Freydis Cook stood at the gates of the Wyrmhaven Deep Elite Magic Academy - a magical school run by goblins, for goblins. However, it was the only magic academy in the area, so her father had paid - or bribed - to have her attend school.

She was confronted by several goblin girls, led by one with long parallel curls in bright green. The goblin sniffed. "Smell that, girls? That's the smell of a human. Humans are outsiders here!"

Freydis said, "I take it you're the villainess?"

#microficiton

Since 2007, I've had some prepaid phone numbers on a VoIP provider called Vitelity Communications, which became Voyant, which became Intelliquent, but which still calls itself Vitelity sometimes.

Anyway, I've got two numbers parked there that haven't been used for years. There are cheaper places to park phone numbers, but I just haven't been bothered to go through the port process.

This morning, I got an email that my balance for one of the two accounts was low, so I went to drop another $15 on it, which, given my lack of usage these days, generally pays for about 9 months of service.

Something broke (it was me, I broke), and I ended up paying $15 four times.

So, uh... guess I'm good until 2029 or so, unless I actually use these phone numbers, given that it is a pay-per-minute type service.

If I do want to port these phone numbers to another service, such as voip.ms, that's kind of annoying, because I'll have to burn my Vitelity credit first.

"the conference will now begin"

*️⃣ Asterisk sound 'confbridge-conf-begin.wav'
📦 From package 'asterisk-core-sounds'
🇦🇺 Spoken in Australian English

Big corp™ terminates account of user for no (valid) reason, and their frontline block any escalation.

Pundit for said company reports it, without comment.

If that was about Europe trying to enforce regulation the pundit would be all "blah blah europe, blah blah, bad, we are American, fuck you". But here, for egregious bullshit, ZILCH.

I guess he still wants to be on their good list.

That's the definition of a chill.

"if this greeting should be played indefinately"

*️⃣ Asterisk sound 'if-grtg-played-indefinately.wav'
📦 From package 'asterisk-extra-sounds'
🇬🇧 Spoken in British English

About fucking time.

“Judge orders White House to use American Sign Language interpreters at briefings”
npr.org/2025/11/05/nx-s1-55991…

Sadly, does not include VP briefings. White House is supposed to update court on progress by end of week. Curious how it will jerk court around.

#accessibility #ASL

"...to mute, or unmute yourself. When you are muted you can not send audio to other participants. However you will still hear audio from other unmuted participants."

*️⃣ Asterisk sound 'confbridge-mute-extended.wav'
📦 From package 'asterisk-core-sounds'
🇦🇺 Spoken in Australian English

Hey, I've been under distress lately due to personal circumstances that are outside my control. I can't find a permanent job that allows me to function, I'm not eligible for government benefits, my grant proposals got rejected, paid internships are quite difficult to find. Essentially, I have no stable monthly income that allows me to sustain myself.

Nowadays, I work mostly on accessibility throughout GNOME as a volunteer, improving the experience of people with disabilities. I helped make the majority of GNOME Calendar accessible with a keyboard and screen reader — still an ongoing effort with !564 and !598 —which is an effort no company ever contributed financially. These merge requests take thousands (literally) of hours to research, develop, and test, which would have been enough to sustain myself for a couple of years if I had been working under a salary.

I would really appreciate any kinds of donations, especially ones that happen periodically to bump my monthly income.

These donations will allow me to sustain myself while allowing me to continue working on accessibility throughout GNOME, potentially even 'crowdfunding' development without doing it on the behalf of the Foundation.

I accept donations through the following platforms:

- “TheEvilSkeleton” on Liberapay: liberapay.com/TheEvilSkeleton/… (free and open-source platform)
- “TheEvilSkeleton” on Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/theevilskeleton
- “TheEvilSkeleton” on GitHub Sponsors: github.com/sponsors/TheEvilSke…

Boosts welcome and appreciated.

