“If we allow these tools to dictate our visual culture, we must accept that it will be vitrified by machines which consider a few billion webpages equivalent to the sum total of human existence.
I don’t accept that. How dare we abandon so many countless traditions and people and ideas and nuances, simply because they are underrepresented in the training data?”
👏🏻 @mass_driver
hello there!
For #linux #audiogame players, this is going to be really good news indeed.
Remember the tolk speech dispatcher proxy I made, the one that used the same way of interfacing with speech dispatcher as nvda2speechd, aka another server binary which hosts the websocket endpoint, and based on what was sent from the windows dll to the websocket, it would do the connections to speech dispatcher? that worked, for a while, and probably people who play games relying on tolk using audiogame manager are still using it, so it works to this day.
However, this solution is janky, I always thought it to be that way, but I didn't know of any alternative at the time, so I accepted this to just be the way things are for now.
Every once in a while, I keep revisiting the idea of trying to make this better, so I went to the wine HQ channel on irc.
After a long stream of messages exchanged with @r in that channel, I learned not only that it's possible to do so, in rust of all things, which I didn't think possible at all, but also that wine has two ways of going about this, winelib and unixlib. The details aren't very important, all that's important is that we can, actually, create a windows dll which interfaces with linux components through wine, even if yes, the connection point is kinda painful and arcane because of the way wine makes you specify things.
That discussion resulted not only in me knowing this stuff, but also in them making a better version of the tolk spd proxy, which doesn't use any third party server binary at all, so you don't have to run any external processes. The code is here:
https://github.com/ArcaneNibble/tolk2spd
There are details on how to build this, or run it from the precompiled artifacts present on the releases page in the readme of the repository, although building it yourself is quite involved.
If this ends up included in audiogame manager, considering that it uses a wine prefix per game, we may not have to include the environment variable whatsoever, because audiogame manager controls the prefix, so the file can be moved in the right place inside there.
The original discussion included this as well, but I was initially asking if something like the mechanisms presented above exist because I was wondering, would it be possible to bridge Microsoft's MSAA or UIA to at-spi? the outcome of the experiment with tolk2spd demonstrates this can be done, although the current way in which things have to be specified would make it really hard, as it already made things relatively cryptic for this project, but this is considered accepted complexity since wine has no other way of going about it. What do people think? would bridged accessibility API's help us?
🔗 Ketan Joshi analysed Google's latest sustainability report, and yes, energy consumption went up (a lot).
Adding up the numbers, Joshi concludes it's not because of manual Gemini use, it's because Google's search engine shows AI results by default https://ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/googles-exponential-path-to-climate-wrecking-digital-bloat/
Accessibility isn’t something generative interfaces will magically solve; it’s the groundwork we need in order to make them trustworthy at all. https://www.deque.com/axe-con/sessions/accessibility-in-the-end-of-deterministic-design-again/
The 2026 WebAIM Accessibility Report is out, and honestly, it makes me a bit sad.
After years of slow but steady improvement, accessibility on the web is getting worse again.
A few key takeaways:
- The number of detected accessibility errors increased since 2025. People with disabilities can expect to hit an error on 1 in every 26 homepage elements.
- More empty buttons, missing labels, and low contrast issues compared to last year.
It's trans day of visibility!
Trans men and trans women and trans non-binary people - I see you.
I feel safe around you. I count several of you as my friends.
There have always been trans people.
Firefox will start supporting `ariaNotify` in release 150.
If you haven't heard of it, `ariaNotify` allows you to provide text that should be announced by a screen reader if available and activated. No more fiddling with live regions. 💪
According to MDN, Chromium shipped the method in an "unreliable" state. Let's see how the Firefox version behaves.
MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/ariaNotify
Ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2018095
this is the kind of feature i would love to see built into browsers: https://hister.org/posts/how-i-cut-my-google-search-dependence-in-half/
useful local search, not chatbots.
Some large noodle bowls that came out over the holidays. #pottery
One has a slight glaze blemish, but otherwise I'm happy with them. Using Rocky Mountain BMX clay.
✏️ 5 accessibility checks to run on every component https://zeroheight.com/blog/5-accessibility-checks-to-run-on-every-component/
I guest-posted on zeroheight's blog about accessibility of components!
(note: WCAG compliance is claimed on full pages/processes only)
If you're into new browser engines free from corporate control – maybe skip the latest 'benevolent dictator', and check out @servo
They have nightly snapshots you can install, and they're rolling out new features regularly:
See whose work tech companies are using to train their generative-AI models. Search for authors, YouTube channels and creators, or screenwriters.
Here are nine books I worked on that were used to train LLMs:
https://www.theatlantic.com/category/ai-watchdog/?q=Jeffrey+Zeldman
I'm growing tired of people blaming accessibility guidelines, for stripping away the creativity from the web.
Most websites are not accessible. Many designers don't know (yet I hope), or don't care about accessibility. Or care in a performative way.
So, stop blaming accessibility for this. Thanks.
node has just unflagged typescript support! https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v22.18.0
Study: When experienced open-source developers used current AI tools, work took 19% longer to complete. In spite of which, the developers *thought* they were working *faster.*
It’s just one study, and they don’t claim anything beyond what they observed. Their results are not predictive. Still....
(There must be a name for the psychological trick we play on ourselves to believe we’re being more productive even when we’re considerably less so.)
Hat tip: Dave Martin
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
"But I like programming. I like writing. I like making things and then being able to sit back and look at them and think, holy fuck, I made that. There is no joy for me in typing a vague description into a computer and refreshing my way through a parade of Whatever until something is good enough."
From https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever by @eevee@queer.party
Incidentally, I read the article with this energy: https://youtu.be/Xz7_3n7xyDg
@kims maybe they don't like mom and dad's anticapitalism:
I got interesting news from the fedora accessibility room today! this concerns blind and visually impaired #linux users exclusively, however:
For a bit of time, specifically pipewire >=1.4, one can start pipewire as root. That includes the regular daemon and the alsa layer, because jack emulation is a library loaded inside programs. Anyway, more recently than that, pipewire-pulse got the ability to be launched via root, as a system service:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/commit/dea6fa7f4c3053050d2819afa80265e5ffb39730
I'm not sure if ubuntu can use any of this yet, I suppose not, but most other distros which aren't debian based should be able to do so, for example arch, gentoo, probably nix and fedora starting with 42. This means that your system can start talking much, much sooner without the use of scripts, as long as you enable the system services instead of the user ones, or well, apparently the user units don't conflict, weird as that might sound. Either way, the same security is achieved, because who cares if root apps can listen to your microphone, the battle is lost if those apps are already root anyway!
In particular, this means that one can start espeakup with the system and it'll speak as soon as possible. Not in the initramfs, not at the enter decryption key prompt, but that's still huge progress in case your system crashes and so on.
What do y'all think, does this change anything, or it's still the same for you because you use scripts anyway, or because your systems rarely crash in such a way where that'd be required?
we all know lemmy, the fediverse's answer to reddit, right? I wonder, where does the name come from?