🚨 *Attention!* We were made aware of a fake “KeePassXC Password Manager Pro” repository on GitHub that links to unverified external binary downloads. - There is NO Pro version of KeePassXC! - You get all the “Pro” features with the regular version. Please download KeePassXC only from trusted distribution channels linked on keepassxc.org/ !
This week I learned there is such a thing as a lamb burger. And that one can get a hold of a few very easily in London. And I've decided I do not dislike lamb burgers, at all.
Once upon a time, a blonde became so sick of hearing blonde jokes that she had her hair cut and dyed brown. A few days later, as she was out driving around the countryside, she stopped her car to let a flock of sheep pass.
Admiring the cute wooly creatures, she said to the shepherd, "If I can guess how many sheep you have, can I take one?"
The shepherd, always the gentleman, said, "Sure!" The blonde thought for a moment and, for no discernible reason, said, "352."
This being the correct number, the shepherd was, understandably, totally amazed, and exclaimed, "You're right! O.K., I'll keep to my end of the deal. Take your pick of my flock."
The blonde carefully considered the entire flock and finally picked the one that was by far cuter and more playful than any of the others.
When she was done, the shepherd turned to her and said, "O.K., now I have a proposition for you. If I can guess your true hair color, can I have my dog back?"
I've started editing my way through a small collection of short stories formerly published in the New European Magazine between 1822 and 1823. Here's the first of eventually six stories: 'The Funeral' by Thomas Richards.
I made a similar tool for Mastodon (and a few other platforms), for those interested to give it a try!
https://data.stefanbohacek.com/projects/fediverse-post-accessibility
#AltText #accessibility #ImageDescription
Unsloth now has notebooks for many tts models you can finetune: Sesame-CSM, Orpheus-TTS, Spark-TTS, Llasa-TTS, Oute-TTS, bonus Whisper Large V3 - STT. #Unsloth #TTS #ML #AIdocs.unsloth.ai/basics/text-to…
Big thanks to Ada for translating Post 1 of my blog series “I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back” — titled “Built for Control, but Not for People” — into French. They’ll be reading it live on the radio today with Irina!
This release lets you further tweak the barcode size in the fullscreen view and slightly improves barcode finding reliability when scanning or loading a barcode from an image or PDF file. It also fixes a crash when trying to load a pkpass file without a barcode in it.
Add ability to choose barcode width in fullscreen view
Remove confusing import from app function
Various scanning fixes
Fix crash when loading a pkpass file without barcode
@Jamie Teh Damn! It sounds brilliant. I've listened to it from the begining to the end in one go right away. It's your and Michael's style and at the same time you have something unique in there. I like the song "It'll Be Alright" the most. Do I hear correctly you have some guest vocalists in this song? I find "Scourge" something you have very likelly taken off. And also "Smoke and Splinters" is very nice too. It's all great and heartening.
Thanks to both of you including your close friends and families. My all time nth degree favorite piece is "CruelToBeKind".
@pvagner Thanks Peter. Really appreciate the kind feedback. The two guest vocalists in It'll Be Alright are my two sons, first my 12 year old in the orchestral section, then my 10 year old right near the end. What do you mean when you say "you have very likely taken off" regarding Scourge? I didn't quite get it, haha. Wow, Cruel to be Kind is a blast from the past! I have a special place for that song, even if it's from a previous era. I feel like you've followed our music since the very beginning. Thank you for that. :)
@Jamie Teh Regarding sourge I wanted to say it's kind of special, mixture of genres, a bit of electronic at the start, then metal, and that unusual singing immediatelly before the last chorus. I hope you had fun while arranging that.
Very cool. Thanks for sharing! Love the melody and the chord changes all around! BTW, I think I recognized the string quartet from Native Instruments in one of the songs! :)
I am all over the place as far as NI instruments go. Love their "Session" series though. BTW, I am using Shreddage Fretless here: youtube.com/watch?v=sxgSjdoMvb…
This tune was written during my trip to Marbella, Spain, while staying at the fabulous sea side there.Two years and many instrumental iterations later I have...
@vick21 Oooo very nice! I do particularly love the thick, lush, layered, spacious character in this and your other work. It's a lovely immersive ear treat. :)
I just published my new instrumental called "Sea Time, the Sound Waves of Marbella" (for now on Youtube only). Hope you like it! youtu.be/sxgSjdoMvbQ #music #acoustic #instumental
This tune was written during my trip to Marbella, Spain, while staying at the fabulous sea side there.Two years and many instrumental iterations later I have...
Also totally forgot to talk about this yesterday. As a part of global accessibility awareness day, we put out a new update for the Be My Eyes app for Windows that is completely rebuild from the ground up. Along with giving us a better base to build amazing new features for desktop in the near future, this new app also fixes a lot of the accessibility issues that people have reported over the last 1.5 or so years. In addition Chat History is now also available on Desktop, so you can start a conversation from mobile and continue it on desktop (and vice versa).
Geeky stuff aside, let's enjoy the hottest friday party ever. @Marek Macko is on air again with his awesome show called #playgroundLive. #dance, #trance, a bit of #hardStyle, #eurodance, #90s and other party genres in an incredible live mix performance lasting a few hours spiced up with some random chat messages of fellow listeners and friends.
https://www.facebook.com/thevelvetofficialhttps://www.instagram.com/the_velvet_luxembourg/Recorded at Unison studiosMixed and masters at studio evolujcia
I love #joplin so much. I find myself using it to publish long documents that I want others to read that are well formatted, but in plain HTML so can't be edited, and live on my server. Better than a PDF by far, and markdown makes including tables and other complicated layout easy. The only improvement I'd love is the ability to see how many visits a published note got. I don't need browser and IP and location and all that stuff. Just a number, so I can know if a link I shared with a single person was viewed by them.
Right now, I'm using #shlink to generate a unique URL for this purpose. So I publish a #joplin note, then put that URL into shlink, and give my person the shlink url. Then I can see if they clicked it or not. In theory, Joplin allows plugins and I could automate this workflow somehow but I have no idea how Joplin plugins actually work.
Dear #Letsencrypt, you helped secure millions and millions of servers, not just web servers. But your announcement at letsencrypt.org/2025/05/14/end… about ending Ending TLS Client Authentication Certificate Support in 2026 because Google changes their requirements would result in your certificates becoming a possible risk for ensuring SMTP traffic. Please think again. Please.
Let’s Encrypt will no longer include the “TLS Client Authentication” Extended Key Usage (EKU) in our certificates beginning in 2026. Most users who use Let’s Encrypt to secure websites won’t be affected and won’t need to take any action.
Because the standard arch linux iso boot options with speech aren't working right now. I've decided to make my own (for my own use) but if anyone wants it let me know.
