@VZ I've personally long got over any feelings of guilt due to using LLM's for accessibility work. The world was not built for people like me, and despite understanding MSAA, UIA and the Cocoa APIs on a decent level at age 20 due to being a blind systems hacker, I don't feel ashamed to admit that I would've done less than half of my accessibility work for this release without Claude. Not because I don't care, but because Claude turns "We called .toNSString() on freed memory" into a 20 minute bug hunt instead of a multi-day headache-inducing slogfest, and actually lets me operate at a level that I'd argue I should've been able to forever ago and that no one else really bothers operating at. If a listbox wasn't rendering visually at all on macOS and Linux, that would've gotten fixed immediately. Meanwhile, blind people did notice the broken listbox on macOS when using wrappers like wxPython, but their solutions were to make wrappers that delegate to the dataview on cewrtain platforms (https://github.com/accessibleapps/smart_list), not to fix it at the root. And my AI coding agent lets me now fix problems like this at the root super efficiently. I review the code it outputs religiously and the results are seemingly positive so far. I'll debate the ethics of AI all day long, but it seems like a net-positive for this particular thing.

BTW, 3.3.4 contains a lot of #accessibility improvements which is something I had always considered very important, but never had time to work on before, so it's great to finally make some progress here, even if the PRs adding them were made possible only by the use of LLMs.

Another #announcement of new #wxWidgets releases: https://wxwidgets.org/news/2026/10/wxwidgets-3.2.12-and-3.3.4-released/

This one is more important than most because we hope to release 3.4.0 next, so testing 3.3.4 in order to find as many problems as possible before the next stable release and not just after it, as usual, is especially welcome!

@TheQuinbox i fully agree. the real solution would be to have federation between forges, so you only have to sign up one a single one. the workaround for now that the forge admins could do is to allow signups via github/gitlab/etc, which would at least lower that barrier. sadly nothing a simple contributor can change though, so the problem will continue to exist unfortunately.

I hate self-hosted code forges because I now have to create an account in order to contribute to your one tiny project that moved from GitHub due to AI slop. Don't get me wrong, I get it. I hate GitHub too. But to its credit, one account lets me contribute to literally millions of projects, from the Go compiler to the Linux Kernel to anything else. Creating an account on my.git.forge.cool-domain.biz just lets me fix your Android launcher or whatever, nothing else. Super low ROI, which is why I've not motivated myself to contribute to a project hosted like this yet. On GitHub, I fork, create branch, push, open PR. On custom codeberg/cgit/etc instances, I figure out how to sign up, decide what email to use, generate a password, maybe go through a barely accessible captcha, figure out how to access my profile, figure out if fork is a link or a button, oh, and now I can fork the repo, step 1 of my previous way of doing this!

Ever wanted to be able to control your Android screen reader with JavaScript? Backtalk now lets you do just that! @Aryan has already made scripts to combine the more actions and go to channel buttons in the YouTube app into accessibility actions instead, thus making videos only one swipe element, and doing the same for the update and view details buttons in the app updates section of the play store. Here's how simple this is, speak a message whenever settings opens:
export const manifest = {
id: 'hello',
name: 'Hello',
version: '1.0',
author: 'You',
minApiVersion: 1,
testedApiVersion: 1,
apps: ['com.android.settings'],
permissions: ['speech'],
};

backtalk.onAppEnter(() => backtalk.speak('Hello from a script'));

You know who else does that? EVERYONE. Everyone and their mother is guilty of this. I am guilty of this. I cannot think of everyone in every situation. I'm probably offending someone right now. We can talk about that when the ideas I express in this post reach the popularity and generate the quasi-fanaticism that anti-glasses ideas have. Somehow, I think that people will be much, much more hesitant to talk shit about phones with cameras on them than about smart glasses. But hey! Sighted people are the many, blind people are the few. We will continue to graciously accept that everybody has a potential camera on them at all times, because it would be ridiculous to lobby for phones to not have cameras anymore, wouldn't it?

Disclaimer: I had Meta glasses for a week and returned them. I found no benefit in using them myself, and I do not like Meta in general. I also know people that have found very good accessibility-related use cases for them. You know what I usually utilize for those use cases? My phone. Wow! Nuance! Or is that hypocrisy? The lines are so blurred nowaadays...

This written after coming back from the gym where somebody talked to me for 2 minutes about how much merit it had that I was doing what I was doing. I'm self-conscious as fuck at the gym. Should I write one about AI next? Should I? Should I?

