 dollar ye option bohad hai Acha ha as me ap jaldi join kare or earning karna shuro kare bekar me apna time barbad mat karey please apni time ki qadar kare join👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇 preview--clonex-nfts.lovable.a…
Just out of curiosity, if you use your own email client and send GPG/PGP encrypted email, how does an email provider decrypt it?
Sometimes encryption is a necessity even if privacy isn't an issue. Example: I've used encryption to send a JAR file to a friend for testing: he had a gmail account and Google doesn't allow JAR files as email attachments to "protect the user". This hid it from Google's software. It wasn't really secret - the password was in the email's text.
Remember the Fichenpolizei from back in the 1990s in Switzerland? It was a personal data collection scandal at the time I was based there for a brief time.
So US no way, Switzerland neither and EU? Not anymore they are also building mass surveillance laws. This trend is worrying. I already have my emails in Norway, my docs and pictures are in Swtzerland in Infomaniak, I will now start to look for alternative.
Matt Campbell
in reply to Al Puzzuoli • • •Al Puzzuoli
in reply to Matt Campbell • • •Matt Campbell
in reply to Al Puzzuoli • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Matt Campbell • • •Matt Campbell
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 • • •🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Matt Campbell • • •James Scholes
in reply to Matt Campbell • • •@matt @fastfinge There are definitely some ridiculous modern software practices that are incredibly wasteful in terms of energy, resource utilisation, state sponsored surveillance, and the like.
then again, constantly maxing out your storage medium and memory capacity isn't a great recipe for innovation either. You said it yourself; they literally had to leave out the assistive technology because it wouldn't fit. A state of affairs that people would quite rightly find astonishing if it happened today (outside of embedded hardware where the resource constraints are serving to make the tech more exclusionary).
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 likes this.
Martin
in reply to Matt Campbell • • •