In 2014, my children’s wonderful Mum, Amanda, who is now a teacher of blind children, approached me with a problem of great significance.

She was teaching a blind girl who had written to Santa. But the child was worried that Santa wouldn’t be able to read the letter she had written, because it was in Braille. Amanda did her best to assure the child that Santa would have no problem with Braille, but the doubts remained.

Remembering the stories I used to tell our own children when they were younger, Amanda wondered if there might be anything I could do to help.

Well, it certainly made a pleasant change from my regular writing sessions trying to figure out technology and then explain it to other people.

The result was "Louis, the Blind Christmas Elf", which I gave to Amanda in written form.

Amanda loved the story, but came back and said, "why don't you do an audio version? You'd be good at that," again remembering all the funny voices I'd use when reading to our kids.

So, back I went into the studio, to create the narrated audio version.

The reaction to this little story has been so special, and heart-warming. I've heard from so many people. Teachers, parents, grandparents and consumer leaders have all written to me telling me how much the story has meant to them. And every year at this time, I get requests for it. It has now been translated into other languages and even turned into a play.

I'm deeply touched and honoured that it has meant so much to people.
In the spirit of being proud to be blind, I offer you this festive story and wish you a merry Christmas.

This Christmas, I've finally bitten the bullet and done some serious contributing to @openstreetmap (and also joined the OSM Foundation while I was at it). Honestly, I think it's one of the great wonders of the #OpenSource internet, so I wrote a blog post about why I'm contributing (and you should too)

andreasthinks.me/posts/OSM_for…

#GIS #openstreetmap #GeoSpatial #christmas #DataScience #data

Andreas Varotsis - Why I’m Contributing to OpenStreetMap for Christmas…

…and maybe you should too!

^{andreasthinks.me}

As it is a long, long tradition Conversations is available for free on the Google Play store for the last week of December.

This tradition was originally born so that when I meet people at Chaos Communication Congress and they ask what I do, they have an easy way to install Conversations. In that regard it's a very special year as we are seeing the return of CCC.

However if you are meeting loved ones to celebrate something else these days that’s fine too.🎄

play.google.com/store/apps/det…

#37C3 #XMPP

Conversations (Jabber / XMPP) - Apps on Google Play

An encrypted, user friendly XMPP instant messaging client optimized for mobile

^{play.google.com}

@verdre published his work about reverse engineering Android app support in Sailfish OS and bringing it to GNOME/Linux mobile. 📱

Great read

blogs.gnome.org/jdressler/2023…

#Linux #LinuxMobile #mobileLinux #GNOME #Wayland #Android #reverseEngineering #SailfishOS

The next release of the js sdk is planning to bump the supported #matrix spec version to 1.5 or 1.6. This means it and as a result also Element Web will refuse to start on current versions of #conduit and #dendrite. This is an intentional decision resulting from a discussion between several SCT members.

I think that approach is bad and it should check for a range of supported versions instead of arbitrarily bumping the minor version to make the ecosystem move, but this is a heads up, that now is the time to contribute to both of those servers, if you use them and want to use the Element Web client on them going forward. (I already had my discussion with the SCT and I won't tell other projects, what they should do.)

JS-SDK change: github.com/matrix-org/matrix-j…Dendrite supported versions: github.com/matrix-org/dendrite…Conduit supported versions: gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/b…

Bump minimum spec version to v1.5 by richvdh · Pull Request #3970 · matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk

We only claim to support a year of spec releases, so this should be fine. Part of: #3915 Here's what your changelog entry will look like: ✨ Features Bump minimum spec version to v1.5 (#3970).

^GitHub

NVDA 2024.1 Beta 1 is now available for testing. Highlights include a new on-demand speech mode, the ability to drop speech modes from the NVDA+s command, a new "native selection" mode for Firefox, bulk actions in the add-on store & ability to review add-ons & more!

Note this release breaks add-on compatibility and only works on Windows 8.1 and newer.

Full info and Download from: nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-1b…

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Update #Beta #NewVersion #A11y #Accessibility #News

NVDA 2024.1beta1 available for testing

Beta1 of NVDA 2024.1 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what the next version of NVDA has to offer before it is officially released, we welcome yo…

^{NV Access}

Love to see this! #GNOME Online Accounts supporting the WebDAV standard and having @nextcloud be a skin of it is the way to go!

andyholmes.ca/posts/goa-and-st…

Way more interesting and healthy fediverse news is happening in the shadows and is barely getting discussed! Discourse has federation between different instances of itself and other #fediverse software such as Mastodon working!

