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I am passing along the following two quoted post from Chris Hofstader’s Facebook page. He is the former Vice President/Software Engineering at Henter Joyce/Freedom Scientific.
“I have been intentionally trying to avoid writing about blindness issues as I feel that Jesse, Connor, Sarah, Alison, Chancy and some others do a much better job these days as they are all very much in real situations and I'm a lonely eccentric old man who has fallen out of touch with most things related to blindness technology other than those I use personally. Also, as I've been quite public with, I am dealing with a major obsessive anxiety disorder and writing anything about blindness or the blindness biz is a trigger for my anxiety. But, in light of the events at the company formerly known as Freedom Scientific last week, I felt I needed to discuss some of them as I've the insider perspective on this one that my big five listed above cannot possibly know.
The most newsworthy of these events was that Glen Gordon was asked to resign and, in his public post published on LinkedIn, Glen wrote that he had expected to be working on JAWS for years to come and said so in his address at the NFB convention this past July but, in this statement, he said he had chosen to resign because the company no longer represented his values. I spoke to Glen last Thursday for the first time in abut fifteen years, it was a pleasant conversation about a nasty subject (refer to my post that morning).
I first met Glen 27 years ago and for six years, we were an incredible team leading JAWS, PAC Mate and the other FS software products. After we shipped the PAC Mate with a Braille line in December 2003, my mental health started to go south in a real hurry, it was my Marathon event, I made the delivery but dropped dead (mentally) at the end. I did some pretty good things in that final year but my brain was so broken, I was of no value to anyone so they chucked me out. Here, I will, for the first time state publicly that the sighted hardware VP we fired for incompetence got a $300,000 severance bonus and I, the VP of Software Engineering - the source of 100% of our profits, was instead threatened with lawsuits nine separate times by them, a costly venture and got a $0 severance package. This is when I started being a public critic in the blindness space and started warning the public about the risks we were taking by permitting a group of sighted investors to have control of the most important program in the blindness world. But, the work Glen and I did between 1999 and 2004 had turned JAWS into a monopoly with a marketshare greater than 80% and most blind people in workplaces worldwide used JAWS so, in a sense, we were addicted to a drug sold to us by people who had profits and not our best interests in the forefront.
Losing Glen from JAWS would be akin to the Rolling Stones firing Mick, they fired Keith when they fired me. We would not have JAWS For Windows had it not been for Glen. While he and I would bicker some times over software engineering processes (something I am very formal about), after working with him for about six months, I realized I had met what was possibly the greatest Windows hacker alive, blind or sighted. We ensured we came closest to the specifications on any request for proposal from a government agency, corporation, university or whatever was asking for a site license. Window-Eyes, our closest competitor, didn't even try. We hit 100% of the RFP for Social Security Agency (SSA) and the game was over. Why Window-Eyes even submitted when they only hit 35% of the RFP made us scratch our heads, "Are they even trying?" The answer was "no" Doug Giofray is a sighted guy who didn't feel the urgency Glen and I did so didn't really compete.
Glen has been slowly losing his leadership role at FS. They changed his title from Chief Technical Officer to something called "software fellow" or whatever that means. That I knew more about their financials than he did shows that he has been "corner officed" for some time and had little influence on the direction of the company. He was the last person near the top of the company for whom I have any respect and now he's gone.
There were other long time employees who were also chucked out last week. As I predicted in the spring, they are seeing a massive revenue hit and it's now quite obvious that they are going to try to jack up the prices, lose anyone who actually gives a poop about the technology and squeeze as many dollars as they can - this is the standard model for private equity investors when things go bad, you can find zounds of companies that have fallen this way. (1/2)
As I've been saying since it became a credible screen reader that we should donate to and support NVDA, it's the screen reader everyone in the community can influence and it's the screen reader owned by the entire blind community worldwide. NVDA is in more languages than is JAWS and if we can raise about $2 million per year for it, we can help them hire really amazing blind hackers making six figure salaries in industry today. If we do not accept ownership of NVDA, we are putting our futures in the hands of vulture capitalists and last week, they started picking the last of the meat off of the bone.
It's actually worse for our low vision friends. There is no NVDA for them, it's pretty much ZoomText or nothing for professionals. There are roughly 6X as many low vision people as there are blinks and they are essentially trapped into buying ZoomText price hikes and all. Why is there no magnification package out there in the free software world? Because a magnification project is a profoundly more difficult problem than is a screen reader. A screen reader just needs to talk and push dots onto a display; magnification and other low vision features need to deal with a lot of sometimes contradictory needs for different visual acuities. I tried to make the FS MAGic product as good or better than ZoomText and a ton of money, high priced contractors and all of that jazz couldn't do it. Ben Weiss made the best one ever and nobody has challenged it since.
