I (with the help of a friend) managed to convince another friend to try switching from #Codex to #Claude. And it's not the first time when I hear it's a huge boost, quite another experience. Try Claude, if you haven't yet: pay $20 for a month or drop me a DM, I'll share my subscription (there is an official way of sharing a week of subscription, nothing fishy or illegal). Codex is a good thing for code reviews, finding hard-to-pinpoint bugs, race conditions, such things. But for solving complex tasks… you'll see the difference straight away, and when you start using skills, it's yet another mega boost. #AI #AIAssistedCoding

today's experience with #ClaudeCode where I literally have to scream (yes, wrote many AAAAA's in the terminal).
claude: Okay, now you need to write this very long command, I copied it to your clipboard, review it and press !, then Ctrl+V, then Enter.
Me: AAAAAAA! so you could copy commands to my freaking clipboard and have never ever done this in my whole AI life? So you know what I did? Virtualized JAWS window. Searched for the command. Swore, because it's multiline. Asked you to condense it in one line. Went back to virtualize JAWS window. Searched. copied. Pasted. And you could just copy the whole thing in my clipboard? AAAAA! 🤯
claude: sorry sorry, I'll put it in my memory now.
Moral of the fable: Claude can actually put long commands to your clipboard. and if you're blind (or prefer this interaction independently of your sight), instruct Claude to copy all the commands, especially longer ones, to your clipboard. #AI #TIL #TipsAndTricks

Okay, #Blind people, let's make it hot: #BackTalk or #SandFly? Why? I'm mostly interested to hear from people who used both. Thanks!

If you use or want to use my Debussy #set of skills and plugins for #ClaudeCode, a new addition, should work on windows (tested), Linux (tested in WSL) and Mac (not tested): a short, concise, screen-reader friendly status line to monitor your limits. Here's an example output from my live session:
Opus 5.5. Ctx 8. Session 0. Week 6.
that means: model is Opus 5.5, 8 percent of the context is used, 0 percent from the 5-hour limit used, 6 percent from the week limit used.
Marketplace is here: https://github.com/Oire/debussy.
#AI #Development #Accessibility

RE: https://dragonscave.space/@jpellis2008/117446160332567746

Muahahahaha!

#TIL I was today years old when I learned that you can actually share your iPhone screen including VoiceOver to Zoom in windows. To do that:
1. Join a Zoom meeting in Windows.
2. Press Alt+S or click the Screen Share button.
3. Select the Other tab. With screen readers, move to that tab in the tab list and press Enter, it doesn't get selected automatically.
4. from the list that appears, select "iPhone or iPad".
5. check the Share Sound checkbox, if you want this.
6. click Share.
7. On the iPhone (or iPad) from the Control Center select Screen Mirroring. If it's not there, select More Commands (or something like that, sorry, my iPhone is in French now) and add Screen Mirroring.
8. On that screen select "Zoom User".
9. If voiceOver sound doesn't come to your Windows Zoom meeting, you might need to reload VoiceOver.
10. Enjoy!
#Tip #ScreenShare #Accessibility #Zoom #iPhone #iPad #Windows #VoiceOver #ScreenReader

There are many amazing developers. there are many amazing blind developers. And thanks to #AI, even more blind developers can make their ideas a living product, and those who coded before AI, now can do it more quickly. Quinn, Aaron, Brian, Andre, Bryn, Allison, Jeff, Taylor and many many others (I don't tag you all so the thread doesn't become a huge mess). That post was inspired by last boost, Aaron's accessible Android emulator. Thank you for your work, thank you for existing and making this world a brighter and more accessible place to live. That's it, that's the post. #Accessibility #Gratitude