Attached is a demo video from Angus McLeod via their announcement here: meta.discourse.org/t/activityp…

Hey ! We're pleased to announce that Ltt.rs [1], an email (JMAP) client, and Mercurygram [2], a new fork of #Telegram, now support #UnifiedPush. And support is being upstreamed to Telegram-FOSS :)

[1] ltt.rs from @daniel
[2] github.com/drizzt/Mercurygram/ from @timothy

GitHub - drizzt/Mercurygram: Unofficial, FOSS-friendly fork of the original Telegram client for Android

Unofficial, FOSS-friendly fork of the original Telegram client for Android - GitHub - drizzt/Mercurygram: Unofficial, FOSS-friendly fork of the original Telegram client for Android

^GitHub

I don't think #WebAIM has an account on the fediverse yet, but the 10th iteration of their Screen Ready survey is now live.

The vital #a11y insights created from these surveys help inform our understanding of the technological and usability landscape. This helps to shape how accessible, and importantly usable experiences are created on the web.

If you use a screen reader, I hope you'll please consider filling it out: webaim.org/projects/screenread…

RScan lets you scan a barcode of any product, and automatically looks it up on DuckDuckGo and tries to select the most fitting and useful description. The scanning is really fast and convenient, meaning it's easy to work with even if you're blind and don't know the location of the barcode, but it's also great for sorting through large number of items, if you need to say search for a particular chocolate in a pile, or you order a large number of cans that you need to tell apart in order to sort them to groups. RScan can deal even with scanning multiple items of the same barcode, making this process easy and efficient.

I've been gradually developing this app over the last years, always reflecting my actual needs and actively using it in my home. I've been sharing it with my friends from Czechoslovakia, receiving great feedback. In our region, the automatic product identification works really well and RScan can truly identify 90% of items just by seeing their barcode.

Few days ago, I finally got to release it in google play, and given this opportunity, would like to expand it to more regions. My theory is that my algorithm should work comparably well in regions where products use metric system for describing themselves (300 g chocolate, 400 ml can etc.).
It's not yet prepared for UK, where the commonly used units are different, and completely unknown for me is USA, where a similar but different barcode standard is used than in Europe, plus they have different units too.

I would love to support as many countries and regions as I can. If you would like to help me with this, sending me barcode numbers of things you commonly use in your region (cans, chocolates, common drugs, drinks), along with the name of your country would be very useful, so I could check out how does your Internet describe things and make RScan adapt for it.
If you're technically skilled, you can read the project's readme:
github.com/RastislavKish/RScan
and directly look for the unit information required by RScan, this would save me the struggle with localization and location simulation.

Also, if RScan works well in your country, I would love to hear that too! My theory of compatible countries is still just a theory, it needs to get verified.

You can find RScan on Google play:
play.google.com/store/apps/det…

And, along with all the code and scanning tips in the documentation, on my GitHub:
github.com/RastislavKish/RScan

Happy scanning!

GitHub - RastislavKish/RScan: A practical barcode scanner for product identification

A practical barcode scanner for product identification - GitHub - RastislavKish/RScan: A practical barcode scanner for product identification

^GitHub

Are you interested in making your notifications private?
We have a great guide in our website describing how to set up your android xmpp application to deliver notifications for all your apps on your device. Without using google.
joinjabber.org/tutorials/servi…
and for people who self host you can use your own server to deliver notifications privately to your devices and the devices of the people that use your server :)
joinjabber.org/tutorials/servi…

#privacy #xmpp #dataprotection

This festive season give the gift of accessibility with an NV Access donation. Your support ensures we continue delivering life-changing technology to blind and visually impaired people globally.
Donations can be made here, nvaccess.org/support-us/#donat…

#Donate #Donation #NVDA #ScreenReader #Accessibility #Christmas

Let's Encrypt will issue new intermediate certs in Q1/2024: groups.google.com/a/mozilla.or…

Make sure your LE cert deployment logic includes serving the right intermediates that ACME should hand you, not just that same old LE intermediate you got years ago. Otherwise, there'll be breakage...

#x509 #pki #LetsEncrypt