A little #PIpeWire tip I learned today. If you want to use OBS Studio with a Google Meet session in Firefox. Start OBS Studio first, if not Firefox will set a format for the camera that OBS Studio do not support and you get a black box in OBS Studio. The other way is fine.
Wim is working on a proper solution, adding video conversion to PipeWire, but for now the ordering do matter.
Here's my new project, a keyboard for one-handed typing. Tens of thousands Ukrainians have injured arms and hands during the war, and my goal is to make an inexpensive keyboard for anyone to assemble at home.
Did you know when using JAWS 2024, when focused within the list of running applications (JAWS Key+F10), you can find an app and press Delete. This will close down the application. Very useful if an app is running and you are having difficulty closing it.
You can also use the delete key whilst holding alt down when pressing alt+tab to close a window, rather than releasing alt to activate it. Not in JAWS of course because of it already using Alt+del as a hotkey.
Pravděpodobně už znáte český hlas Zdeněk, který po jeho zveřejnění představil v tomto článku Ondrej Rosík, sám autor prvního slovenského RHVoice hlasu Ondro. Zdeněk je první český hlas na platformě RHVoice.
Did you know that iAccessibility has more than just Apple App Directories? We encourage everyone to submit apps to our Windows, and Android App Directories so everyone can know which apps are accessible on these platforms.
NVDA 2024.3, the free screen reader for Microsoft Windows, is now available for download. We encourage all users to upgrade to this version. Full information & download links available from: nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-3/
Highlights: - Notification of add-on updates - Unicode normalisation options - Help Tech Activator Pro braille display support - Mouse wheel scrolling commands - Many bug fixes & updates for Windows 11, browsers, LibLouis, eSpeak-NG, Unicode CLDR #NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #A11y
NV Access is pleased to announce that version 2024.3 of NVDA, the free screen reader for Microsoft Windows, is now available for download. We encourage all users to upgrade to this version. Highlig…
Can you help me? I'm having problems with the #NVDASR update. It goes completely mute when finished, no matter what voice is in use. Restarted and it doesn't work. I went back to the previous version and tried again and the problem happened again. It even happened with a portable version. I wouldn't want to start a version from scratch because I have everything perfectly configured in 2024.2.
@halisonjl When you say you restarted - did you restart NVDA or the entire PC? We do recommend restarting the entire PC because sometimes odd behaviour can happen directly after installing and before restarting the PC. Which synthesizer / voice are you using? Everything which works in NVDA 2024.2 SHOULD work fine in NVDA 2024.3
It might be useful to let people know. I found the culprit! It took a lot of work, but it worked by deactivating the add-ons one by one. It was an add-on called TemporarySkipe. What a shame. He was very helpful sometimes. And it wasn't even marked as incompatible by NVDA.
@halisonjl Ah thank you - disregard my last message then, sorry I didn't realise you'd replied again - I'm not familiar with that add-on. We haven't introduced anything in 2024.3 which should break add-ons. Assuming restarting the PC didn't fix this add-on, it would be worth reaching out to the add-on developer to see if they have had other reports, or if they are able to fix it.
Great Braille Game! I learned about this game from Holly Anderson of the Maccessibility Podcast. Brailliance is a Braille version of the popular Wordle game with a little twist. You are given the total number of dots in the word, and you have to guess what the word is by figuring out the letters in the word with each of your guesses. For example. The word has a total of 10 dots. So your first guess is tale, t, a, l, e. It tells you that 3 of those letters are in the word, and one is not. t, a, and l, are in the word, and the letter e is not. Please note: those letters are part of the final word, but they do not have to be in that order. So lets see, the letters t, a, and l, equal a total of 8 dots, so you only have 2 dots left to make the final word. And you only have 4 letters left with 2 dots, b, c, i, and k. So now it is just a process of elimination For this word, the correct other letter was k. So the final word was talk, t, a, l, k. The tough part is figuring out words that have a specific number of dots, but this gets easier the more you play. Plus, to help you out, the total number of dots for each letter can be found on the letters of the on-screen keyboard. So how good do you know your Braille? Ready to take the challenge? Just like Wordle, there is a new puzzle every day, as well as some other puzzle packs that you can play on the side if you like. The game is totally free, and does have a cost to get rid of ads if you want. I actually find this game more fun and challenging as Wordle! So I highly recommend giving it a try. Here is the app store link. apps.apple.com/us/app/braillia…
Brailliance is a puzzle game where you guess the word by adding up braille dots.
This game has been carefully crafted to be playable by everyone, and it includes multiple accessibility features for people with blindness and other disabilities.
