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today I've heard for the first time about the #RigelA open-source screen reader project for #Windows written in #RustLang. Unfortunately only Readme has an English version, all other documents and code comments are in chinese, but the project seems very promising. Use Google Translate or another translator if you, like me, don't speak Chinese. https://gitcode.net/mzdk100/rigela

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in reply to André Polykanine

Bwuh? Wow, someone actually started doing the thing I tabled for doing after I retire! :D
in reply to Bri😻

@Bri A person I trust tried it and said it's extremely fast. I cannot assess how far is it, probably at its start more or less, but first, it's open-source, second, it's written in Rust (so compiled), and third, it's something new finally.
in reply to André Polykanine

I successfully built it, and it runs and is pretty fast, but none of it is currently in english.
in reply to Bri😻

@Bri I guess you need to switch the language somehow. There is a barbarian method for that: take all the locale Yamls and remove the zh-cn part. Or at least the GUI one. That's what I'm going to do.
in reply to Bri😻

@Bri BTW, for me it said buffer stack overrun, probably due to key conflict with NumPad Insert in JAWS and in RigelA.
in reply to André Polykanine

Oh, yeah I did see that, but only after I restarted NVDA to see what the UI elements were.
in reply to Bri😻

@Bri Go to %userprofile%\.rigelA, there is a config.toml file, and there you can change lang=zh to en. Didn't get where it's changed in the code yet, sorry.
in reply to André Polykanine

Surprisingly, it can already read things in Chromium browsers. Although when I exited, it made Chrome and Slack crash dead. @Bri
in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes Yeah, I have no idea what I did, but now, somehow, the tab key, yes, the Tab! Key, launches instances of the program. WTF.
in reply to Bri😻

@Bri @jscholes Same here, I also don't know WTF, but folks, it's really exceptionally fast! I've never seen such a performance in ages!
in reply to André Polykanine

@jscholes great, but it's just as good as fuckware if it's binding itself to tab, what the serious fuck
in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes oh I've tried exiting many different, clean and dirty, ways. It's hacked into Windows itself somehow and bound a shortcut to the tab key, somewhere, fuck knows where.
in reply to Bri😻

@Bri Right, but I'm pressing Tab and it isn't doing that, so I'm wondering if it is still running in the background on your machine somehow. I ran it from the terminal, and then pressed Ctrl+C when I was done. @menelion
in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes OK. Solved it. I think that's quite enough excitement for one day.
in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes I told it to create a desktop shortcut. When you do that, it asks you to put in a shortcut key you want to assign, so I told it tab. Then, I went to that shortcut and fucked the shortcut off.
in reply to Bri😻

@jscholes still don't know how in the serious fuck it did it the first time though, because there was no shortcut there before.
in reply to André Polykanine

@jscholes Yeah, so it did it again. Definitely don't fuck around with this. It'll jack your shit.
in reply to André Polykanine

@jscholes Best of luck. My experience just now spooked me bad enough that I'm staying far, far far away.
in reply to Bri😻

@Bri @jscholes I'm so pissed off by everything working slooooowwwwwlyyyyy that I'll keep trying. I'll definitely tell you when this particular issue is gone.
in reply to Bri😻

@Bri It doesn't sound malicious. Just a perfect storm of weird and buggy behaviour. @menelion
in reply to Bri😻

@jscholes you'd think that in the many years I've been online, I would've learned not to just run shit on my host, but alas.
in reply to André Polykanine

@jscholes same, but after this, I think you underestimate how bad this particular instance freakd me out. A program just blindly generating an lnk somewhere bound to the tab key. Yikes.
in reply to Bri😻

@Bri Quickly looked into this: I think that as soon as the keyboard hook in the hotkey field detects input, it checks the "shortcut" box, and creates the shell link. That represents a pretty odd design, rather than e.g. allowing you to check the box yourself, specify the hotkey afterwards, and then press OK/Save. On top of that, add the fact that the keyboard hook presumably captures Tab, instead of ignoring it. @menelion
in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes @Bri yeah funnily enough I've made this mistake when trying to assign target shortcut through alt+enter properties dialog manually even myself to NVDA - only to discover it made the shortcut the tab key. With how it does keyhooking perhaps alt+CTRL got as stuck keys when it launched and didn't unlock, so tab was firing the shortcut. But if it auto-bound to tab key after install, now that's a bit odd for sure.
in reply to Tamas G

@Tamasg It didn't bound to Tab after install. It didn't actually install, because I, at least, was running it from a debug binary. @Bri @menelion
in reply to James Scholes

@Bri So... yeah. Two questionable choices on top of each other, but probably no bad intentions. @menelion
in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes nods, I didn't really suspect foul play, but scary none the less.
in reply to Bri😻

@Bri I think I avoided it by not actually having opened the settings UI yet. @menelion
in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes I think my major problem was that I didn't figure out how to change the language until I'd already majorly fucked it up.
in reply to Bri😻

@Bri It is interesting that the Tab key is valid as the shortcut in a programmatically created shell link, indicating that Microsoft avoids that in their own Properties UI but does actually allow it. @menelion
in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes @Bri This makes me wonder how Windows even locates all the .lnk files that might potentially have keyboard shortcuts in them. I think this would be far less of a problem if it was e.g. limited to the desktop, which I don't think it is.
in reply to Bri😻

@Bri @jscholes I'm planning to contact those Chinese folks and communicate with them about it. It's a great start, I believe.