So, the blind people can go to NVDA but the low vision people are forced to continue to support FS and that's a bad thing.
So, send a pissed off note to Rhonda, the new CEO of the company formerly known as Freedom Scientific, donate whou would have spent on JAWS to NVAccess and let's have the revolution we could have had 15 years ago and have spent a lot less money than we did on JAWS. Cut out the sighted middle man and go direct to blind run projects. It's proven that we cannot trust the sighted owned businesses anymore” FaceBook Link Post Source: facebook.com/100000176300195/p… (2/2)
I have been intentionally trying to avoid writing about blindness issues as I feel that Jesse, Connor, Sarah, Alison, Chancy and some others do a much better job these days as they are all very much...
Businesses lose nearly £446 million every BFCM weekend because of inaccessible websites. Learn how accessibility boosts conversions, loyalty, and sales, and how to prepare for the biggest shopping weekend of the year.
@VE3RWJ Well, it's not a talking clock in the actual useful time telling sense. But there were talking clocks before that. Panasonic made one using disks and optics in 1971, for example, but it wasn't too reliable.
You know, the combination of the post text, the media description itself, and what the sound actually is makes an awful lot of sense in the current political climate somehow.
FYI On November 19, 2025 a test of the National Public Alerting System (NPAS) will be sent out in all provinces and territories over wireless networks, TV, and radio.
Canadians will receive a test message from their provincial or territorial government. A test schedule can be found on the Alert Ready website. #alertready #NPAS #cdnpoli #polcan #ocanada
My therapist told me I need a hobby, but I don't think they give those out to 40 year olds anymore. How does one find a hobby? Do people just wake up one morning and say "I'm going to put on a pair of roller skates and see what happens!" and claim that as their hobby if they survive?
It appears that the Dell Latitude E7240 I use as a bed-side don't care too much laptop is blue screening a bunch. Maybe it's time to buy another $50 special on Ebay to replace it, or replace the dead storage in this far too large HP laptop I have sitting in a corner with better specs.
You probably know this, but there are cheap mini PCs that outperform those Dells now. I have one by my bed that was around $140. It's nothing impressive, but it works and runs Windows 11.
So we have 2 adult kids plus one girlfriend plus one dog moving back in with us in THESE CHALLENGING TIMES and we are purging our basement of about 30 years of stuff. One thing I find the most challenging, as the keeper and archivist of all digital memories (a role I did not ask for) is how to deal with so many old computers and disks and cds and dvd-rs and some outdated tech that are loaded with stuff. I can’t just delete shit or throw it out, it’s basically my 3 kids entire childhoods.
Like old Zip disks. What the fuck do I do with these? Still have the old G3 tower but it doesn’t boot up. I have a vague memory of you dealing with this kinda stuff, @jessamyn ?
What do I do with these old floppy games? And original HyperCard software with box and manuals!People will pick up anything i curb in this neighborhood so I know someone will grab it, but I feel like someone might collect this stuff? ***UPDATE: Claimed!***
For our friends in the #USA from the #FCC: On November 20, 2025, the FCC at its Open Meeting will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) which would seek comment on terminating the mandatory status of TTY-based relay service for state-based Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS) programs; facilitate the transition of analog TRS users to Internet-based forms of TRS; propose and seek comment on recognizing IP Speech-To-Speech Relay Service as a compensable form of TRS; explore certifying a national analog relay provider; and seek comment on streamlining TRS provider certification and data collection processes, updating or eliminating obsolete rules, and closing an outdated docket.
The November 2025 Open Meeting is scheduled for 10:30am ET on Thursday, November 20, 2025, and will be held in the Commission Meeting Room, 45 L Street N.E., Washington, D.C. 20554. The FCC meeting is also streamed at www.fcc.gov/live. Open captioning and sign language interpreting will be provided for this meeting. Other reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities are available upon request. E-mail your request to fcc504@fcc.gov or call (202) 418-0530.
For general questions about TRS, visit www.fcc.gov/trs. For specific questions about this draft item, please contact Joshua Mendelsohn, Disability Rights Office, Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, at (202) 559-7304 (voice and videophone) or Joshua.Mendelsohn@fcc.gov.
Re: last noc.social/@todayilearned/1155…) about Mozart's song "Lick me in the arse", I partially read the Wikipedia article, and I have to say, singing a six-voice canon (round) at a party sounds like fun.
Random thought that just popped into my head. In 1966 the Beatles released a song called Paperback Writer. So we have a theme tune for @TheQuinbox now.
After a few intense days with GPT Codex, it’s finally time to officially introduce Sara. #SARA or Simple Accessible Radio Automation, is a program primarily designed for radio presenters who host live shows.
Some notable features that are currently missing from other broadcast solutions accessible to blind users include:
a loop function – especially useful for intros, a flexible number of playlists and players, and a news editor module with the ability to embed audio clips that can be played while reading the news.