This is the longest of longshots but... people here seems to know everything about the most obscure stuff. Does anyone know of an #NVDA remote client for Linux? There is one for Android, sort of one for iOS, but I have yet to see one for Linux. I'm thinking it may not be difficult, and would definitely be nice to have. Servers/relays are already available, does anyone know of a client? Boosts are, of course, very welcome, indeed, they'd be appreciated. #blind #A11Y #screenreader
Hello #accessibility experts and #screenReader users. I am trying to find out a wordpress addon that might provide self-hostable and screen reader accessible reservation system. The features I am looking for is ability to integrate this with google calendar or any other caldav based self-hostable calendaring solution. Email notifications for both visitors and administrators is a plus. I need this to be accessible to both visitors as well as administrators. Also recently I think I have seen a mention of croutfunding campaign where the aim is to build open-source accessible booking system. I'd be happy to look at it too if you can remind me of it.
Have you tried our new forums yet? Register at iaccessibility.net, and then head over to the forums either in the menu, or by going to forums.iaccessibility.net. Let us know what you think, and we hope you enjoy them.
I'm trying to take another stab at implementing #Passbook (#pkpass) support in #Catima.
It's going okay but I'm having trouble hunting down test cases, especially test cases with localized strings.
Do you have any .pkpass file you're willing to share with me? If so, please send them to me and tell me if you're okay with me including them in Catima unit tests. Feel free to censor things before sending (but please tell me what you censored).
I received a variety of different passes with quite some variety of fields existing/missing and different data types.
As far as I can tell, I should have enough data to properly test and implement all common cases and I think I don't need more cards right now. If I turn out to be missing something after all I'll make sure to ask for help again :)
Question for those who own the Bible Courier: what TTS engine does it use? I have to admit that I'm intrigued by this device but I haven't yet seen it. Its price of $100 is just high enough that I'm not quite sure I want to order it but I am thinking about it ..
BibleCourier is an electronic pocket Bible designed especially for someone who is blind or visually impaired. BibleCourier weighs about 4 ounces including batteries and is about the size of a pocket New Testament (4 by 2 by .75 inches).
@Bruce_Toews Oh. That's interesting. Thanks so much for the info as I wouldn't have assumed that. So, I assume they have different recordings for each version. Do you feel it's worth purchasing?
I’m not personally familiar with this product. But students in the passive owned something like this it’s usually an audio recording that’s broken up by Bible books, chapters, and verses in such a way that you can easily navigate to them using buttons. There is an awesome Amazon echo app called the Bible app skill though that works pretty good and has several different narrated Bibles. as an alternative.
I don't know what the TTS engine is, but it's a great device. There are so many versions you can get. Plus, it gives you the ability to navigate between book, chapter and even verse. You can also make bookmarks. I highly recommend it.
In case anyone who cares missed this, based on user feedback, I updated my AxSHammer Firefox add-on to add "Kill all aria-label" and "Kill all ARIA roles". As always, this could do as much harm as it does good, so if it breaks anything, you get to treasure all the little pieces. addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firef… #accessibility
@Jamie Teh Thanks for the notice. Most likelly I was not paying attention previously and this is indeed great addon with nice name according to what it does.
For those of you interested in learning how to teach #Blind and low-vision kids and adults #TactileDrawing techniques, #Coding basics, then building up to creating their own digital #SVG graphics for tactile output and beyond, the Tangible Art & Design Adventures curriculum is now live online! Come check out the TADA adventure and share it far and wide! tada.wssb.wa.gov/
This release brings an important OMEMO encryption fix, native notifications on Windows, usability improvements, and many bugfixes. Thank you for all your contributions!
Gajim 1.9.2 brings an important OMEMO encryption fix, native notifications on Windows, usability improvements, and many bugfixes. Thank you for all your contributions!
Please vote for an implementation of VJOURNAL in Thunderbird. 👇 This would REALLY improve the ecosystem and usability of open protocols! Currently there is almost no software on the desktop to sync your notes and journals with a CalDAV server and TB could fill a huge gap here.
# already has a great support for VTODO VCALENDAR and contacts. What is missing though is support for VJOURNAL entries. Journals are close to calendar entries.
20 minutes after launch, the Unihertz Jelly Max campaign is fully funded. This is a 5-inch 5G phone with a 4000 MAh battery, 66 watt charging, 5G, Android 14. kickstarter.com/projects/jelly…
unless one has already been done and I just haven't seen it, it would be good to have the team do a retrospective on why the prerequisite capabilities for screen readers weren't seen as mandatory design elements during planning, and document the changes they're making in policy and procedure to avoid these oversights in future. not to admonish, but there are clearly lessons to be learned here.
