Vibing around with making an accessibility mod for Pokemon Stadium. And Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep. And Dissidia Final Fantasy, the original not DuoDecim. And Mortal Kombat Unchained. And Dragon Ball Z Attack of the Saiyans. And Legend of Zelda, Link's Awakening. And one of the Fire Emblem games. And Chrono Trigger.
Because ADHD that's why.
So I took a day off from work today expecting to get a ton done. Instead my stupid body decided I needed to sleep all day. Ugh. Stupid body.
Today is White Probing Cane day. This probing device has aided blind people in getting around for a century. It was first invented by James Biggs, AKA Big Throbber. Since then, it has given blind people the independence needed to come, and go, as they please. It is also on this probing day that we face dependence of a different kind, the digital dependence on corporations. But the time has come, my fellow blinds, to cast off the chains of the corporates who say we must depend on them, and take the whips from those who would flog us with “Have you tried resetting your phone?" or “Have you tried turning off and on your screen reader?" We must labor upon Linux, where we can build our own space that can still interface with the sighted world, safely from our own. For they cannot abide us, and cannot accomedate us. From the Windows Start menu, to Google disability support, to iOS 27 bugs, we have spoken and spoken and spoken. It is time, my blinds, that we act. Let us probe with pride!
So like I know no one is gonna get it, so I'll explain. First time Unicode folks added people with White Canes to Emoji, it was called a probing cane. Dirty jokes ensued, of course. This is mostly a joke, cause I'm sure nothing will come of it, and also a metastatement about how sighted people can't even get the names of our tools right.
For those who use Renpy to make visual novels, it now has native screen reader mode, and an AltText property for sprites.
Okay, y'all, quick Backtalk tip. You can lock the gosh darn orientation! You hold 4-5-6, and then swipe up with another finger, like dot 1, and poof, orientation locked! So I have charge port to the right, and it isn't a hacky mess of changing gesture assignments and stuff! Holy crap! One more step to actually enjoying using Android. Now if I can get Braille to type in my Pin, that'll be one more step!
I just got BackTalk on my Galaxy Watch 5. This Watch feels more like using VoiceOver on my Apple Watch series 4 or so. Doable. Not great, but definitely better than TalkBack. @TheQuinbox @fireborn
Wanna see how awful the new Google Book accessibility is, right on your Mac if you have one?
This runs a real Googlebook OS image in a VM on an Apple Silicon Mac — GPU-accelerated, with Chrome working.
Here we go, the Great Switch is starting! Or something.
> I'm getting sick and tired quite frankly of iOS at this point. I got the 18 Pro recently, and for the first day or two I was totally fine with the device. I loved how much smaller it was, the unibody aluminum design, everything about it was great, until it wasn't.
Apple makes some of the nicest feeling hardware on the planet, but the software always just leaves a horrible taste in my mouth after a little while. Just on this new phone alone, here are a few things that have driven me mad, to the point of potentially wanting to switch:
When using Direct Touch Typing, my VoiceOver will decide to play a sound as if I'm swiping, making me miss the tap, and not put a letter in, and disrupt flow entirely.
Discord calls now make YouTube videos incredibly quiet, to the point where I can no longer watch them while in a call with anyone. Not just Discord, but also FaceTime Audio as well.
The entire audio stack seems fucked. I had to call emergency services to let them know there was a fire on the freeway when I was driving somewhere with my girlfriend, and I shit you not, the audio was doing this strange auto adaptation to my environment or something, so it would make the dispatcher super quiet, so I would turn the phone up, then it would suddnely get normal again, making her excruciatingly loud, and rinse and repeat. This happened constantly, and continues to happen. This is not just limited to the phone call, either. This happens everywhere.
Suddenly, without warning, VoiceOver will stop responding when a video is playing on a webpage like YouTube through the Brave app. If I try to focus elements, they simply won't read the entire element, at all. It will begin reading, but cut off after the first word.
When using Siri, in the one in a million chance she understands what I'm asking, she will cut her speech off at the tail end of what she's trying to say. This is the least of the problems with Siri, however, because she can hardly understand what I'm asking half the time.
Dictation is a total ass dump. It misunderstood Siri for Fury yesterday. And like, Fury makes no sense in context to what the rest of the sentence was. Weren't they susupposed to have this new fancy dictation feature? lol.