Here's the only sample we have of the CyberTalk synth, reading a part of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. You will hear the male voice first, than the female voice.
It’s a legitimate question that comes up from time to time. While the question is fairly short, the answer requires a few details. Behind the question of security, it’s also often about privacy.
How secure is UnifiedPush?
It’s a legitimate question that comes up from time to time. While the question is fairly short, the answer requires a few details. Behind the question of security, it’s also often about privacy.
If you’re like me and enjoy watching streams or listening to multiple audio sources, check out my newly updated @pipewire based script! It makes muting or unmuting sound from different sources really easy.
Blind software developers on fedi, I have a question!
Have you used GDB? and if so, do you still use it? I'd love to hear experiences from blind users because I can't tell how good or bad our interface is for users.
For more context, GDB is the main debugger (that I know of, at least) for C, C++, Rust, Ada and Fortran. If you used a debugger for a program in one of those, you probably used GDB with maybe some interface on top.
Because GDB is all text based, I'd think it could reasonably well suited for blind users, but I'm sure being accessible isn't as easy as "the text is there" so I'd love to hear the experience of blind users!
I tried searching online but couldn't find any experiences from GDB users specifically (only general tool advice from coding with eyes closed), so direct experience would be appreciated!
I've used GDB occasionally to set breakpoints and debug C and C++ code, from the CLI. It usually works fine, other than terminal weirdness when gdb and program output might mix or interleave.
I no longer use it but that's because I don't write C or C++ anymore.
Today is Global #accessibility awareness day and I think I speak for a lot of people in the community when I say I'm tired. Particularly over the last few months, the overall climate towards accessibility and #diversity hasn't been super welcoming and while I have a good support network that can remind me that I am, in fact, human and worth existing, many do not. If you receive a request to make something #accessible, from anyone, keep in mind that may very well be the 5th, 10th or even 100th attempt this person has made today at screaming into the void hoping to be seen as a person rather than a potential drain on resources. Rather tna big companies showing off #AI gizmos that mean we've offloaded a problem we didn't want to deal with onto a fallible set of algorithms, maybe #gaad should be about being aware of how ridiculous it is that accessibility professionals and consumers need to fight to even be seen as human these days, because make no mistake, we do.
Agreed with this. I really wasn't that impressed with Google's announcements this time around, not doing much to move the needle. Apple, on the other hand, actually had stuff that would likely be useful to more people, and while they have their problems, I think in general they have a better understanding of the challenges disabled people face on a daily basis, rather than trying to make everything about AI solving issues most of us didn't really have in the first place.
Today in the iOS app store in the Today tab, I encounter a heading with the title Accessibility Awareness, the Best Accessible Apps and Games, Curated by App Store Editors
I swipe right and what do I then encounter? Six separate buttons, all labeled "App Suggestion" with no accessible titles. So, VoiceOver users just hear "app suggestion, button", "app suggestion, button", "app suggestion, button" ... I have reported this to Apple Accessibility. Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
I didn’t have the same experience, Apple must expect you to turn on all of the voiceover intelligence features. Anyways, lots of the games in there are not accessible for blind people. They don’t tell you that either.
i mean at least they have something, google doesn't have anything in the playstore talking about accessibility, but yeah i agree, lable your shit properly
I am just testing @Jami with a #screenreader on both linux desktop and android for #accessibility. Initial setup is accessible on both the platforms. Listing conversations I can't really say as I only have single contact. Audio calling is working fine. I am impressed that the call setup took just a moment. On android controls like microphone toggle, speaker / earpiece toggle and hangup button are working fine. I am unable to find out in call controls with the keyboard on linux. On both desktop and android I can write messages. On android I can read messages, find and execute additional actions in the popup menu. On the desktop I can't read incoming and outgoing messages with a screen reader. I haven't discovered on how to copy them.
In conclusion comparing this to the tox chat the Jami is more accessible with a screen reader. Perhaps I will be able to figure out how to handle the calls with a keyboard shortcuts however the fact message text is not readable with a screen reader on desktop linux and perhaps other platforms sounds dissapointing. The idea and decentralized nature of this communication app sounds really amazing.
Exploring @Jami further I think I can post a few more observations. The desktop app uses QT6 for the UI. Apart of some ounlabelled buttons such as Accept / Reject incoming call and some tab controls on the main window most of the UI elements are clearly labelled and accessible from the keyboard. The desktop app has a keyboard shortcuts button on the main screen which opens a tabbed dialog with accessible lists of keyboard shortcuts. I haven't yet discovered if these can be tweaked but the default ones are working well for me. For calls it's ctrl+y for accepting and ctrl+d for rejecting / hanging up. Letter m alone can be used for muting / unmuting the microphone. I need to find out if there is a way to create global shortcuts or do some actions using commandline switches. If either of this turned out to be possible it would perfectly integrate with the desktop. Sending and receiving files is something I'm going to try next.
Here it is. Post 2 in my series on #Linux #accessibility. This time, I'm digitally screaming about the audio stack. As always, feedback is encouraged and welcomed, and subscribe via rss or email to receive plane-text versions of what I write, the day after publishing at 10 am UTC fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-w… #a11y #linuxAudio #linuxAccessibility
#linux won't change until people understand that testing and programming needs to be paid. Spend some buck on your favorite distro or project, ask for better management or better testing.
@lcruggeri It needs to be paid, yes. By companies. There are some huge companies behind Linux and various parts of the stack. I wonder how many are funding accessibility efforts? IBM, a little. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and cut the accessibility team. The Gnome foundation does some work on it but the processes are still a work in progress.
@lcruggeri I agree–I'm always in favor of people donating to their favorite projects. The issue is that a lot of people, unfortunately, just don't care about accessibility, because it's not happening to *them*. It's happening to some unfortunate minority group.
Open Collective is a legal and financial toolbox for groups. It’s a fundraising + legal status + money management platform for your community. What do you want to do?
@lcruggeri @danirabbit My series has been about accessibility, if you didn't read it I'm a blind user that's been using Linux for years now, and I'm just expressing my personal experiences with it, and expressing my worries and concerns about where we are and where we're going.
@lcruggeri @danirabbit @talksina It was, but VoiceOver (Apple's screen reader) has been neglected on the desktop side of things for years. Windows is the more popular choice at the moment.
@lcruggeri @danirabbit @talksina Yup. I use Orca. It works well for the most part. It's issues lower down the stack (desktops, audio, wayland) that break the experience.