@gsuberland i understand, from my perspective a team is an organized entity.
The broad Linux Wayland transition, while necessary, has been difficult but with each roadblock out of the way we are one step further putting it behind us and focus on improving the Linux freedesktop for everyone
For any enthusiasts of legacy assistive tech, it seems the first source code of the Talks Screen Reader for Nokia 9110 Communicator has been published by one of the original devs. Unbelievable to think that it all started off as a bunch of prerecorded messages supplemented by the ability to spell anything it doesn't have ready letter by letter and plugging in external synthesizers and Braille displays via the serial port: github.com/mgroeber9110/talx91… #Accessibility #Blind #RetroTech #ScreenReader
@jcsteh Wow, good memories that communicator was the first thing I ever bought on eBay and I spent the entire week crapping myself thinking I've been ripped off to the tune of many many dollars
Usually people talk about Linux terminal commands used in those hacker-man movies. So here we present you "Termux terminal session" used in an American comedy show.
Also a CW for anyone who's going to watch the entire video: there is some blood involved at around 2:50
Chad (Pete Davidson) is chosen to save the colonists at Elon Musk's Space X Mars habitat.Saturday Night Live. Stream now on Peacock: https://pck.tv/3uQxh4qSu...
It was an honour and pleasure to have been asked to address the National Federation of the Blind’s DeafBlind Division on Friday. I gave an address about living the life we want as blind people who wear hearing aids. If you are blind and wear hearing aids, or have an interest in this topic, I hope you find the text of interest. mosen.org/nfbdb2024/ #NFB24
Here is the text of my address to the NFB’s DeafBlind division which I delivered earlier in the week. Living the life we want as a blind person wearing hearing aids Delivered to the Na…
Na svoje projekty hledam vyvojarskou pomoc (React + TypeScript) a rad dam prilezitost lidem pred prvni praci, kteri muzou benefitovat i z meho mentoringu.
Budu moc rad boostovani tu. Ale hlavne za osobni sireni mezi juniory a velka pomoc by bylo i sdileni na LinkedInu, kde je precijen vetsi sance, ze se nejake zacatecnictvo najde.
Na svoje projekty v muhu.digital hledam vyvojarskou pomoc (React + TypeScript) a rad dam prilezitost lidem pred prvni praci, kteri muzou benefitovat i z meho…
In this video, I show how to use the Libervia CLI to run ad-hoc commands, a powerful feature of XMPP that allows you to execute custom commands on your server or client. I'll demonstrate how to list available commands, run a command to get the server uptime, and send an announcement to all users. This tutorial is a great way to learn more about the Libervia CLI and how to use it to automate tasks and interact with your XMPP ecosystem.
Paperless-ngx is an open-source document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive
You can either scan or upload various document formats into Paperless-ngx.
It will organise and index your scanned documents with tags, correspondents, types, and more. Your data is stored locally on your server and is never transmitted or shared ...continues
supposedly the #android 15 betas allow for BT-HID #braille displays to connect without having to use USB. Has anyone gotten this to work? I just tried it with a Mantis q40 and while the device is detected, when trying to connect it just says " failed to connect to [bluetooth_name_here], try again", so this does not quite appear ready for prime time. Makes sense given its a beta, just curious if its a pebcac issue
If anyone is interested in following the progress I'm making on fixing accessibility issues in #OPNSense, follow this issue on github: github.com/opnsense/core/issue…
I am working on fixing the major accessibility issues that make OPNSense very difficult for someone who is totally blind to use. The following pull requests have been submitted: #7587 - added aria-...
@Jason Fayre That's perfect timing. One of the sites where I'm working as a sysadmin have just received their new opensense based gateway. Next week I'll start learning the platform.
@pvagner Very cool! They have already excepted a few of my poll requests. I’m not sure when these changes will make it into the official packages, but should be soon.
It’s been all over the news, so you probably already have heard about what’s happening in France, but in case you haven’t yet: a new Fractal beta just dropped! What have we been up to? Mentions are sent intentionally Authenticated media are suppor…
Just in case anyone was wondering whether Windows console flooding breaking their screen reader is unique to NVDA, it isn't. Looks like a UIAutomationCore bug. Colour me unsurprised. If you have Python installed, try this with Narrator. Open a command prompt, enter this command and watch the world burn: py -c "print('hi\n' * 100000)" Narrator just won't interact with anything after that in any other application. UIA just goes bye-bye. So much for the UIA CoalesceEvents and ConnectionRecoveryBehavior settings. Absolutely ridiculous. History would suggest that this will just never get fixed.
