Our latest In-Process blog is out: nvaccess.org/post/in-process-3…

Featuring
- The NVDA 2025.1 Beta
- What’s New in 2025.1
- Updated NVDA Expert Certification 2025
- Gene Empowers New Zealand
- Changes for Developers
- NVDA Add-ons and API Breaking Changes

#NVDA #NVDAsr #Blog #News #Newsletter #ScreenReader #Blind #Accessibility #Update #Changes

For any folks still out there using the #Rockbox firmware, I recently discovered the Hifi Walker H2 which is both officially supported, and more importantly, still being manufactured and sold. Flashing takes a bit of patience if you're #blind, but it can be done.

amazon.com/HIFI-WALKER-H2-Reso…

Wow, Orca can't keep focus right in Fedora 42. I'm not even sure how to describe this well enough. On Enafore, Mastodon client, arrow through your timeline. You'll get stuck in a loop of going down a few posts, then you'll be brought back to a previous one, and you'll be stuck around that post unless you arrow down fast enough or something. Wow I might just move back to Windows now on this computer at least.

#accessibility #orca #linux #foss #blind

Yesterday at the #PlayStation concert, a young, blind man sat next to me.

We got talking and it turns out he is an accessibility consultant for companies, including video game developers and has worked with Sony on God of War and other products!

He goes by his handle: Sightless Kombat.

He is entirely #blind from birth, but loves video games so is passionate about accessibility in the sector.

I told him to come join Mastodon as I think it’s the friendliest social network for visual impairments, he said he was thinking of joining but wasn’t sure which instance was good. I’m not sure if there is one that’s dedicated to visual impairment? I just told him to join mstdn.games 😅

Anyway, here’s his YouTube & Twitch channels, and website if you’re interested in seeing what he has to offer. The dude has platinumed God of War Ragnarok on its hardest difficulty, what a legend!

YouTube: youtube.com/@sightlesskombat?s…

Twitch: twitch.tv/sightlesskombat

Website: sightlesskombat.com/

#disability #disabled #Accessibility

SightlessKombat - Twitch

I'm an award-winning, multi-credited accessibility consultant and gamer without sight from the UK. If you ever thought "how can someone with no sight play a videogame?", you've come to the right place for answers! Relax, say hi and see just how I enj…

^Twitch

I met up with a #blind colleague over the winter break. He was travelling with a sighted partner and said something like: "We'll have so-and-so along, so some things that are usually a pain will be easier."

He did not mean like, white water rafting and shit. He meant, walking to a store next to the hotel at 8 PM because someone needs a tube of toothpaste and then maybe picking up some churros.

I saw a post from someone at a conference saying that they walked out of their hotel to buy a bagel, and instead ended up in the middle of an unexpected antiques show in the street. It got me thinking about how #disability affects spontaneity.

Not in a depressing, woe-is-me sort of way, but from a practical, logistics point of view. Sadly, for many #blind people, this might've gone something like:

Blind Person (BP) to First Hotel Person (HP1): "I want to get a bagel from <bagel shop name>."

HP1: "We have bagels in the hotel, if you'd like me to take you to the restaurant?"

BP: "No, this bagel shop was recommended to me and I've been looking forward to trying it. It's only across the street."

HP1: "Well... I'm not sure. Let me check if anyone is available."

[BP sits awkwardly in lobby for 10 minutes, not knowing if they'll be there long enough to fold their cane or not.]

HP2: "Hi, my colleague tells me you're heading to <bagel shop>; I can take you there now if you're ready?"

BP: "Yep, let's go."

[BP and HP2 head out of the hotel.]

BP: "Wow, what's all this noise?"

HP2: "Oh, there's... an antiques fair I think it is? Happening this weekend outside the hotel."

BP: "Nice. What sort of stuff do they have?"

HP2: "It looks like furniture, pots... stuff like that. We're just here at the bagel shop, let me get the door. One sec."