@lcruggeri @danirabbit @talksina pipewire and pulse are userspace daemons that sit on top of whatever you have underlying (alsa/oss/jack), they don't replace it, they're for mixing and control. As for OPs post while I can't say I've run into any of the issues listed (audio's just kinda always worked for me, though part of that is likely just because I'm picky about manufacturer) I do have a solution for the root problem, both pipe and pulse can run in systemwide mode from boot 1/2
@raptor85 @lcruggeri @danirabbit @talksina I maybe should have been clearer. I know pipe wire and pulse are built on top of not instead of alsa. I thought I wrote that in the post but maybe I need to be clearer about it. I also know that they *can* be started in system mode from boot, but it never comes configured that way, and unless you know how to do it, or find a script to do it for you, it won't be. That was my point. I can configure that, because I know about the feature, and how ot set it up. A new linux user might have no idea. I talked about that a bit more in post 1.
@lcruggeri @danirabbit @talksina sorry, that first part was directed to the post above that one in the thread. It's been ages since I've used one of the big mainline distros but I do remember SUsE at one point having that as an option during install, it seems shortsighted if they (and others) took it away.
@raptor85 @lcruggeri @danirabbit @talksina I don't know any that have system mode pipewire as an optino during install. Arch and gentoo and lfs, but only because you build them yourself anyway.
@lcruggeri @danirabbit @talksina oh, I'm talking like 10-15 years ago, it was definitely a thing in distros for a while (likely as much from there just not being a well understood standard yet). Seems about right on par, It's a huge issue I have with many distros and desktops (and wayland) myself is that every version seems to strip options in the name of making a more "unified" experience, wayland in particular is a HUGE pain...
@danirabbit @lcruggeri Thanks for taking the time to read my rambling. I've heard from a few people that the elementary installer starts speaking when you just leave it sit and don't press anything at all. Is this the case?
Yes! We added this feature fairly recently. After a few seconds of being on the first page of the installer it’ll announce the screen reader shortcut. And I spent some time going through the installer with my eyes closed to make sure everything was labeled and could be navigated etc. I’d love any feedback on it!
The thoughtful, capable, and ethical replacement for Windows and macOS—plus AppCenter, the pay-what-you-can app store. Sponsor elementary on GitHub to fund the development of Open Source software a...
@lcruggeri Seems like it would be good to encourage and normalize a trend towards sharing about what FOSS we've donated to most recently. Make it a part of FOSS social culture. If we're openly sharing every time we donate it might encourage or remind others.
My most recent donations were to the Linux Mint folks, Thunderbird, Wikipedia. My donations are always small due to my budget but repeated throughout the year as often as I'm able.
@dennyhenke @lcruggeri This would be nice. There is the concern around that though that is people might feel guilted into donating, those who really don't have the income for it. It's true, though, that one person calling out what they donate to can encourage others to do the same. Thank you for raising this idea–some food for thought for sure.
@dennyhenke an idea i had was about putting a sum, like 20 euro, and having it divided automatically into the recipients of your choice, this was the model of Flattr that's sadly dead
@lcruggeri @dennyhenke This would be really nice. here's an amount of money, here's what I want to support. Not even down to the details of *who* I want to support, *what*. Accessibility, console development, firmware reverse engineering, whatever.
@dennyhenke i think that this should be a decision that the project of choice has to make. Obviously, more interest in that aspect (accessibility for example), more money.
@lcruggeri @dennyhenke How is that supposed to work? The majority of users don't need accessibility features. Projects already prioritize features themselves, and apparently accessibility is low on the list for most of them. So if donations are supposed to make a difference, they need to be tied to accessibility - otherwise 99% of your donation will be used for more widely used features
@Doomed_Daniel @lcruggeri @dennyhenke It's not a bad idea, if the pressure works for getting people to donate to accessibility. It would have to be specifically accessibility money, which then might lead to only that money being put into accessibility and not anything else. Food for thought, like I said, but not perfect.
@lcruggeri @dennyhenke True, that could happen - but I fear for many projects just getting money without any communication of intend will be used for the most popular features (that still are considered improvable). Most projects will have several features that they'd love to improve if they had the resources, so prioritizing is hard
@lcruggeri @dennyhenke I wonder if a different model of paying someone to work on accessibility who then works on different projects as needed would be better - but OTOH that might not work that well given how hard it is to contribute code to some bigger projects, especially as an outsider...
@Doomed_Daniel @lcruggeri @dennyhenke I'd do this if I could, but, quite rightly so, I don't have the public reputation and reliability needed for people to be willing to fund it. and I still have to do my day job, which is working on nuclear safety in digitial.
Thanks for this, since I haven't really understood Linux audio since ALSA other than being vaguely aware of Pulse.
I'm thinking about how situations like this happen in "Linux" vs how things in Windows or other (newer) systems feel like they're better, even though just like your article points out, many of the older APIs for sound are still there on Windows as well!
I think I've identified three things, but I'd love your thoughts.
1. There's no centralized body dictating changes
We have FreeDesktop, but there's no one officially saying "This is now deprecated. Stop using it"
2. Linux itself inherited the idea of being compatible with older Unixes and an OS legacy going back to the 70s.
3. Developers aren't given a lot of guidance when knowing what to implement. At best they are just using SDKs from the desktop environment.
With that, how do you see a way forward to improve the situation?
@serge I wanted to let you know I've seen your post and bookmarked it. I'd like to take your points raised and write a post about them, if you don't mind, rather than write a short-form response to what are long-form questions.
@serge it's software 101 to have to deal with the constraints of software that exists, if the plan is to re-write everything every time somebody decides that there's a new hotness well... that's how you get wayland where the entire ecosystem is broken. the approach of pipewire where they try to maintain backwards compatibility is good, it's just hard to execute on.
@serge I don't think that ethos exists outside of the kernel tbh. Underlying platform stuff is constantly changing which makes it exceedingly difficult to deliver software that is highly likely to work. If the mid layer of linux software did care about long term compatibility in the way that the kernel does I think we'd be in a vastly better place.
Great series. It looks like PulseAudio is still the best thing in the world. I remember in 2010 how terrible it was. Sound could disappear because of something and so on. The best solution was to kick it out of the system. According to different online forums, it was a pain in the ass for many users these days.
@Yinshi It's still awful. I configure most things to use alsa when I can, because, although it's old, and clugy, and broken, I know how to hack around it from lkml threads from 2008
Huh, somehow this has me feeling optimistic... I guess it sounds like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit. You mentioned not having a audio mixer with good accessibility, which sounds like could be improved with a couple weekends of getting acquainted with the accessibility stack (or I haven't fully comprehended how bad it is yet). I've been meaning to learn how the screen readers and such work, and that seems like a good jumping-off point.
Here are some things you can do in your code to make your program work as well as possible with assistive technologies. For components that don’t display a short string (such as an image button), s...
