a quick demonstration of a Sandfly feature I have been working on. I apologize in advance for the audio quality. #android #blind #accessibility

Linux has a ton of desktop environments, some of which have accessibility issues which are slowly getting better.
Windows has exactly one desktop environment, all of which have major longstanding accessibility issues which are slowly getting worse.
Exhibit number {integer literal is too large to be represented in any integer type}: Go to the settings app and search for something. Your keyboard focus will get stuck in the "Is this a good response?" popup. Meanwhile you literally cannot read the response to decide whether it's good, unless you use your screen reader's flat review or object navigation.
I know Linux is far from perfect and I haven't even scratched the surface yet, but Microsoft has a whole lot less of an excuse to be this terrible.

I did a thing*. It eventually annoyed me enough to see if I could do something about my pixel not having the ability to have a different ringtone for each sim you had instaled. Turns out, in android 17, you can. Tested on my pixel8, as it's the only pixel I have. *Codex did most of the work
https://github.com/kieranlittle667/sim-ringtones

A website asking me to disable my browser sandboxing?

No I dont think I will

I wholeheartedly believe that every man should watch this video, because i bet none can grasp quite how terribly women get treated, even at work, without being challenged

@thisisjofrank:
“I gave a talk at EMF titled "Men in Tech #YesAllMen", in which I told my experience of being a woman in tech. I was afraid to publish it in case it affected my current or future employment.

With all the current news I would like to add my 2¢. So here is the recording:”

https://youtu.be/WXL6K1lhvt0

New post: Be Aware of What's in Your Logs.
A bug report I got recently came with a log containing things I never needed to see. So let's talk about what you're really sending when you tick "Send logs", why "can contain text on screen" should be read as "does", and what developers owe the people filing reports.
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/be-aware-of-whats-in-your-logs/
#Privacy #Accessibility #ScreenReaders #BugReports #InfoSec

> BUILD FAILED in 5m 33s

oh. :blobcoffeegrump:

I owe @TheQuinbox an apology. When I posted my skepticism about Backtalk, I hadn't actually looked at the project — I didn't realize Quin was behind it. Having now gone through the repo, I'm genuinely impressed. The analytics are stripped out, network calls are all opt-in, the scripting engine has a proper permission model, and downloads are hash-verified. This is careful, disciplined engineering.

Unlike TalkForward or other efforts with questionable origins and no public repo to inspect, Backtalk is fully open source and built on a solid TalkBack fork with real security considerations baked in. It's refreshing to see Android screen reader development back in the hands of the community with this level of quality behind it.

I haven't been this excited about accessibility on Android since @nolan released Spiel. Looking forward to where this goes honestly. It's refreshing to see so many of the new stuff be opt-in and nothing shoved in your face unless you yourself enable it.

Really sad to see people I respected take a big dump on PHP today. It was unnecessary. This is open source. Things run on too few donations and mostly unpaid work.

These people work hard. They deal with entitled users in bug trackers. They sift through slop reports and slop contributions. They have to defend their infra from thieves who can afford to lose more money in an hour than they will not make in a lifetime. They have to drop everything when their unpaid project has an emergency.

the hardest problem in software engineering is communication

The fact that a way to use a particular AI featur of Android is to first ignore the error it generates and just… Wait a bit is astoundingly stupid.

The latest Paperback development release can perform OCR on images inside books. Simply hit Enter on an image, and if the image contains text, a dialog box appears with the text inside it. It can also save images via the context menu when positioned on an image. Really cool!
@TheQuinbox

The Lemon Balm Google text-to-speech voices are actually really good. I do not understand why they will not allow TalkBack or other screen readers to use them.

Don't be me. Laptops are not designed to be carried open. Especially not down stairs.

Making a handwriting keyboard when I don't personally write with a pen is a lot harder than one might think

Right now, Linux is more accessible than Windows. I mean, at least the Start Menu reads properly in Mate and Gnome. That's two desktops it works in, opposed to Windows' 0.

your feedback is important to us, please place your microphone as close to your speaker as possible

Someone at the makerspace last week asked how I seemingly know how to use every tool from sewing machines to soldering irons and lathes to lasers, and my reply was that my favourite thing to do is learn. Whenever people ask what I want to _do_ with a skill I’m learning I often have no response, I just love learning things to learn them and get good at them. I’ll definitely find uses later, but it’s not why I learn stuff.

oh huh it *is* still Cybersecurity Awareness Month

ARE YOU FUCKING AWARE YET

When Stephen Baum retired several years ago, and I'm sure many of you know the name, Kurzweil 1000, a program I absolutely loved and probably used even more than JAWS or NVDA, was no longer updated. It was effectively discontinued, much like OpenBook. I was pretty much convinced I'd never see another Windows program that could fill the K1000-shaped hole in my life. My experiences with QRead, Bookworm, and a couple of other applications taught me not to expect anything to be Kurzweil 1000. Then Paperback came along. At first, I thought it was just another short-lived project fueled by a developer's initial enthusiasm. But I'm genuinely happy to say that Paperback has brought together the best parts of Kurzweil 1000 in a modern, compact package that feels right at home today. Just like K1000, Paperback lets you create bookmarks and notes, and even transfer them to another computer. You can now also export them as HTML or TXT files in the latest development release. It supports a wide range of formats, and when it comes to navigating through books, it actually goes well beyond what K1000 offered. Its ability to recognize scanned PDFs is surprisingly accurate and useful, too, especially for a feature that's still relatively new. Sure, it doesn't connect directly to a scanner. But these days, far fewer people need a dedicated scanner to digitize physical books than they once did. It doesn't have a built-in dictionary or Wikipedia access like K1000 did, either, but in this day and age, those aren't necessarily features you can't get from other tools. And here's another thing I really appreciate: unlike K1000 and pretty much all its competitors, Paperback doesn't insist on converting every book into its own proprietary format. It reads the original book and cleverly stores your bookmarks and notes separately in its own format. After all these years, it's quite something to find a Windows reading application playing such an important role in my life again. I honestly didn't think I'd feel that way about another program after Kurzweil 1000. Welcome to my reading life, Paperback. You've got some pretty big shoes to fill, and you're doing a damn good job.
@TheQuinbox