Is anybody aware of a way to stream Apple Music on Mac OS that is usable with a screenreader? No, the Music app is not usable with a screenreader. I'd love to save my tokens if there's something half-decent out there, but if there isn't...

But hey, this is 2026. I have one resource left. let's see what Claude can do with a half-accessible (15% accessible?) plug-in. Yes, I think this is fair use. Feel free to disagree with me. I'm sick of these responses. The truth is that I have no issue showing the same level of sympathy with these companies that they show with me.

"Blind people using it to varying levels of success" is exactly what they said last time. Except last time, they said they had been able to help some blind people to that end. In the email that this message was a response to, I asked what assistance they had been able to provide and whether they could give me more information about how blind people were making use of it. Conveniently, that part of the email wasn't ever answered.

The exodus from Kontakt is amazing and empowering and I'm sure NI deserves it. Unless, of course, you're blind. These companies will try to do everything that NI did but better. Except, of course, accessibility.

I don't know why I keep writing to Orchestral Tools to ask about the accessibility of SinePlayer. Their latest response makes it fairly clear that blind musicians are simply not an audience they are interested in. Their latest response:

Hi Guillem,

I am afraid the situation remains the same.

We are aware SINE is not very accesible and there are blind people using it with varying levels of success.

Unfortunately, while we do not hinder accessibility tools on purpose, I am afraid our current priority is SINE development on bugfixing and the most recent OS.

While we want to improve SINE as much as possible, I am afraid we do not have the manpower to be able to implement all possible requested features.

Apologies for the bad news. Anything else, just let me know.

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".

Update: No updates. As in, it has indeed been a couple months and we still get "file deleted", "file deleted", "file deleted", "file deleted" while downloading files. Is this much time long enough to justify my constant snark about Teams and Microsoft considering us cripples to be a lower echelon of society not worthy of consideration? Or shall I wait until it's half a year? Because I'm pretty sure we'll get there.

I haven't seen many of these for artists, so figured I'd try and see what happens!

Hello! I'm a #pianist and media/videogame #composer hopping between Barcelona and London, looking for work on either front!
I'm currently a composer for Soundbooth Theater, writing and producing music for some of their audiobooks and cinematic audio productions. I've also composed music for a couple of small creator podcasts and videogames, would love to collaborate with such projects more in the future!
Find samples of my work and more info on my website below. Boosts are very much appreciated!
https://guillemleonmusic.com
#GetFedihired #Fedihire

I'm playing against the storm, so... I may as well stream it. Coming in a few minutes.

Welp... The text says it all. Thank you but not really, @mew

Can anybody confirm that attaching files to a post with FastSMRW on Mac OS is broken? The add button doesn't seem to bring up an open dialog or anything.

Has anybody had any luck with any kind of free virtualization software on Mac OS? At this point I'm paying for Parallels mainly because Excel is absolutely useless with VoiceOver on Mac OS and I need it for work. I genuinely cannot get UTM to work, it's either really slow or simply fails to boot for no apparent reason.

Anybody here who works for the Gatwick animal reception centre that could confirm if their job description includes making sure customers pull out just about every hair on their head?

Every time. Every single fucking time. I will fly to every other airport and the staff will check my paperwork, scan Sid's chip and send me on my way.

Gatwick? No. You have to send in the documentation ahead of time so that they issue a pre-approval letter. The first time you fly to Gatwick, you don't really know that you have to do this until you get an email from a heretofore unheard of address, addressing you by name and flight date and demanding documentation (how they got that data you never know). Half the time they find something wrong with the documentation that nobody in any other airport has a problem with and let you know the day of the flight. You can't really send it in earlier though, because the UK still requires that you give your dog a tapeworm treatment every time you fly there, and that has to be done 24-120h before the flight, and getting a vet appointment isn't always easy. Flying to the UK 4 times within 2-3 months? yep, 4 tapeworm treatments. Is it healthy for the dog? Probably not, but ehh, that's a different kettle of fish.

Don't worry though, after your pre-approval letter is issued (if you're that lucky) they'll still have to send for someone from the reception centre when you land. This person will take a while. Like, a *while*.

I swear I will begin to pay more just to avoid this airport. Dear mother of god what a pain in the ass.

Having a vet clinic just a one-minute walk away from my house while having a guide dog is genuinely such an underrated privilege. They're a small clinic so they've even taken walk-in requests for vaccines and preventative worm treatment before. Moving away from this is going to be annoying at the very least.

What's interesting is about the versions of Audiologic's synthesizer that come with the Sonobraille and PC Hablado is that, although the files are usually called something to do with "TSE" (ttsebox, ttse2so, etc), the TTS does not actually stand for text-to-speech. It's... The Text Speaker Español. The. The first T stands for The. Fantastic.

Today on "Mac OS accessibility is polished to perfection", VoiceOver has decided that (1) no option key commands will work and (2) only the first word of a line will be read when I arrow through a text field. A VoiceOver restart does not fix it. A Mac OS restart probably will. But I do not, want, to fucking, restart, my Mac. Do I have a choice? Nope.

You know you're in Spain when the menu button for your router's custom ISP-made web interface is a graphic labeled... meun.png. I did not misspell it. They did. Meun. I love my country sometimes

You know what I just realized? I could just make the Airpods Applescript beep at the very beginning and boop at the very end. If it beepboops, bad. If it beeps, I just have to wait and hope. Why didn't I think of this earlier?

I have an Applescript linked to an "option key command" (formerly keyboard commander) to connect to my Airpods. Because it's 2026 and this is Apple, it takes absolutely forever (okay maybe anywhere from 2-10 seconds, leaning heavily toward the latter) to actually connect. And because it's 2026 and this is Apple, sometimes it just silently fails and doesn't work at all. How do I know that it's working if I don't want to wait 2-10 seconds leaning heavily toward the latter? Well, I also have an option key command to open finder which, for some reason I can't recall but likely has something to do with Apple being Apple, is also an Applescript. Because Apple is Apple, you can't seem to run two Applescripts at once within the option key commands, and they somehow get put into a queue. So, I press my Airpods command and then my Finder command. If it switches to Finder, it has decided not to work and I have to go into System Settings to manually connect them. If it doesn't, I just have to wait 2-10 seconds leaning heavily toward the latter. The moment I hear the Airpods connect sound or VoiceOver announcing that Finder has been switched to (sometimes one happens sooner than the other because, you guessed it, it's 2026 and this is Apple) I know it's worked. Hurrah! Computers are fascinating, aren't they?