@modulux I can't speak to how well it works in practice but GTK 4.18 and on should now be accessible on Windows and MacOS thanks to the new AccessKit backend
@clairie @modulux indeed, but please remember that the accesskit backend is still somewhat experimental, so help in making it work better upstream is very much welcome
@Emmanuele Bassi @modulux @Claire @Danielle Foré I'm wondering are there known windows builds of some very accessible GTK apps such as fractal, shortwave, gnome podcasts, eartag, amberol or some others that we might enjoy trying out with a screen reader on windows? I'll be definatelly looking into it soon enough. I'm excited about it so it's why I am also posting here.
@pvagner @modulux @clairie I am not aware of any binary builds for Windows; I personally have a full life already, and I don't particularly plan on wasting it on the foibles of Windows.
As far as I know, the accesskit backend was tested with a custom gnome-text-editor build, but that was last year. If people want to pick this up, I'd recommend starting with a small hello world to ensure that building all dependencies actually works.
This is not only a well written song with a great message, but the production is really nice. Gabrielle Aplin - So Far So Good youtube.com/watch?v=-jipxnd4h2…
If you are blind and you have the spoons, can you let me know if you use the terminal on Linux and if so which one? If you use the terminal, do you use a screenreader plugin or a specific external screenreader on Linux?
I wrote a terminal UI program for kubernetes that has voice assistance and I want to test it with a normal workflow that a disabled user would follow.
Edit: I am also willing to pay! Read further down in this thread!
I use mate-terminal if on the mate desktop, or terminator if not. Screen reader, just Orca on the desktop, or speakup/fenrir at a console. A gui terminal screen reader does exist for the GUI called tdsr.
Is there a coop or collective of disabled people in tech where you can go to hire accessibility experts? I don't want to continue to release software unless I know its accessible, but I can't know that unless I have my software audited by disabled tech experts that know the pitfalls of these things. I don't need free labour either. I am happy to pay for this service.
@aaron @icy @JesseBot I don't think I can call my-self an accessibility expert, however I am on linux most of my time, I mostly use gnome terminal with orca screen reader. I am kind of power user. As for k8s and related technologies it's entirely new to me. Still I'd be happy to be helpfull so if you have some patience with me to introduce your project, let me know please. I am from central europe and evenings and weekends suit me better as during working hours I'm at the office.
Sorry for the extreme delay. As I mentioned earlier, this is my hobby project, so I can only dedicate a lot of time to it when work isn't demanding on weekdays, but more frequently on the weekend! The project is called smol-k8s-lab (pronounced "small kay eights lab" which is the trick I used to get it to be pronounced properly by the tts library in python). You can install it using pipx, so pipx install smol-k8s-lab, but it has external dependencies for using kubernetes, so you'll also need to install with apt or brew kind and k3d. I have added screen reading elements for the terminal UI, but they're all prerecorded MP3s because I found orca and espeak to not sound very good. The TTS library I used with python has an irish accent, which I think is understandable, but I'd love your feedback on. Because the program uses MP3s, you will need alsa and/or pulse libraries installed to actually play the audio. If you would like, you can check out the project on github here: github.com/small-hack/smol-k8s…
If you have questions, or you would like to chat on a voice call, I can help out if we can find a time to link up. I can do weekends in the mornings after 10AM CEST, so tomorrow could work if either of you would like to do a call. I guess it makes sense to use something were we can share screens, that way if you run into any hiccups, I can see what you can't, and live fix any issues so you can continue. I've tested it form the point of running the smol-k8s-lab command, and then gone through the accessibility options. I am very interested in what you think of the accessibility screen and options and if I should improve them. I allow setting terminal beeps as well as reading various elements including screen titles. What I don't know how to do is make orca read the text. I know how to launch orca, and I know how to use the MP3s I added or espeak, but I don't understand how to tell orca, from the command line, to read a line of text.
☁️ CLI & TUI with a smol friendly vibe to get started with Kubernetes on metal, then bootstrap apps using Argo CD 🧸 Great for testing webapps and benchmarking. - small-hack/smol-k8s-lab
Sorry for the very long reply. I know they're a pain on screenreaders, but there's a lot of info here and I didn't want to leave anything out. If you're still interested, please let me know what app you'd like to meet on and I'll get you my info. If you'd like to do it on your own and just provide feedback that's also ok. Please don't hold back any negative feedback. If you think it's an awful experience, tell me, and tell me how you'd like it to be better. I am here to help, as long as you understand that it may take me a few weeks as I do this in my free time. If you'd like payment for your services, please just DM me your rate and how best to pay you. I can do paypal through my roommate, direct bank transfer if you have an IBAN account, and ko-fi. The reason paypal has to be through my roommate is that paypal canceled my account when I tried to change my name after transitioning my gender.
Oh, this is also the first project I am confident enough to introduce to the blind community, but if you don't mind working with me, I have others that I'd like to work with you on in the future. I'd love to develop a relationship where I can start working more closely with people in the community that passionate about accessibility. I promise to learn from anything you tell me and disseminate that info back to my other friends in the industry and my coworkers if they'll hear it 🙇
Hi. I will get everything installed and try it. I'm not sure about the use of mp3 files, just because then you lack adjustable rate, pitch, and inflection support for those that also have hearing difficulties. Is the aim to make a TUI or something similar? Again, I don't have anything installed yet, this is a first take upon just having read your reply.
Yes, it's in a full TUI right now. There's also a CLI that can be used, but the purpose of the TUI was to make it easier to walk you through the process of setting everything up. Technically, if you're good with YAML, you could just use the CLI, but then you'd need to fill out the yaml using only comments in the yaml file.
Do you know of a CLI command to play some text, so something like: orca say "welcome to the TUI"? I know how to do this with espeak, but I'm not sure how to make orca read a TUI specifically. Alternatively, if you can tell me the command to make orca read everything in the terminal, that'd be awesome, or even just point me at a guide where I can learn myself. I can also spend sometime this evening reading this guide I found, but I'm not in a space where I can do that right at this exact moment. github.com/C-Loftus/orca-intro…
@JesseBot Thanks for the details. I'll check out the github project and I'll likelly ask some questions. As for the other things, I'll let you know. CC @aaron
Based on the feedback from @patricus and everything I've tried so far, it looks like this project is not ready for general use by the blind community. I am currently trying to figure out what's going on with it not reading elements on the screen on focus, so I will keep hacking on that and update you all when it's ready for another round of testing. I apologize for the delay. I spent the past few hours working with tdsr and breaking my terminal with that (I have a lot of ascii art features to my terminal experience that the screenreader hates and I've been adding more features to my shell to work with that). I'll spend more time on this today and tomorrow and if I can't get it to work, it may have to be a next week thing. Thanks for all your patience!
I'd recommend trying speakup in a tty session. That Can sometimes behave better. If using tdsr, be aware of its cursoring on/off toggle, alt c, plus c.
I haven't been able to test yet as the system I tend to test on is currently being incredibly stubborn on accepting keyboard input. I'll still try things and let you know what I find out, maybe something will be helpful.
