@podfeet interviews Celeste D’Costa from Imaginable Solutions about their Guided Hands assistive device that enables anyone with limited fine motor skills to write, paint, draw, and access technology. #a11y #CSUN2025podfeet.com/blog/2025/06/csun-…
Allison interviews Celeste D’Costa from Imaginable Solutions about their Guided Hands assistive device for people with limited hand mobility. The device enables anyone with limited fine motor skills to write, paint, draw, and access technology.
About the Open Source Accessibility Summit The Open Source Accessibility Summit will be a one-day in-person event that brings together members of the disability, accessibility, and open source communities to define a roadmap for improving the accessi…
Ok, the #Thunderbird chat interface for IRC and Matrix seems to have #a11y issues with #NVDA now. Sometimes NVDA completely freezes, especially when the interface is maximised, though not reliably in all channels. I filed a bug, appreciate anyone who can dig into what on earth is going on: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.…
The Trump administration is quietly working to fast-track changes to a key disability rights law by circumventing typical procedures, advocates are warning.
Incidentally, the company unleashing a new wave of contrast problems on the web (see today’s Codepen Spark for liquid glass copycats) is also the company that seems uninterested in supporting `prefers-reduced-transparency`: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/do…
The prefers-reduced-transparency CSS media feature is used to detect if a user has enabled a setting on their device to reduce the transparent or translucent layer effects used on the device.
My first experience of users with disability testing today and what an experience! I received feedback on components that had been coded in a semantic and accessible way, but which unfortunately led to issues in use. Even though I was already convinced of the need to go beyond compliance, I got some very concrete examples! If you're in the process of improving accessibility, do this kind of test. Asking people who are concerned to give their feedback is really important and precious #a11y
Apparently the Department of Energy is trying to eliminate accessibility/nondiscrimination regulations. If you live in the U.S., please take a few minutes to comment on DOE-HQ-2025-0015 and DOE-HQ-2025-0024: regulations.gov/document/DOE-H… regulations.gov/document/DOE-H…
Please do not use this post as an excuse to beat up the devs at Apple or Google. If you are doing that, you have missed the point of this post and you are being unnecessarily mean to individuals who may have no control over broader organizational dec…
@Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺 @Jayson Smith @Nick Giannak III If you are still testing deltachat, I managed to run my #chatmail relay and it's working for a few weeks for me. I have created a groupchat where I'd like to invite other screen reader users. As I have posted a few times recently, #deltachat people do really care about screen reader #a11y so while testing and something is not working the way you would expect lets describe it in details, and report it properly.
Everyone should be doing what Home Connect is doing and we all would have a much easier time picking our household devices. Home Connect is a common smart household appliances platform for everything by Siemens, Bosch and Guggenau. They let you, without creating accounts and anything, add a virtual device of any type, to play with its control interface via the app. A great way to evaluate the accessibility, which by the way is a great and is 100 percent a planned endeavour, while playing with a fantasy coffee or washing machine. #Accessibility #A11y #Blind
It's really bugging me that I need to replace a `<fieldset>` with a `div` prepped up with ARIA attributes because Chrome has a decade old layout bug. #webdev #a11y
Mit diesem Film macht der *Deutsche Blinden- und Sehbehindertenverband (DBSV)* auf die Probleme aufmerksam, die viele Touchscreens für sehbehinderte Menschen...
SoapBox: I love the AI tools like CoPilot and Gemini, but I'd appreciate some more thoughtful design for those with Blindness and Low Vision. I'm on CoPiolot and it does a great job of treating its responses as ARIA-Live events so JAWS reads them out promptly, but it loves to talk in MarkDown.Example: **Steps to Baking Cake** steps 1.**Preheat Oven** to 400 Degrees. The Markdown is just littering the whole experience, if I could save a default preference telling it I'm Blind and using a screen reader so please never respond using MarkDown or Visual Descriptions, that would be a huge win! #a11y
This is a rant. It comes from a place of frustration obviously, so take it in that context.
Okay, so I bought the BT Speak, on an installment plan of course cause I ain't fucking rich, and I have no clue what to use it for. So first of all, I probably have adult ADHD even though my doctor, who is supposed to know things, says adult ADHD isn't a thing. And we're supposed to trust our healthcare provider, and they know everything right? /s So maybe it was an impulse buy, just a little, although I really was curious about it.
It's a Raspberry Pi 5 compute module with a battery pack and Braille input, tiny stereo speakers, a microphone, a USB C port, Mini-HDMI or some esoteric bullshit, and Micro-SD card slot. It comes with 32-GB internal storage, with like 5 GB in your /home partition cause why the fuck not, and no headphone jack. Cause WTFN.