@TheCube If you can switch apps, NVDA will often eventually read things that don't require UIA, like the Run dialog, the desktop, web browsers, etc. But UIA is just completely dead, and these days, that includes the alt+tab UI.
This happens to me dozens of times a day. It's not just excessive output, it's also terminal redraws where, say, I'm exiting from an editor and I return to a very long-lived SSH session that has significant history, or moving between screen/tmux windows. I now find myself having to use github.com/tspivey/killNVDA/ all the time just to reliably use a console. I almost wish this was an NVDA bug, so it could actually be fixed.
@tristan I've definitely never seen this when only a single screen of output gets dumped; e.g. switching tmux sessions. I wonder whether there's an add-on or something else making this more egregious there. Also, are your consoles set to use Windows Terminal or Windows Console Host? I'm guessing the latter given that you said conhost.
Yeah, I stick to Command Prommpt. I couldn't get used to Windows Terminal, and at the time (a year or two ago) it was more sluggish and buggy for me than just using the classic console. Would it be worthwhile for me to try it again?
@tristan No; I found it even buggier than console host in terms of accessibility. Note though that cmd uses terminal unless you explicitly disable that, which is why I asked.
@tristan But regardless, I am really sick of Microsoft not giving a crap about UIACore stability. This has been going on since like 2007. And the problem is that UIACore is effectively a black box. We can't access any of its internals, so there's nothing we can do about it. At least with MSAA/IA2, as hacky as it is, there are things we can do to work around the problems.
I haven't done enough investigating to see if it's an add-on I have installed, but random output also seems to just crash conhost as well, accompanied by an NVDA error sound. Sometimes the conhost processes will just hang around forever, and twice now I've seen them baloon to 20+ gigabytes in resident memory without any of them visible or active in the foreground. Gotta love it.
@BTyson It doesn't seem to be sufficient to prevent this particular extreme flood from breaking things. I suspect this breakage is purely within UIACore, given that it also happens with Narrator.
MS should really look into this since it's a potential attack vector. Anyone malicious could easily add a bit of code that sends a huge mass of text through the terminal, instantly frying the accessibility system that many programs rely on. UIA is essentially being DDoS'd.
Xin chao and Dumelang! That's how you say Hello in Vietnamese and Setswana. RHVoice Text-to-Speech engine for Android was updated today, adding two new languages: Vietnamese 🇻🇳 and Setswana 🇧🇼. Take a look at our list of languages with available TTS engines on Android accessibleandroid.com/list-of-… #Android #TTS
Hello!! Taking a look at the list, I noticed that the Galician language isn't on it, so I'd like to remedy that. There's a female voice from Vocalizer TTS called Carmela. I'm not quite sure if there are any other TTS engines with Galician voices, though.
I'm still working my way through the official Rust book. Honestly, it's great. Not only does it explain Rust without dumbing things down too much, but it's very accessible. Code isn't in one of those widgets that repeats each line or forces line numbers on me, and what images there are have extremely thorough alt text. I'm very impressed. doc.rust-lang.org/book/
heads up. the June 2024 OSARA keymap improvements has landed in the latest osara snapshot. This is just a gentle reminder to update when the prompt appears. Here's an overview of the changes for Windows and Mac. hoard.reaperaccessibility.com/…
As a blind person, I find it quite sad that the most common use of Unicode Braille these days is to make terminal apps *less* accessible to the people Braille was originally intended for.
do you mean when it's used as a spinner to indicate to a sighted person that something is happening? I maintain a piece of software that does this. If I were to change it to use other characters - such as a sequence of vertical bar, slash, em-dash, back-slash - would that improve matters?
alternatively, is there a sequence I can output to tell a Braille device to stop displaying, and another that I can output to tell it to start paying attention again?
or, well, anything else I haven't thought of that would make the accessibility problem go away without getting rid of the useful display for sighted people?
@DrHyde Terminals are actually surprisingly backwards in terms of accessibility. Where modern GUI environments have a way to indicate such semantic information to a screen reader, terminals don't really. If the spinner contains a progress indication (like percent done), I would at least put that at the beginning of the line to make it slightly more readable. Otherwise, there's nothing you can really do.
We need something like the ARIA specification, but for terminals.
that communicator was the first thing I ever bought on eBay and I spent the entire week crapping myself thinking I've been ripped off to the tune of many many dollars 
Sean Randall
in reply to Brian Hartgen • • •Andy
in reply to Sean Randall • • •