I really appreciate it, but please don't stress yourself too much on this. If you don't have the time or your system isn't cooperating, you can always wait till next weekend.
Until then, I'm going to keep fighting pyobjc on macOS. I think part of my issues here are because I wrapped tdsr in a poetry project so I could develop with it a bit more quickly and then released it via pip. When I do a pipx install tdsr2 it doesn't work and says it can't find the objc library, but when I use poetry shell to create a local python virtual environment and use the tdsr command, it works beautifully. When I try to run smol-k8s-lab in the terminal after tdsr is running, it both plays the MP3s I mentioned before AND tdsr uses the default system TTS voice and you get both playing at once which is horrible. It also causes tdsr to start spitting out a lot of terminal escape key garbage to the screen and breaks the whole session entirely. I had to manually close my terminal tab, because it wasn't responding to control + D like it normally does. If I wrote the thing and I feel frustrated, I don't want users to also go through that.
As far as linux is concerned, I don't have easy access to a machine console with gnome on it, as I'm currently running KDE and tdsr doesn't seem to play well on kde at all. Let me give speakup a try though. I haven't tried that one yet. It looks like it uses espeak, which I have tried before, so maybe it'll work better. 🙏 (The other thing that makes this complicated is supporting both Linux and MacOS at the same time, because there's different tools across bother of these. I wonder if this is made any better by anything the wezterm project has done lately as that's a terminal that works on multiple OS. I brought this up to wez himself in 2023 github.com/wezterm/wezterm/dis…
I followed up with wezterm and it looks like he opened an issue where he's gotten about as far as I have in learning the tools he needs to learn, but hasn't put in any actual PRs github.com/wezterm/wezterm/iss… Having a single terminal to support across all operating systems though would make this easier, so I will push on this as well in the background.
I am working on a TUI for a tool I'm writing and I was wondering if there's any built-in accessibility features in wezterm for users with vision disabilities, such as support for screen readers, a ...
Yeah, I'm considering going back to gnome full time so I can actually ensure my normal workflow prioritizes screenreaders in the future, because if I'm not dogfooding it, it won't get the love and attention it needs. I honestly forget why I switched to KDE in the first place, so maybe it's time to give it up 🤷
These days when I set up a computer and want to create a local user account, I just invoke that screen from the command prompt. You can do this with an internet connection, but it needs to be one of the first things you do. 1. In the Windows first-run setup (after it has been installed), press shift f10 to open command prompt. 2. Type this: start ms-cxh:localonly
This should pull up the old "Who's going to use this PC?" screen. Seems to work in Windows 11 24H2. When you get done answering security questions, the computer (or at least the out-of-box experience) will restart. I also use this cmd trick to launch a portable copy of NVDA sometimes. A lesser-known shortcut in Windows setup is ctrl-shift-f3. This puts you into audit mode, where you're logged into the desktop of the administrator account even though you haven't completed Windows setup yet. A dialog will automatically start, giving options to restart into the out-of-box experience or restart normally. In this mode, you can install drivers and make any other changes that need to be made before the setup process completes. Example: When giving someone a Surface tablet with an attached Bluetooth keyboard cover, you might want to go into audit mode so you can pair the keyboard, but still retain the setup process for the recipient. You can, of course, also use this trick to completely bypass Windows setup in order to reinstall Windows on a brand new system.
The state of Linux accessibility in 2025. This started out as a rant but became a series. Please feel free to leave feedback, comments, and subscribe via rss or email for more stuff as I release it. fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-w…
I love this rant. The best part of my career was maintaining a manufacturing facility where legally blind workers ran the plant floor and all the machines. It was amazing when they would ask for help and they showed me how to improve the accessibility and quality control checking systems. They were able to run production often better than sighted workers, because we worked together to maintain accessibility. Maintaining accessibility with Linux would be greatly rewarding too
I frequently get frustrated with commentary about this from disabled people on Mastodon, since it is often entitled if not downright insulting contributors/maintainers. In that sense, I approve of your commentary here because it is much more differentiated and calls out problems and frustrations without attacking people who don't deserve it.
@nightoo I'm not here to attack anyone, simply say things as they are. I've had a lot of good come out of this series so far (nothing I can fully disclose yet) but things are happening. So I'm encouraged to keep writing in this vein.
@ity kind of? But there's a reason abstractions like pulseaudio and pipewire need to exist. Alsa is the most unforgiving POS if you make one mistake. Stay tuned for my rant on the audio stack, publishing on tuesday.
@Doomed_Daniel Not at all. It's sad that gtk2 is still your best option for an accessible application. It's the volunteers that have to work around this nightmare.
urgh - again a case of >90% there, but no one does the last 10%... how hard can it be to at at least document the env vars?! (I vaguely remember trying to figure out some Qt env vars a while ago and didn't find any proper documentation either, so that's a general problem there)
And wouldn't it be nice if toolkits and desktops could agree on *one* (hopefully simple) way to enable such features...
@Doomed_Daniel the arch wikki has some of them. the rest I found by digging through code forever ago. For some context, I started with Linux on a little Samsung nc10 netbook when they were new.
@talon @matt Thanks for sharing - such a shame we have reached this state of affairs!
I wonder whether there are potential parallels with things like LineageOS and postmarketOS - focus initially on devices like ThinkPads that are known to work well with Linux. Volunteers could sign up to run through an accessibility checklist after (say) booting a live image from a USB drive and document on a wiki. But as you say... assembling that image is not going to be trivial
BTW, do you have an opinion on the ADRIANE desktop system? I remember seeing a long time ago on a KNOPPIX live CD (it's from the same guy, Klaus Knopper) and it seems like it's still developed, but not available in common distros. It has the approach of being text-based first with screen readers and braille in mind
@Doomed_Daniel I've never tried it. I had an entire section on distros/desktops for blind people, but I cut it because it boils down to I don't use them because if that maintainer gets bored, or gets hit by a luss tomorrow, project dead. And most of the distros are held together with duck tape and expired bubble gum, and in every single one they say please please don't update anything ever because we can't guaranty it will still work. See Vinux for an old example, accessible coconut for a newer one. Slint for the closest one I consider acceptable.
As someone who was involved for a short while in bug triaging and testing for accessibility functions of LibreOffice on macOS, I can sadly only confirm the sorry state of affairs. For many years, the bugs reported against accessibility in LibreOffice went pretty much unresolved/ignored. Until fairly recently, the version for macOS was still using code that used a deprecated Apple API - not surprising then, that it didn't play well with the built-in accessibility functions of the OS, and that calling these functions often caused LibreOffice to crash or hang. It was so bad at one stage that we were recommending to people to turn off all accessibility functions of the OS if you wanted to work with LibreOffice on macOS, which really does kind of defeat the purpose of the goal of providing an office productivity suite usable by as many people as possible.