#Accessibility #a11y #GNOME #GNOMECalendar #MutualAidRequest #MutualAid

GNOME Calendar: A New Era of Accessibility Achieved in 90 Days

There is no calendaring app that I love more than GNOME Calendar. The design is slick, it works extremely well, it is touchpad friendly, and best of all, the community around it is just full of wonderful developers, designers, and contributors worth …

^{TheEvilSkeleton}

Challenge: improve the speed of the #curl dotdot URL normalizer function. (without doing ridiculous things)

github.com/curl/curl/blob/28d2…

curl/lib/urlapi.c at 28d27570fa021011b8679344d090772fea49d0d1 · curl/curl

A command line tool and library for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP...

^GitHub

“20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple | hey.paris”

hey.paris/posts/appleid/

Yeah. Time to review how you use Apple, Google, and Microsoft cloud services.

20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple

Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and…

^{Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison (hey.paris)}

posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely?

hey.paris/posts/appleid/

20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple

Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and…

^{Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison (hey.paris)}

And finally done with the alt-texts for my trip to Japan. In total we are talking about 597 images, only a very small number of which received empty alt texts (because they showed largely the same thing as the previous one from a slightly different angle).

I don’t claim that they are perfect, but they are there! If you don’t like one, send me a better one.

I’m not yet done with the site, I still want to add more regular text, and more notably some videos, but this is a huge step in any case…

I’m proud of it, but my takeaway here really is that it is simply not practical to do like this for a personal site: I easily spent 20 times as much time on getting alt-texts than I spent on selecting the images and if anything that is a very low estimate. It simply doesn’t scale for posting a large number of vacation pictures, with this selection being very much a selection, we have many more images, not all of them good or even that dissimilar from what is there now, but still…

I was originally planning to also put pictures from my previous trip up, but the way this went I don’t think I’ll do that, at least not with fully manually generated alt texts.

I see a lot of complaints about AI-generated alt-texts, but I’m honestly not sure that they are worse than much of what I came up in this case, especially once I do a second path on them to fix any mistakes, in the same way in which I use DeepL for translations: It’s not that they are fully reliable, but they are good enough, that I can focus on the few issues they have and don’t have to do all the tedium that translating everything manually brings with it. And in a lot of cases DeepL does a better job than I would have done: My English is pretty good, but I am not a native speaker, and sometimes that’s noticeable in that my vocabulary is not as comprehensive as it is in German. Maybe the same approach would be fine for #accessibility? I’d be interested in opinions and proposals.

And I am familiar with all the benefits of alt-texts, but since that page is first and foremost a image-site, where not being able to see them will really remove most of the reasons to use it, it also does make me wonder how many people will actually benefit from it, compared to the effort I put in…

"to use the default attendant, just press pound"

*️⃣ Asterisk sound 'to-use-def-attendant.wav'
📦 From package 'asterisk-extra-sounds'
🇬🇧 Spoken in British English

I normally use my computer with a regular qwerty keyboard. But since it's a seven-inch Toughpad, I wanted to try it with my Orbit Writer, due to the size. I bought it to use with my iPhone, which it does very well (better than with Android,). I read the manual and even saved the HID keyboard commands so that I could refer to them quickly. But I don't understand a few things.

1. It is missing the Windows key. Due to this, I can't get to the start menu as I usually do. I also can't get to the desktop in the regular way.
2. I created a desktop shortcut which I put on the start menu, but I can't type ctrl+escape at the same time, so that method of getting to the start menu is also blocked, meaning that I still can't get to the desktop.
3. I can't type NVDA+F11 or F12 for the system tray or the time and date, respectively. I was able to create new commands for both under Input Gestures. But I also tried NVDA+1 for key identification, with both caps lock and insert, and that didn't work either. Fortunately, I was able to create another gesture to get into the NVDA menu.
4. On a qwerty keyboard, I can type alt+f4 to switch between windows. If I hold the alt key, I can also continue pressing f4 to switch between more than two windows. But with the Orbit Writer, while the command works, it seems to only work for two windows i.e. I can't hold alt and continue pressing f4.

Am I missing something here or is this a half-implemented system? How can they say it works with Windows when basic commands can't even be performed? If there are ways around these problems, please let me know.

#accessibility #blind #braille #NVDA #OrbitWriter #technology #Windows