Like, I'm just not sure what to do at this point. I just got this phone, and traded in my iPhone 15 Pro Max for it, and I'm stuck with it at this point. My only option would be to sell the iPhone, and get an Android if I wanted to go that route, but the problem there lies with me using iCloud for virtually everything. Storing old images, keeping passwords via the Password app, my email that's connected to every account I own, etc etc. Not to mention the fact that I have Apple peripherals too, like the AirPods Pro, MacBook Air, etc. Just thinking about all of this sounds like a nightmare.
Thoughts? Have any of you transitioned to Android? How was the process? Did you also have a MacBook Air or AirPods, or do emailing and such through iCloud?
From iOS to Android, what di dyou notice most.
https://forum.audiogames.net/topic/60534/from-ios-to-android-what-did-you-notice-most/
OpenEvv, the open engine ViaVoice. I guess that's what EVV stands for anyway, had hit 0.4.
Lol all these Hacker News posts: “AI makes me sad." I'm gonna write a post at some point: “AI makes me happy.” That's an understatement. AI makes me giddy with excitement about what's possible for the first time in, like, ever. Before AI agents, I thought blind people like me, who couldn't code, would never play almost any video game, or have any real say in how we use computers. It was always the sighted people who code dictating what we could or couldn't do, or the few blind people who could code trying to keep up with all the sighted people moving fast and breaking everything like an elephant stomping on ants. And now it's simply wide open. Yes, that means some people will make stuff that doesn't work, but sighted people make stuff that doesn't work all the time. They just don't notice it because they don't need a screen reader.
No way no darn way!
[trypsynth/backtalk] Give every sound its own vibration, like VoiceOver (PR #21)
Blind Vibe Coding
A screen-reader-friendly directory of resources for blind and low vision people who use a screen reader and build apps with help from AI.
This directory lists English-language resources for blind and low vision people who use a screen reader and want to build apps with help from AI, sometimes called “vibe coding.” It covers guides, tools, courses, communities, podcasts, articles, and research, free and paid, for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, and the web. Every resource explicitly mentions blindness, screen readers, or accessibility. Every resource was published or updated in 2024 or later, and every link was checked on 1 October 2026.
Oh no y'all, I've figured it out. I'm a terrible preservationist. See, I don't want the exact Braille Note or Braille plus. I want something modern that keeps the good UI it UX of those systems. So, what if I had AI pull Emacs, Emacsvox, and Omnivox, then had it look at the UI and UX of the braille note and BP, then create a self-contained system that has the modern, text-based infrastructure of Emacs, but with a prettn, fun, people easn interface of a good note-taker on top, with modern stuff like Epub reading, threaded, easy to sdt up email, web browsing using maybe edbrowse or like a headless Firefom, with the app driving the browser inside, modern calendar syncing, goodness just so much we could do. Just so much pretty stuff we could have if the interface was made quite us instead of us having to adapt to everything else. As thus, the ideas for EasyAccess are born. With the tag line: We aren't dumb, we're just tired.
As usual: VoiceOver was significantly more popular among respondents without disabilities (21.7% use VoiceOver) than with users with disabilities (5.7% use VoiceOver).
Oh also more people use Orca than Narrator, 25 for Orca, 7 for Narrator.
There were 25 Orca (Linux) users on the WebAim Screen reader survey.
What if Kafka, except you wake up as a kitten, and everyone takes care of you.
I fell off the bus today. I was getting off the bus, and I think I overbalanced or something. Instead of correcting and being fine, I fell. I remember reaching for something as I tumbled down the steps. Then I was on the ground. Since I only have a single brain cell, I spent a few seconds wondering what happened, where I am, and why I couldn't move to my hands and knees. It turns out you can't really become vertical if you're under an open bus door. Interesting. So, I moved to the side, out from under the door. Then someone grabbed me. I heard words, but it sounded like a mixture between Japanese and Spanish. I said, "sorry?" They said they were trying to help me up. It was around this time when more of my brain began to work again. I managed to stand, with their help. They asked if they needed to call 911, and I said I'll just see a nurse. So, I did. My leg was skinned up a good bit, but besides that I'm fine. The strange disorientation and slight queasy feeling went away after a few minutes.
iBestSpeech and iTrueVoice have been updated. BestSpeech can say y'all, LLMs (pretty much just L L M S), Linux (capitalized, bug fix), and can get passed full width question marks if you ever run into that. TrueVoice has had its volume boosted a little so it sounds closer to all other engines.