The application is 100% vibe-coded, and it’s definitely not recommended to test it during a live broadcast. It requires several sound cards to operate, and for now, I’m not planning to add any virtual audio routing like the one found in Radioboss or SPL. The program is and will remain open source, and perhaps someone interested in contributing will join the project.
In terms of screen reader compatibility, the main focus is on NVDA.
Attached: 3 images
"Gleichberechtigt ins Fahrradland - Warum die Mobilitätswende eine Geschlechterfrage ist." Boris von Heesen eröffnet die #adfcBHV2025 in #Berlin.
Paperback 0.6.1 is out, bringing with it lots of bugfixes and a few new features! Changelog: • Added password-protected PDF support! • Added a very basic go to previous/next position feature. If you press enter on an internal link and it moves your cursor, that position will now be remembered, and can be navigated to with alt+left/right arrows. • Added an elements list! Currently it only shows a tree of all the headings in your document or a list of links, but there are plans to expand it in the future. • Added an option to start Paperback in maximized mode by default. • Fixed links in some Epub documents not working properly. • Fixed parsing Epub TOCs containing relative paths. • Fixed some epub documents not showing a title or author. • Fixed the titles of some epub chapters not showing up properly in the TOC dialog. • Fixed you not being able to use the space bar to activate the OK/cancel buttons in the TOC dialog. • Improved the handling of headings in Word documents. • You will now get spoken feedback if the recent documents list is empty when you try to bring up the dialog. Download: paperback.dev/downloads/ Enjoy!
Sorry for an early morning whinge, hope it doesn't come across as such. Would it be possible to add an option in prefs to make escape minimize to tray? I find I don't like the actual option to do that, because even Windows D sends it away, but with notepad 2 for example, it only does it if I purposefully do Alt space N, or esc. Sometimes I do that to go answer the doorbell or the phone or switch to a browser, but want to alt-tab back only 15 seconds later. Would that be possible? Thanks for this fantastic thing.
@FreakyFwoof Can you please expand on what you mean by windows+d sends it away? Windows+d certainly should not minimize it to the system tray, the only thing that should do that is the minimize option from the system menu, assuming I didn't break it.
OK I just enabled it and yes, Win+D sends it to tray when enabled, which is why I turned it off despite finding it useful. Windows B doesn't, but that never sends anything to tray, which is a good way to get around the stupid WhatsApp no background audio trick.
@FreakyFwoof Okay, that's definitely not supposed to happen. Sorry, I don't use that feature myself so I guess I never noticed it was broken. Win+d should not send it to the tray, I'll investigate :) thanks for the report!
@FreakyFwoof The only reason I don't want to add escape is I feel like it's slightly too easy to hit and confuse the user. Maybe shift+escape if you want a keyboard shortcut?
@FreakyFwoof Yeah, alt+tabbing hard enough with enough windows can do it too. I assume that Windows itself sends some kind of 'get out of the way' event to the window which WX picks up and responds to as a minimize event, which is maybe the same thrown by the menu? I've seen apps get it right to only respond to the menu, foobar2000 for example, but am not sure how they do it.
I'm gonna be honest here: banning VPNs is not the solution. People who want to find content like porn will get it one way or another. It is going to harm legitimate users who use VPNs for security reasons, like on public WiFi or for getting inside a corporate network. I can't log into any of our servers/cloud w/o a VPN. All remote employees use a VPN. We replicate data between 2 data centers using a VPN
It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and…
Following the announcement of the inauguration of 14 new stations on the new Deux-Montagnes branch of the Montreal light-rail line (Réseau express métropolitain - REM), REM employees staged a small protest on Saturday against their working conditions…
Seeing the amazing compactness of the original Infocom Z-machine interpreters puts the wastefulness of modern software in stark perspective. Both the Apple II and MS-DOS Infocom interpreters were about 12 KB of machine code (for the 6502 and 8086 respectively). True, the Apple II interpreter wasn't accessible with Textalker, since it was self-booting (the only way to squeeze it onto a 140 KB floppy alongside the game itself). I'm guessing the MS-DOS interpreter was accessible though.
And of course, the games themselves were also quite compact. Most of the Infocom classics were 128 KB maximum. The two most literarily ambitious games, _A Mind Forever Voyaging_ and _Trinity_, were 256 KB. I'm not sure about the later Z-machine 5 and 6 releases. The later community-developed Z-machine version 8 maxed out at 512 KB.
Also, the Z-Machine literally only had 64 KB of mutable RAM. Even in Z8 games which can be up to 512 KB, only 64 KB of that memory can be written to at runtime. It is very impressive how much functionality could be achieved with such limitations; the Z Machine even had a compressed character encoding to save space, which I think shows the extreme level of optimization that was necessary.
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.
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