[HP2 leads blind person inside, leaving them in the hopefully capable hands of their next unexpecting helper and then running back to the hotel as quickly as they can.]

[BP enjoys a bagel, before repeating the whole charade again to get back to the hotel 35 minutes later.]

What they don't do is: explore the antiques fair, pick out a nice piece for a loved one, wander off to find a quieter spot after finding the whole thing ultimately overwhelming, discover an idyllic inner-city oasis, or any number of other things non-disabled people might do without thinking about them upfront.

Living life as a series of planned transactions, all with a defined end point, can be exhausting and kind of sad.

Note: If you've reached this far and are one of those blind people who would've done things differently in this scenario because you have superpowers, please keep your gloating and judgement of others out of the replies.

I have an #accessibility question for #screenReader users.

If I use hashtags within flowing text, like #this, does that annoyingly interrupt the narration flow and should I rather list them all at the end?

Or is in-text tagging the preferable alternative to a large wall of hashtags at the end, like this:

#blind #AskFedi #screenReaders

Anyone who is blind, or who has worked with the blind, knows how expensive our technology can be. This couldn't be more true with relation to braille displays. Even the cheapest costs at least $799, and it's already behind the newest in that line, at $899. This is the Orbit Reader 20 and 20+. Now, a student in India wants to change that by creating a display that is truly affordable (under $50)! Please pass this on, so that we can give him greater recognition within the blind community. Even if it costs a bit more than he initially suspected it would, there is no excuse for the $2,000 to $5,000 average price of such technology when cheaper alternatives can be designed! He is determined to bring this to market, so let's help him do it and show our appreciation for his hard work on this life-changing project!

forbes.com/sites/kevinanderton…

#access #ACB #accessibility #affordability #blind #braille #BrailleDisplays #children #education #employment #independence #India #learning #NFB #ocr #parent #reading #science #school #students #teachers #technology #work #writing

Do you use a screen reader and read arabic content with it? Have you ever wondered why Arabic tts literally always sucks, being either super unresponsive, or gets most things wrong all the time? I've been wanting to rant about this for ages!
Imagine if English dropped most vowels: "Th ct st n th mt" for "The cat sat on the mat" and expected you to just KNOW which vowels go where. That's basically what Arabic does all day every day! Arabic uses an abjad, not an alphabet. Basically, we mostly write consonants, and the vowels are just... assumed? Like, they are very important in speech but we don't really write them down except in very rare and special cases (children's books, religious texts, etc). No one writes them at all otherwise and that is very acceptable because the language is designed that way.
A proper Arabic tts needs to analyze the entire sentence, maybe even the whole paragraph because the exact same word could have different unwritten vowels depending on its location, which actually changes its form and meaning! But for screen readers, you want your tts to be fast and responsive. And you do that by skipping all of that semantic processing. Instead it's literally just half-assed guess work which is almost wrong all the time, so we end up hearing everything the wrong way and just cope with it.
It gets worse. What if we give the tts a single word to read (which is pretty common when you're more closely analyzing something). Let's apply that logic to English. Imagine you are the tts engine. You get presented with just 'st', with no surrounding context and have to figure out the vowels here. Is it Sit? Soot? Set? Maybe even stay? You literally don't know, but each of those might be valid even with how wildly the meaning could be different.
It's EXACTLY like that in Arabic, but much worse because it happens all the time. You highlight a word like 'كتب' (ktb) on its own. What does the TTS say? Does it guess 'kataba' (he wrote)? 'Kutiba' (it was written)? 'Kutub' (books (a freaking NOUN!))? Or maybe even 'kutubi' (my books)? The TTS literally just takes a stab in the dark, and usually defaults to the most basic verb form, 'kataba', even if the context screams 'books'!
So yeah. We're stuck with tools that make us work twice as hard just to understand our own language. You will get used to it over time, but It adds this whole extra layer of cognitive load that speakers of, say, English just don't have to deal with when using their screen readers.

#screenreader #blind #tts

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