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

This evening's dumb reverse engineer anything project with Claude: Get the APH Chameleon 20's userspace working on the NLS eReader from Humanware.

For those that don't know, the NLS eReader is a Humanware Braille display that people in the US can obtain for free through their state's library for the blind.

Anyway, we now have a rooted operating system, SSH, the Editor and Braille Editors respectively from the Humanware firmware, as well as a *working* headphone jack+speech in menus/editors, operational volume buttons, and OpenEVV. OpenEVV is slow, but usable.

The saddest part is that all of this functionality could have been available but was blocked with software flags. The hardware on the APH Chameleon, all the way down to the Kernel versions, is the exact same as the eReader. They even tell you in the user manual that the headphone jack and volume buttons are nonfunctional! Clearly it was done this way--at least to my uneducated eye--to satisfy some RFP that had different requirements that were still met by the hardware of the Chameleon?

From the NLS eReader user guide (yes, it is this particular snippet from the manual that triggered me so much I started this project to begin with):
"The right side of the device has four elements. At the back is an audio jack with a rubber plug in it. Moving forward are two volume control buttons. These three elements will not be used on the NLS eReader."

Goodnight.

Hell yes! With the latest Backtalk update and the latest Fastplay Android version, you can now have the same touch pad experience you have on iOS, thanks to the new direct touch regions support! Backtalk is by @TheQuinbox: https://github.com/trypsynth/backtalk Latest FastPlay: https://github.com/masonasons/FastPlay/releases/download/latest/FastPlay.apk

SandFly 0.1.3 is out.

SandFly is a screen reader for Android. It is a fork of Backtalk, which is a fork of Google's TalkBack. It runs on phones and tablets with Android 8 or later, Wear OS watches and Android TV.

SandFly was previously Backtalk Aaron, my fork of Backtalk. Many of my changes went into Backtalk as pull requests and were merged. Keeping the rest in a fork that tracked Backtalk got harder with each change, so on 19 October I split it into a separate app with its own name, app ID, signing key and releases.

Backtalk is a great project and deserves support. SandFly would not exist without it. I will keep contributing to Backtalk, and will aim to keep those contributions applicable to its core mission. If you use Backtalk, keep using it, report bugs to it and contribute to it: https://github.com/trypsynth/backtalk

New in SandFly 0.1.0, at the split:
* Scripts are written in Lua instead of JavaScript.
* Shizuku grants the permissions that otherwise need adb.
* Stable releases and development builds, with an in-app updater.

New in 0.1.1 to 0.1.3:
* Settings > More > Report a problem sends a report or suggestion without a GitHub account.
* SandFly's own strings are translated into 26 locales.
* Sound themes can give a sound and a vibration to changing the reading control, the stages of an edge gesture, moving the cursor by character, word, line or paragraph, and wrapping to the next row of a grid.
* Gboard no longer types the last key under the finger when the finger slides off the keyboard, including the voice typing key.
* Typing no longer lags when the keyboard's spell checker does not respond, as with PixelBoard.
* Compose text fields no longer read the typed word and "End of field" after each word.
* The braille keyboard types without delay in SandFly's own fields.
* Selection mode keeps a Characters, Words, Lines or Paragraphs reading control.
* The find voice command finds text in web pages.
* On Android 16 and later, containers named with aria-labelledby are read, as with posts on X.
* The gesture start and gesture end sounds are removed.

Backtalk Aaron users: its last build offers SandFly as an update, and SandFly copies its settings and custom labels.

Download: https://github.com/aaron-gh/SandFly/releases/latest

#Android #ScreenReader #Accessibility #Blind #a11y