@StriderLongshanks I have an anecdote about LibreOffice. Once upon a time they were asked why their PowerPoint equivalent is not accessible at all. They said (quote not exact, but the meaning is this): blind people don't see images, all presentations are graphics, so we didn't bother to make them accessible. As far as I know, it's not accessible till now.
These problems are frustrating because without a screen, sighted users can't use a computer either. Hopefully braille and text-to-speech will be treated as first class citizens one day.
A question. How practical is a full text mode linux system for blind users, at the moment? I know edbrowse exists, and standard command-line can do most other things. Is the main problem running specialised programs that only provide a GUI?
@Aydan @aaron There is much blind users and other power users can do on the text console with no graphic, but browsing the modern web is not practical, no matter what the browser. These days web is too much interactive. Even those who are using emacs for almost everything have to use chromium and firefox for browsing the modern web sites.
And, completely on brand, now I have no console speech because speech dispatcher is starting after fenrir or something something ridiculous. If I log in first, then restart fenrir, I have speech just fine.
Bleh, that sucks. I tried installing linux on a computer with a few... Rather broken components, and that didn't hold up too well. Hard drive probably failed me. So, I wish you good luck with fixing all that mess that it is producing for you. Having no speech sucks.
@talon This is absolutely right. I have debian running on my alienware for having fun with local ai generation, but I just end up sshing into it from windows because if orca breaks I have no speech on tty's and I better hope orca pops back up if I restart it from mate.
this, is, awesome! goddamn, a very, very good article!
However, and consider this the well...but, section. Essentially, a lot of your issues happen because ubuntu exists, and particularly because you're using it, especially ubuntu mate. Ubuntu, to me, stopped mattering the moment canonical did their whole snap thing and slowed down their system, not sure if that's still a thing, but I know they're using that flutter installer which is...ahem, definitely not a very good thing for us. I didn't try it, but I know from trusted sources that it's pretty bad, I wouldn't have the patience for that tbh.
Next, the login issues...stop using ubuntu mate, and in particular, the issue here is a display manager called lightdm. It's possible to make it work again by editting configuration files, but meh, I don't care at all at this point, use gdm is my recommendation. I know it's bulky and a bit meh, but it's bad for everyone, as someone once said. With gdm, if you start your screenreader once, it's gonna be on pretty much for ever, unless some specific thing happens, but that thing is so rare that you shouldn't ever encounter it. Also, persistance, you don't need a script for that, that hasn't been a thing for me ever since the dark ages. I'm using arch, but like, if people's first experience of stuff is ubuntu and especially ubuntu mate, no wonder they run in terror at the whole brokenness of it all, let's just say ubuntu is even more known for not caring
About pipewire: the way to make that work is to use systemd's support for linger and enable that, then indeed as you said, you share sockets with root, but you don't have to modify service files or session files or anything of the sort. If I would have to do that, honestly I would have given up a long time ago. I like challenges, but challenge for challenge's sake isn't something I'm after. O also, for configs, use the user wide location, $XDG_CONFIG_DIR/pipewire.conf.d, that wouldn't be overridden by updates of pipewire. I have a script for that, if you need it. It's still using the old lua based configuration for wireplumber, but that's not needed anymore anyway. Also, a lot of gtk4 apps just work nowadays, way fewer accessibility issues than before.
About alsa, the kernel and espeakup, no comment, unless you do what you said and what I also said above, it's kinda oofed and screwed. About brltty and friends, absolutely no idea there either, I don't have a braille display.
You mention the thing that if one doesn't know the secret command to turn on the screenreader, they're screwed. True, but there the only winner is mac OS, because unless you know to press ctrl+windows+enter, you won't get speech in windows. Is it consistent and all distros have it? hell no, definitely not! but just pointing that bit out.
Alright, that being said, if you want to know how a good linux future would look like, can you do the following? no problem if you don't want to, but still
go on the fedora website
download the fedora workstation iso, important, workstation, v42
boot into it
this issue is unescapable for now unfortunately, but when you think it booted, press alt+super+s to do the screenreader command
the voice would fluctuate weirdly in pitch, but either way, try to just install it as usual, without going in and editting config files, or doing anything a regular user wouldn't be able to do. If you want to do that, can you please reply with how that went? I'm really curious, because I got a relative newbie to tech to install it with this new installer without issues, and yes, this is specific to 42, and yes, I think only workstation has it
Yeah, unfortunately, customisations aren't so huge with fedora and gnome, but yeah, that's the quickest way to get started. There are also some gnome peculiarities, but I'm assuming you know them, so I won't repeat those.
About the whole wayland stuff, totally agreed! however, starting from the premis that any app can snoop on my keyboard all the time, can read every single file I have access to, and can perform anything I can, and maybe more if it can become root, that's definitely not a good situation either. I hate the whole accessibility is left by the wayside as much as you do, hell, I'm making a screenreader along with some awesome people specifically because we want to be free to just experiment and maybe write something better than orca one day, aka what commentary is to talkback in the android realm, and we can barely figure any of this stuff out, we didn't even get to implementing orca's heuristics because we don't know what they are, since you guessed it, they aren't documented.
And yeah, I can't wait for your next article, it's gonna be awesome to read it! thanks for the very insightful text once again, it was really well written!
I may reply to some other posts of this thread because there are some things to still be clarified, don't like how the fediverse represents threads in a linear fassion, but yeah, telling you this so it wouldn't be confusing afterwards, because I was indeed confused when I saw this issue for the first time.
@esoteric_programmer I don't use Ubuntu mate. Read further down the post for what I actually use. My reason for focusing on Ubuntu was several-fold. 1. The ubuntu team should do better. They have done better. 2. The top recommended distribution on *most* sites and listicles for "top linux distribution" which is what most people will look for when switching to Linux is Ubuntu and its flavors.
when was that? you updated what packages and what part of it broke? but yeah, if you want to install everything yourself and so on, the only viable way imo is arch. I did read the whole article, but I was focusing on ubuntu mate there because those kinds of issues you only get there. The post-login stuffage is an issue with lightdm and sddm, so yeah, I hate the whole stuff with that. The issue here is basically that display managers have to implement the launch an accessibility service command themselves, which is of course not something most of them would do, unfortunately. That's why x11 was better in some arias though, it allowed us to make some hacks which would work almost all the time. Either way, gnome and kde are really underwhelming when it comes to wayland protocols, the best stuff is wlroots based, they have extensions for practically everything, it's just that an AT has to interface with those protocols. But yeah, quite a grim situation over all, and about the fedora stuff, dk when that happened, however I haven't heard of such issues in quite some time. Also, fedora is now updating more like windows, so it restarts and updates like that. If you interrupt the update process, you could get a broken system. But then, that's what immutable distros are supposed to fix, and imo, immutable/atomic systems are the best compromise we currently have between nix and just plopping stuff in /usr/bin and making your system function by installing scripts everywhere and holding it together with duct tape.
hmm, that's concerning. Do you still have the affected machine, vm, or whatever it was? do you also have matrix? I know a place where you could ask for a postmortem of sorts. But yeah, I upgraded the fedora system from 41 normally and I didn't have issues, maybe because I used gnome's software tool since I got lazy and didn't want to use the command line? the GUI is corrupting it seemns! :p
ha! arch ftw! are you using gdm for the login screen? also, can't wait for the grub and full disk encryption related article, I have a lot of frustration with that myself
@esoteric_programmer I'm not. I log in with a tty, and then if i'm logging into tty 1, gdm handles auto login to get me to gnome. so if I switch to tty3 I can log back in with speakup.