RE: https://toot.cafe/@matt/117384027466885784

Yes yes yes! #AI

and here it is, my new software for #Windows. I wrote it for myself but I thought, maybe it would be useful for someone else.
Meet #PlanCake, software to read Markdown and annotate it in place.
Do you have a long Markdown document, like a plan, a piece of documentation or your personal notes? Open it in PlanCake as a normal document. If you use a screen reader, you can navigate by headings, lists, tables and links, as usual.
Since PlanCake renders GitHub flavored Markdown, you can check and uncheck tasks in task lists straight away.
click or press Enter on a block of text (including list items and table cells), and you can add quick notes (also supporting Markdown!). Notes are saved in the file itself, with markers you set in settings. By default markers are set to [usernote] and [/usernote]. Want rather a single marker for user notes that go to the end of line? Set the opening marker to something like !USERNOTE! and leave the closing marker empty.
You can also add, edit and delete notes by using context menus.
By default, all of your notes are also shown in a list (F6 for keyboard users, right pane of the window for sighted users).
You can use command line, you can paste files from clipboard (or drag them into the window), you can open files by link, export them to HTML, export your notes to JSON if needed.
It's super convenient to annotate plans for AI assistants (hence the name), but it's absolutely not restricted to this task. Writing a book in Markdown and want to add quick notes for yourself? Are you a book editor working for an author? Add comments in PlanCake!
Works flawlessly with Debussy, my set of #ClaudeCode skills: https://github.com/Oire/debussy.
Website: https://plan-cake.oire.dev/.
GitHub: https://github.com/Oire/plan-cake/.
Do you like my software? Consider donating: https://oire.org/donate/, or sponsor on gitHub. Thanks!
#Software #OpenSource #Accessibility #Markdown #Notes #Annotation #Documentation #Planning

Interesting, why can it be that #Fedra starts and then closes absolutely silently? Tried building from master and running both in targets/release and from the zip version. Tried also command-line run, absolutely nothing. // CC @TheQuinbox

Folks, does anybody know about a good enough speech-to-text solution for #Linux? I'm super skeptical about Linux desktop accessibility in general, but asking for a friend @gemlog. the person is sighted, so no particular requirements on screen reader accessibility. Thanks! #Accessibility #LinuxDesktop

shoutout to all #RunaTTS beta users: please report any weirdness with single character reading in your language to me directly. I started investigating and see now that many languages are messed up when moving character by character, especially for ReadSpeaker. I'm gradually fixing it now, but any input is valuable. Thanks!

I'm super used to #ClaudeCode. It's my main AI assistant when coding, I love its screen reader mode, its skills, agents, etc., etc. but as I posted earlier, I hit my limit and so got bored, so tried Codex Astra on a small task I need to accomplish anyway. TL;DR: #Codex with default permissions is annoying as hell. I know Claude is the same, but it was a long time ago when I set it up correctly for me. Moral: know your tools. Now setting up Codex properly. #AI #AIAssistedCoding

Recently there was a poll in the French-speaking community about political views of Mastodon users.
Results:
Total: 696 votes (not many, but quite representative for such a niche community).
Far left: 398 votes;
Left: 289 votes;
Right: 8 votes;
Far right: 1 vote.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
@gemlog, that's what I was talking about.

Re last: I'm even more radical in this. The vast majority of that SJW movement is highly hypocrite, it's most about words that you can't say and political opinions that you can't have. They pick favorite groups to fight for (on paper) and favorite war conflicts to take a side in (mostly also on paper). disabled people are not their favorites and will never be, because we are too different and too ambiguous. A blind person, a person with ALS or a person with cognitive disabilities can be leftwing or rightwing, support different sides of war conflicts or — absolutely not care about this particular conflict, support or hate the LGBT movement or, again, — absolutely not care about it. Hence, they can't say "all blind people are our friends!", or: "All people with cerebral palsy are our friends!", or "let's fight for people using wheelchairs, they are our friends!" — that will never be true, fortunately or unfortunately.
Example (that hopefully won't cause moderation actions, since I have others that probably will). I'm Ukrainian, I love Ukraine with all my heart, it is so deep that even now, after almost five years, I sometimes wake up in tears, because I dreamed about that blessed land before the war, that land that became my home (yes, I was not born in Ukraine) from the very first minute I put my feet on it. And I'm blind from birth.
But there are other blind people, who support Putin's aggression, who think Russians and Ukrainians are "one people", "all Soviet/russians", "We are russians, god is with us" and all that BS. so, if a social justice warrior picked Russian-Ukraine war as his/her conflict to support one side of, and say, he/she supports Ukraine, — how can he/she fight for blind people? For all blind people?
It's just an example, maybe a too bold one, but that's my thought: disabled people won't be in the focus of the SJW movement because we are too complicated and too ambiguous to classify.
Happy to discuss.
#Accessibility #Disability