So honestly, there's no magic here. Hell, there's barely any of the sort of "Assistive Tech Assurances and niceities" that other products have. And I know, it's a year old, but I mean couldn't they have put a beta tag on it? Cause that's what it feels like. Like it honestly feels like they just released it and *then* worked on it.
So it's got an editor, where everything is supposed to happen for some reason, and how is it used? Not through BRLTTY cause screen readers are so last decade. No, it's self-voicing cause Linux sucks so badly that that's what they have to do to have a solid experience where things happen consistently.
Except oh hey I went into the options menu and no speech. Granted, a reboot fixed that, but it leaves me unsure if I can trust it. Oh and the battery. So it died once, and I plugged it in and turned it on. Battery was immediately around 10%. I leave it there for a good 10 minutes, and it's at about 38%. I find that hard to believe, so I take it off, and it's at 15%. So, meh.
Also you primarily type in computer Braille. Oh you can type in Grade 2 Braille in the editor, but everywhere else? Desktop-mode, all computer Braille. Cause BRLTTY just can't make shit work cause its that one person scratching his own itch, lol, not a team of people with different requirements. And for those who don't know Braille, computer Braille feels like drawing each word out on the screen with a pencil. So writing an email, or a document in LibreOffice? It'd take a while. No other Braille device has this issue. None. Android? Nope, I can type in Grade 2 Braille all day long on it.
Also, maybe there's a command I'm missing. Maybe there's a part of the manual I've not read. Spoiler, I read the whole thing. But when they say the editor is the heart of the BT Speak, they ain't lying. It's literally the program you live in. Oh sure, you can take a detour to the file manager or contact manager or YouTube search, but there's no switching between those programs. Why? Cause you can't open the options menu from within them. Oh no. You go back to the editor, which may not even be the thing you're using on that occasion. But you go back to it and *then* go to whatever else. Cause Linux isn't a multitasking OS /s. Oh and it doesn't have a book reader. And if you open an EPUB, it turns it into a TXT file cause, again, why not. No heading navigation, nothing. And if you convert it to Markdown, lol Pandoc adds the stupid heading links which link back to the table of contents or whatever. And you have to hear that. Cause, again, why not.
Oh and desktop mode is sluggish. It feels like you're using Linux in a virtual machine cause why the fuck not? I mean it's not like the Raspberry Pi 5 has 8 GB of RAM right? Like what the actual fucking fuck! And it ain't even the BT Speak folks' fault either, Linux #a11y fucking bullshit is just that inefficient on anything but a powerful Intel or AMD machine. Cause, again, why the fuck not. So I *could* do email, Internet, LibreOffice, all that nice shit on the thing, but I don't because it's a drag and there ain't shit anyone can do about it cause not enough resources /s.
Lol people on the list are all like "Why do you want a traditional mode program when this desktop mode one can do it and more?" and I don't blame the people that want traditional mode to be used to its limits, desktop mode is just that laggy and so soul-suckingly disappointing to use.
Like I *know* it's not just me. I'm fucking done thinking it's just me that notices shit. Cause I beat myself up enough already for practically being an alien compared to all these normal people, I'm fucking done feeling like my feelings are overblown, or I'm being too much, nah fuck that bullshit. And I shouldn't have to fucking learn to code to do free labor for a company I paid $1000 to. Fuck that shit too. So, I'm probably not the right person for that thing. And that's fine. I'll leave it to the actually smart blind people that can make an OS in their fucking sleep. Fuck this bullshit.
Oh also, Bookshare now wants their money too. And rent. Cause, again, why the fuck not?
What screen readers do you use regularly on your Android device? I’m looking for an anecdotal idea of how popular alternative #screenreader apps on #android really are. Please boost! Thanks so much for your help. #screenreaders#a11y#accessibility#blind
The goal During my 25 years working as a web accessibility specialist I noticed the biggest hurdle to create an accessible web, is the lack of knowledge.
Edit, vu que malgré suppression du raccourci dans LibreOffice, ça ne marche toujours pas. Du coup, nouvelle question : est-ce que le raccourci NVDA + F7 est valable dans LibreOffice pour ouvrir la liste des éléments ? Si non, y'a un autre raccourci ? Un truc particulier à faire ? Jeter ma Surface ? (Je vous vois les libristes 🙄) ----
Hm, est-ce que chez vous, dans #LibreOffice writer, le raccourci pour l'orthographe c'est aussi F7 ? [Eu la réponse déjà]
Ça entre en conflit avec le raccourci du lecteur d'écran #NVDA pour voir la liste des objets, et je ne sais pas si c'est "normal" (pas possible sous LibreOffice alors que c'est dit possible sous Microsoft office ?), ou juste que ma surface pro arrive pas à bien gérer quoi contrôle quoi...