Again this is a nice opportunity to remind of my story. I have installed arch at the end of 2012. I am updating it incrementally to this day. I have changed three laptops so far during all these years and my install procedure was to clone both my system and home partitions to the new laptop, booting linux uefi stub directly.
The only thing that really bothers me is that I can't or don't know how to enroll my own KSK to make my file systems encrypted by my-self. Perhaps some three times something has broken for me because of broken GDM, accidentally interupted building of initramfs. At those times I simply boot arch iso off of an USB, chroot to my install, fix the broken stuff and continue from there. I am using gnome by default and very rare switching to the pure text console enabling speakup manually as I need it.
So I am looking to the brighter future.
Perhaps one day we'll get touch screen support similar to android and IOS on linux and we'll be able to also enjoy linux on our phones.
While the original post aims to make this readili available for the masses, some of us do really like to live on the bleeding edge enjoying the geeky stuff.
I feel you. I don't need the accessibility, so I am generally happy with my experience. But I am bothered by the fact that Linux isn't great for many disabled people
At the desktop environment level, KDE eV is currently employing/contracting the legally blind Ritchie Frodomar, 1 of 11 eV staff in total, which should hopefully help improve this situation. Still, it's awful that many Linux distros have currently got themselves into this state.
Note to self: I must install a screen reader on my GNU/Linux system (1) to know what the experience is like, (2) to be able to report/fix the bugs, and (3) to be able to test the code projects I will create.
@WebCoder49 The efforts of KDE and Gnome both in recent months is commendable, but it still took to long to get there. I do like that both now call out accessibility as a core value.
@WebCoder49 There is a post at the end of the series which will highlight everything that is actively being done and where things are improving. The reason that is the last post, however, is because it's not there yet. This is where we are now.
Well said. I revisit Linux every couple years to see if there's a straightforward installation for me, a sighted user who tends to use Apple hardware. The last time was just a few weeks ago and I found the language even on the various distro download pages to be confusing enough that I didn't feel comfortable going forward. There are a lot of dependencies that you have to understand to get started with Linux as a non-programmer and they can be very daunting.
@masonasons You don't. If you can chroot. and you know what actually broke in the first place. If you don't actually know what exploded though, or your audio doesn't work in the installer, or something else just shits itself like your keyboard. well. You're back at square one I guess. All of those are valid.
@masonasons which is why I wrote this. It shouldn't be this way. It just... shouldn't break in the first place. Fallbacks should exist. sane, useful fallbacks.
I agree. And like, one of the main issues like you're saying is that we have like 3 different audio systems now, and you have no idea what's going to use what.
Incredibly powerful stuff here. Hopefully you have better luck explaining this than I have. I’ve seen so many “linux on Ubuntu is great actually!” threads from people who don’t know and it triggers me every freaking time.
I recall someone here on the Fedis shared a sad thread years back, about the two (2) times that the biggest American charity for blind folks partnered with serious Linux devs to improve accessibility in the core OS.
Both times, Microsoft threatened to defund the Charity, who received most of their money from MS, and the project fell through.
MS wins gov contracts on accessibility grounds, so they sabotaged the open alternative twice.
@seachaint Had no idea about this and it's quite disturbing to me that they would stoop so low. Planning on reading this article, maybe it will inspire some action to improve things.
@seachaint unfortunately I can believe this. Do you happen to know any more details on it? I haven't heard of this and wonder if this was in any way recent. If so, it undermines everything Microsoft has been saying about accessibility for all in recent years.
@ZBennoui It was shared as a thread here and it's probably gone, but I _think_ the charity was the American Council for the Blind. The partnership may have been the Linux Foundation or GNOME.. It's been a while. I hope it's documented on the web somewhere and wasn't just discussed here. The person sharing it claimed direct participation both times. Sorry if that's not much help
That isn't to say "This is why, so it's fine". I would rather think of accessibility as a first class part of design that doesn't need a "funded project" to bake in. But it's still saddening and angering to learn how MS will absolutely screw users who need accessibility features, if it helps them win contracts. And they get the credit for being accessible, in the end.
I've had a more positive experience over the years, but first with Debian, and later Arch Linux. I'm currently running Arch. I know there's work to be done in Linux accessibility, and a need for more development resources. On the other hand, I worry that posts such as this are going to discourage people from trying it - even people who would benefit from doing so.
@jason Arch is good, because it gets out of the way. While I can't disagree it might discourage people from trying, that's been the argument for ages. "encourage people to try and then we'll know to work on it". It hasn't worked.
Having more users doesn't necessarily encourage development in free and open-source software. Prioritizing satisfying the existing users would be a good move. I think various Linux distributors with resources should expand and combine their accessibility efforts via the GNOME Foundation, Linux Foundation, or another suitable, neutral nonprofit.
I feel the pain reading this. Being a long term Linux user as well knowing the how hard it can be to install a simple application from source sometimes. And imagine doing it with the screen turned off... I think this is one of the problems with the OSS world. There are too many distros out there and "no one is forced" to make it accessible. Are there any projects out there working on this?
@haagen A couple of individuals. The Orca project. Gnome and KDE are chipping away at it. Fenrir exists as an updated console screen reader, but that's about it. Anything else is accessible by accident.
@haagen there are distributions made for blind people, but they are usually maintained by 1 person and have a huge disclaimer that says please don't update anything because it will fall apart because we've had to patch downstream.
wait - THAT'S what brltty is for? I recently messed around with an esp32 dev board and I couldn't flash it. The documentation just told me to disable or uninstall brltty. This worked, so I didn't question it further then. Now it sounds like this was similar to the docs telling me to just shut off all my monitors?