Go on, ask me for sources. I've got stories aplenty! Like that lady who I accidentally bumped past two days ago who turned toward me and said to their companion "oh shit, he's blind!" in a very audible voice. How about the lady that stopped me at a crossing last week to talk to me about how praiseworthy I was, how much my dog took care of me, how he's my best friend, "right?" while I was running late to an appointment? Wait until I tell you about the lady who shouted across the street when the traffic light went green "ARACELI! QUE VIENE EL CIEGO!" (Araceli! The blind one/blind man is coming!). Are you looking for examples specific to pictures/videos? On multiple occasions, my sighted friends and mobility instructors have had to tell me about people openly taking pictures of my dog and I on trains and in stations, and on a couple of those have had to tell those people off. Are you sighted, like the great overwhelming majority of people are? Check your privilege. You can tell when someone is wearing smart glasses. I can't tell when someone is holding their fucking phone. I can't even tell when people are gawking at me for being an inspiring superperson with a supercane or a superdog (okay Sid is actually a superdog). It makes me uncomfortable and guess what? The not knowing doesn't make it easier. If I were a more vindictive person, I could be saying "hah, now you know what it's like". Stop whining. Or at least, have some humility and adequate your whining to the world, not just to the able-bodied majority. It is so, so typical of the Fediversal Good to leave entire sectors out of the equation out of simply not thinking about them.

🧵

I'm willing to accept the general de-nuanced views against smart glasses and those who profit, economically and in clout, from disparaging them and the people who make use of them.. I'm willing to accept that they're a cancer on society and I'm willing to accept violence against those who make them and use them. Under one condition. That you grant me this: I am fully blind. Anytime I go out in public, I am acutely aware that an overwhelming majority of people have at least one device on them with a camera. Their cameras and microphones could have disco lights going off every time they take a picture or start a recording and I'd be none the wiser. I do not know whether someone is taking pictures of me, videoing me, or even whether they are holding this machine in their hand or not. A train carriage full of people minding their business feels the exact same as a train carriage full of people pointing their evil anti-privacy, anti-blind machines at me. It does not make a difference whether they are big or small tech. It's absolutely trivial to turn any audible alert off. What's more, even if you do happen to have your GoodSmallTech™ made-in-the-EU ethical anti-AI anti-fascist anti-nazi phone's audible alerts at full volume, a selfie and a photo straight at my goddamn face sound the same to me. And you know what the funny part is? That I have no doubt, no damn doubt in the world, that people take pictures of me without my knowledge or consent at least somewhat regularly. I'm blind, I'm gallivanting around with a cute dog, crossing streets and going on trains... How inspiring, how interesting! And after all, I'm blind, so I'm not gonna notice! I firmly believe that at least a decently sized sector of the population does not assign the same level of personhood to a blind person, or probably any disabled person, than to "normals".

I'm happy to announce scriptview 0.2.0, a tool that shows you the source code of compiled AppleScript files, on macOS, Linux and Windows. This does feel slightly weird for me because it's the first time I'm truly vibe coding something; Claude did practically all of the coding, and I directed, reviewed, pushed back, and read through endless amounts of old documentation and bytecode.
What it does:

• Reads compiled scripts, bundles and applets, and matches osadecompile line for line on every script that ships with macOS and on 6,133 of 6,142 scripts from GitHub.
• Rebuilds the source of run-only scripts from their bytecode. No comments, but the code comes back perfectly.
• Reads classic Mac OS scripts back to AppleScript 1.0 in 1993, from resource forks, ._ files, MacBinary and BinHex. Current macOS refuses to open many of these.

The macOS builds are signed and notarized, so no Gatekeeper dance.

Downloads: https://github.com/trypsynth/scriptview/releases/tag/v0.2.0

It's open source under MIT, and the docs folder has everything we learned about the format, much of which wasn't written down anywhere before. #AppleScript #macOS #accessibility

HumanWare posted: BrailleNote evolve KeySoft first update is here. https://www.humanware.com/en-usa/news/product-announcements/braillenote-evolve-keysoft-update-1/
Adds a braille terminal I sadly haven't been able to test much due to not being an iOS user, find in the braille editor, gets rid of the space bar requirement in browse mode for many commands, and some other niceties. Not sure if anyone who follows me even has an evolve, but if so, there you go.