It seems, I've only now discovered this article by @RareBird15: https://lanie.work/technology/privacy-is-a-luxury-i-cant-afford/. This is the truth as it is.
All those leftists who preach inclusion and happiness for everyone (which, as we all know, is already something worrying because there is no one condition everyone can be happy in, except for one: if you are a dictatorship and you eliminate people who are not happy under your power — anyway). Many people especially in Europe now talk about degoogling, de-microsofting, de-appling, de-whatever-ing. Although I have no spare time for it, I read and keep reading those articles. And not a single of them, not an F'ing single one, mentions #Accessibility for the blind, chronically ill, for people with parkinson's, for all of us who do need accessibility. Inclusion is good, but only on paper and only for certain groups. Use various pronouns (even non-existent in the current language), don't pronounce this or that word, don't have a different opinion on some subjects, and first and foremost, don't forget to preach inclusion. For everyone. Yes, for everyone — except for at most 25% of people on this planet who *really* need accessibility, accomodations and particular treatment.
H is for hypocrisy there.
and no, you won't convince me that privacy-schmivacy or something else is more important then accessibility. Accessibility is *not* a luxury — it's how we live. A talking computer or a talking smartphone is the only way for us to communicate with such devices (there is Braille, I know, but it's not the point of this discussion). A website suited for keyboard and screen reader operation is the only website we *can* work with. Again: it's not about what we *want*, it's about what we *can*. So if your website is a million times private, sovereign, open-source and what not, but if it's not accessible — I *cannot* work with it, hence it's not for me. If your operating system has no screen reader or is not suited for keyboard and screen reader users — I *cannot* use it, hence it is not for me. And no, I won't go and fix everything, as most of the open-source community suggests. I have no time and no mental force to fix OS kernels and office suites. Of course, if you hire me on a contract as an accessibility specialist (or not me, anyone of us who is knowledgeable enough, I'm not jealous!) — then it's another thing.
That's that simple. And, as we are here, if Meta glasses can help me to read a sign or a menu in the restaurant — I'll strive to buy them, because I need this accomodation. I don't know why I have to repeat such things over and over and over, — I don't know why Lanie has to, why Elena @elettrona has to — but we repeat this and we will do it on and on and on, as much as they want us to shut the F up.
P.S. for those AI haters: This was written with no help of AI.
#OpenSource #Privacy

Folks, I need help. A friend of mine handed me a nearly dead HDD with tons of photos and documents. It's a WD My Passport 500 GB, very old, making funny noises but not too much. Windows sees it, diskpart says file system: raw.
What is the best way of attempting to recover the data? We don't care about the HDD itself, just the files on it.
After some investigation I found GNU DdRescue (needs to load into Ubuntu which is a bit daunting, I have no experience working with Linux Desktop and screen readers really); R-Studio and a couple more pieces of software for Windows.
Any ideas, comments, suggestions are hugely appreciated.
UPDATE. From the replies I've gotten so far (thank you so much folks!), I think I was not clear enough: what I count to do is to copy the HDD byte by byte into an img file, then calmly work on that copy. Thanks again!
#HDD #Windows #AskFedi #FediHelp #RecoverData

RE: https://social.leons.cc/@garo/117219003372344343

Yes, I knew it but it's a great suggestion, thanks!

#Microsoft keeps breaking #Accessibility in #windowsForms. Many of you can notice that their menus are not native menus anymore, but I was today years old when I noticed that their list view is also something else. With NVDA it reads as "table" (which it should not), and only the first column is read. I checked, it ships in SIC! and nobody told me (probably because nobody knew there are other columns). I'm crafting a solution right now, but it's a crutch of course. I don't want to go away from WinForms because other #CSharp solutions are even worse accessibility-wise. It seems, the only viable way to cook apps is wxDragon now, but it's Rust which… is syntactically very specific, at least for me. Sigh. #Blind

Hallelujah! #Google fixed password autofill #Accessibility in #Chrome! Coooool!