@ecori Yes. brltty is for braille displays. Unfortunately, it eats your serial ports for breakfast. So if you want to program an ESP32 or are a ham radio operator and want to change your radio firmware *and* use brltty, I hope you have time to right a million and one udev rules.
holy shit that's depressing. at least NixOS lets you share the horrible crimes you have to do to get things working but this is little assurance.
if you want reviews on nixpkgs changes, feel free to tag me (LF- on GitHub) but i don't know how else to practically help; it feels like basically everything is undermaintained, nobody has any time, and that the reason stuff worked in 2012 was that there were government contracts to be had for gnome people at redhat that required that the accessibility works.
@leftpaddotpy Thanks. I personally haven't really dived into Nix yet, but given how much this post has exploded I'm going to see what works and what doesn't, and not just in a vm. I'll put it on hardware, then write about it when I'm familiar with it. The biggest issue right now that I see is that there's no accessible installer for Nix. Also, accessibility helcres, such as speech-dispatcher, rely on global configurations. /etc/speech-dispatcher.. I know a lot of tools get around this by allowing you to define your config options in your Nix configuration file, but as far as I can tell speechdispatcher isn't one of them.
ultimately all those things just set environment.etc.* so you can just do that there as well with raw text; the modules that give you something nicer are just implemented on top of that. it's also possible to manually create it if you don't want to manage it with NixOS.
in principle it's probably possible to use another distro's ISO to install NixOS. it's *very* possible to install NixOS over ssh with a custom ISO and i do it most times. building custom ISOs with your ssh keys built in is like 20 lines of code on *any* distro with lix/nix installed and it's my preferred installation mechanism; see LF-/dotfiles on GitHub, the iso stuff in configs/nix/flake.nix.
the iso not being accessible really sucks and i am willing to lend social capital to efforts fixing it; the solution of adding ssh keys to the installer can bypass that for now, and probably is more pleasant than doing an arch style install process entirely in a vt console
i think it might be quite possible to inject Wi-Fi credentials into an ISO as well, though I'm uncertain of the specifics of how. there's also the secondary strategy of obtaining Ethernet adaptors though that's kind of annoying of course.
I saw your blog post passing by in another toot, and wrote a mini-thread of three toots about it: exquisite.social/@labellaragas…
I work in website accessiiblity and I am very sorry desktop accessibility on Linux is failing people with a disability. Are there distro's that do better as Ubuntu, or are they all bad?
Wow.
An excellent post from a blind screen reader user, on how bad accessibility is on Linux.
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-1-built-for-control-but-not-for-people/
It is a fucking shame.
@labellaragassa there are some that do better.Fedora has an accessible installer now in v42, which is great. Love that, but it doesn't configure sound across multiple vts or anything so if something breaks in updates (it does) you're stuck.Arch gets out of your way and if something breaks, you built the system so probably know what or at least the wikki will have something that will at least point you in the right direction.Gentoo can be installed from any other live environment, and well… same thing as Arch. You built it, you probably broke it.
a slight correction: GTK4 released with accessibility. We delayed the release to land my rewrite that cut through three different layers to get to Orca. It was indeed incomplete, mainly because we had to wait to get the rest of the stack up to speed, and it had bugs because the whole stack comes without regression testing (something I also worked on). The rest is accurate…
no worries; I just wanted to make sure to note that there were regressions because the accessibility work was there. You can say that the GTK developers rewrote the implementation for 4.0 but it still needed work at release time.
accessibility has been stuck in “held together by hopes and dreams” since the Oracle acquired Sun and chopped the accessibility team, and companies focused on web browsers instead of native OS support; of course, volunteers don’t end up prioritising stuff they don’t use, and you’re left with very few people keeping the lights on and trying to catch up to the changes in the rest of the stack
I'm sorry you have to go through that. And thank you for speaking up.
Just one small suggestion, regarding the old (stable) packages on debian: have you considered running debian testing? Still debian, more recent packages.
@FreakyFwoof You very much have a point there. Though it is not "Linux" ignoring accessibility, it is the desktop environments and software. And the good news is: Progress is being made towards an accessibility-first distro: social.tchncs.de/@Linux@linuxr…
Thank you for writing this. As a sighted developer (with a personal interest in accessibility), I learn a lot from reading the experiences blind people take the time to write down and share with others.
I hope we can get to a point where people stop accepting or normalizing accessibility failures. People seem to treat it like an "extra", but when core functionality fails for a portion of your users, that's not an extra, that means your software is broken!
@FreakyFwoof @dingodoppelt The how manyth blind distro is this? 5th? 6th? It will go the inevitable path as all the others. Also we don't need a blind windows or a blind Mac so why should we need a blind Linux? And what about other disabilities? Why shouldn't I be able to use arch btw?
@talon @dingodoppelt For all MS and Apple's issues (and yes they both have many) I could get a non-techy computer-user up and running with a fresh install and built-in screen-reader within a day. I'd say a couple hours but a day just to be fair. Every single! Linux distro needs the same level of access, whether that's screen-reader, magnification, braille, high contrast, whatever the case may be. Custom builds of stuff always fall behind mainline. We see it time and time again. Bespoke hardware and software has a tendency to get left behind. Braille display tech is living proof of this a lot of the time.
@talon @FreakyFwoof @dingodoppelt you can use arch btw. Arch btw is the best choice, because it just gets out of the way. That's… the best thing I can say about it.
For those who aren't in the know, Bookworm is a really cool reading app that is compatible with over 20 different document formats. You can find a rundown of its features and how to download it by following this link: ddt.one/en/software/bookworm
This has saved me a bunch of times, so might be useful to other people. When I change firewall rules on a remote machine, I always run the following command:
# service pf restart && sleep 30 && service pf stop<br>
And then I hit control-C after a few seconds. If my ssh session is still working, this cancels the service pf stop command. If I've managed to break my ssh connection with the rule change, the firewall is disabled after 30 seconds and I can revert the changes and reenable it.
New in Foobar2000 for Mac V2.25 preview: "Added keyboard shortcut mapping functionality."
Yeeees!!!! This is what I've been waiting for for ages. The Mac version received everything else I used, and behaves very similarly and runs just as quickly as the Windows version, but literal 0 support for hotkeys was a dealbreaker. It goes without saying that, like the Windows version you need to go in and set up the keys yourself and at least for this initial preview there is absolutely no default hotkeys defined where the Windows one at least has some menu items configured. It also currently doesn't support global shortcuts or hotkeys without a modifier so sadly still no space to play or pause for me. Even then this is a huge improvement and I can actually see myself using this as my default player now also on Mac. You can download from here
Here's what I'm personally excited about. New features include built-in UPnP media renderer; each foobar2000 instance can now serve as audio output device for other instances on your home network.
@Mew✨🥰 @Pitermach It cooperates fine with upmpdcli and bubble upnp from my limited testing so far. I like it verry much really. Peter, the Foobar 2000 developer is a genius. The fact he is working on these things 25 + years and is still passionate is more than amazing.
Sean Randall
in reply to Guillem Leon • • •