Rungui is a small (16kloc) portable desktop GUI library built as a wrapper over GTK3 (Linux), Win32 (Windows) and Cocoa (macOS). It has no other Rust dependencies and builds in seconds. https://github.com/graydon/rungui

Donald Trump has often cited Andrew Jackson as his favorite president, and as you read through Perley's stories from the Jackson era (1829-1837) you will quickly understand why. Jackson comes across in these pages as extremely Trumpian–driven by ego, pride and resentment. One such story is the tale of Jackson's Head.

When the frigate USS Constitution was under repair at Boston, it was decided that what this ship really needed was a big wooden head of President Jackson fitted on it. The head was duly carved and affixed.

This angered a Cape Cod mariner named Samuel Dewey, who decided to do something about it. In the middle of the night in a raging storm, he rowed a small boat out to the Constitution and sawed Jackson's head off. He then brought it back to Boston, where his prize made him the toast of the town.

He eventually took the head to Washington and presented it to the Secretary of the Navy, daring him to prosecute. The government chose not to. For the rest of his life, Dewey's carte de visite (an early version of what became the business card) showed a picture of a saw with the inscription "I came, I saw, I conquered."

https://archive.org/details/perleysreminisce00poor/page/n195/mode/2up

New app added to Accessible Android apps directory: Paperback accessible https://accessibleandroid.com/app/paperback/ @TheQuinbox

Behold the glorious speedups of Backtalk yourself, via a sort of shitty audio demo I recorded a couple hours ago.

If you have a Pixel watch or any other similar wear OS enabled device, I cannot recommend trying backtalk enough. Natural bias, of course, Backtalk is my baby, but using the rotor to change between reading controls feels very good on this size of screen, and actually being able to do that on my watch is incredible, as is the circular menu and status readout. I've still got some improvements to make, for example figuring out why the settings app of all things makes it lag so bad when scrolling, but now the main thing stopping me from using my Pixel watch 4 is the fact that I got the larger size and it's slightly uncomfortable on my tiny little wrists, not the screen reader. https://github.com/trypsynth/backtalk

RE: https://social.visionhub.ie/@adrian/117390003573683525

This. Absolutely this. I don't understand why everyone is going crazy over glasses when there are plenty of other devices, let's start with Ring Door-bells but we can talk about phones, watches, anything you like, that already have the power to video, photograph and record you. Oh yes and let's not forget dash cams and cars themselves.

Back in the day, Netscape Navigator had a "Reload" command in the View menu, advertising the shortcut Ctrl+R (or ⌘R on Macs). When Internet Explorer came out, they followed IBM's Common User Access interface standards, so their View menu had a "Refresh" command with the shortcut F5, although secretly they did handle Ctrl+R too, to make it easier for Netscape users to switch. Likewise, when Firefox was pushing to take over IE's marketshare, they added support for F5 even though they still advertised Ctrl+R as the Reload shortcut.

Today, in Firefox Nightly, the View menu does not have a reload command at all, never mind a shortcut. Nor is there a mention of it anywhere in the hamburger menu that I can see. Ctrl+R *is* mentioned in the tooltip of the reload button, though I wonder how many people would actually check that.

I guess we've shifted from the era of "computers need self-describing interfaces so people can learn how to use them", to the era of "there is ambient, pop-culture expectations for how computers should behave, you just need to follow them, not try to explain them".

Fedra version 0.7.1 is out, containing mostly bugfixes and a couple additions. Changelog:

- Added `Home` and `End` to the media player, to go to the start or end of the media.
- Added an option to start Fedra maximized.
- Added options to turn off streaming, and to set how often Fedra checks for new posts when it isn't streaming.
- Fixed closed dialogs and media windows staying in memory and leaving Fedra running.
- Fixed Fedra crashing on startup on Windows when PC-Talker isn't installed.
- Fixed Fedra creating a lock file in your home folder on macOS.
- Fixed VoiceOver announcing menus when you press shortcuts on macOS.
- Fixed filters and muted hashtags not working in remote instance timelines.
- Open User Timeline and View Author Profile now let you pick anyone in a post, including the authors of quoted posts inside boosts.
- Turning notifications on or off for a timeline now says the name of the timeline.

Download: https://github.com/trypsynth/fedra/releases/tag/v0.7.1
Enjoy!

No, I'm not anti-religion. I'm not religious myself, not since I was in my teens at least, but I know religion is important to plenty of people. My problem is when it becomes involved in government. Keep your religion private. Try to force it into government operations, and I have a problem. That's why I love the story in this thread.