J'ai tenté en prenant un clavier normal aussi, parce que la touche NVDA sur le clavier surface est relou à faire, donc je pensais que c'était p't'être ça, mais non. Et pourtant quand j'active l'aide à la saisie, ça me dit bien que c'est le bon raccourci avec F7🤷♀️
Just published a blog post tearing into hCaptcha’s so-called “accessibility” mode.
It’s not accessibility. It’s a cookie. And to get that cookie, you now have to submit your email and send a code via SMS to an U.S. phone number. It fails silently. It doesn’t confirm anything. You click “Confirm Code” and get “An error has occurred.” No cookie. No fallback. No support. And if you somehow get it? It’s a third-party cookie your browser probably blocks, and it expires. Then you get to do it all again.
Meanwhile, hCaptcha’s text-based challenge — the only mode that might actually work with a screen reader — isn’t tied to the cookie at all. It only shows up if the website owner specifically enables it. Most don’t. So even if you’re blind, even if you’re using assistive tech, you get the same unusable image grid as everyone else.
This isn’t accessibility. It’s exclusion wrapped in PR.
The blog post breaks it all down: how the cookie flow works (or doesn’t), why the system is broken by design, how developers got misled, and what real alternatives look like. If you care about accessible design or just want to understand how bad this gets, read it.
One of my closest and longest friends is starting a new YouTube channel documenting his journey to fulfill a life-long dream of his. Even though he's low vision, through a new program available in Ontario, he has the opportunity to gain his drivers license via the use of a bioptic telescope. If you love cars as much as he does, are just curious, or are a low vision person interested in what a program like this could mean for you, check out his first video on the channel! As far as I know, this is the first time someone has documented the journey of learning to drive with a bioptic telescope from day one, from the perspective of a person with a disability, rather than a doctor or other medical professional. You can find the video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GZdw1CzYtI#a11y#cars#driving#accessibility#disability
Another piece of cool, open source, user repairable #linux #hardware ordered because #accessibility focused guides on user-repairable hardware basically don't exist. I can't wait to evaluate it and make a post series about the experience. Maybe with some videos! I need a Patrion or something if I keep this up, but oh well. It's fun and people seem to enjoy what I have to say. #mnt #linuxHardware #a11y #openSource #foss #openHardware
Thorsten presents innovative TTS solutions and a variety of voice technologies, making it an excellent starting point for anyone interested in open-source text-to-speech. Whether you're a developer, accessibility advocate, or tech enthusiast, his channel offers valuable insights and resources. Don't miss out on this fantastic content! 🎬
Guude! (hi, nice to see you) 👋,
i'm Thorsten 😊.
You like open source, privacy aware and local running voice technology? Me too 😎. You'll find cooking recipe like tutorials on TTS, STT, Voice Assistants, AI, ML and way more cool stuff here.
Thanks to @spsheridan, we’ve got CSUN Accessible Tech conference interviews, we’ve got my wish list from 2024 for WWDC, a deep dive into SD card speeds by @zkarj, and Security Bits with @bart, all on this week's NosillaCast.
Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Apple Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, May 25, 2025, and this is show number 1046.
**update**: If you are using this post as some kind of call-to-action to harass and attack the GOS developers, please don't.
That damages everyone. You, them, and myself. It's not helpful.
**Update two**. I have made the decision to pull this post. It is not a good starting-point for a discussion, and just encourages defensiveness on both sides – when there really aren't sides here at all.
As a FOSS contributor, I am deeply ashamed at the way I approached this out of frustration.
@J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen You're giving us a shell of a car and the wheels, but not the engine. This is exactly like saying "I built a display framework but no graphics drivers, good luck." #a11y #accessibility #android jkjk
“I’m asking this massive company to stop releasing features & products & ideas that are obvious barriers. And I want them to stop expecting free labor from the community. It’s tiring, frustrating, and disrespectful.”
Hey, Alphabet or Google or Chrome or whomever in that illegal monopoly continues to release things to the web platform that are full of accessibility barriers, I have what I think is a straightforward request.
Hey, Alphabet or Google or Chrome or whomever in that illegal monopoly continues to release things to the web platform that are full of accessibility barriers, I have what I think is a straightforward request.
