Raspberry Pi Desktop now available for PC and Mac https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-desktop-now-available-for-pc-and-mac/

I’m pleased to announce that the version 27.1 updates for both Mona and Spring are now available on the App Store, bringing support and optimizations for iPhone Duo! https://getmona.app

RE: https://zeppelin.flights/@jsnell/117439869565953277

OK, made in California just isn’t really my cup of tea in terms of podcast listening, but I really do have to listen to this episode!

We're going live!

Tune in to our Facebook Live this Thursday at 1:00 p.m. Eastern in celebration of White Cane Awareness Day! Join us as we explore Camden Yards near the Baltimore Orioles' stadium with smart glasses while using an exciting new product from HumanWare.

The transcript of this video is in the comment section.

https://youtu.be/Ldz_biPBSv4

FastRoute is a very cool Windows application that lets you easily record audio and apply effects. It's Audio Hijack on macOS, but on Windows. Because it can be hard to understand how this works from just text, I made a quick audio recording. Of course, I used FastRoute to do it. Sorry for the mic peaking sometimes, for how nasally I sound, and for how unscripted this is. Link to FastRoute: https://github.com/masonasons/FastRoute/

OK, this is going to be a super detailed, nerdy, long post about me getting a new gadget and making it accessible.

Last Monday, I got myself a Flipper Zero. For those of you who don't know, Flipper Zero is a tiny device squarely targeted at tech nerds, geeks and tinkerers, and has made a name for itself as a hacking gadget shortly after it was first released in 2023.
It's a nifty little device that can receive, send and manipulate various types of radio, NFC, Bluetooth and infrared signals, which yes that does make it a great tool for ethical hacking and pentesting. But that means it can also, for example, be used as a universal remote for controlling TVs, stereos, ACs, or most anything else that's remote controlled around your home, it can also be extended to be a powerful network diagnostics tool thanks to various add-on boards that can be connected to its GPIO pins. So yes this thing can do a lot, and it's very popular throughout the tech community.
Problem is, the Flipper Zero comes with zero accessibility features. To be fair, the device is very constrained in terms of resources: 64 MHz processor, 1024 KB flash storage, 256 KB SRAM, not exactly much headroom for a screenreader. At least there's a speaker though, a tiny piezo buzzer that isn't exactly capable of producing high-quality audio, but hey it's something at least.
Thankfully, the Flipper's firmware is completely open-source, and in fact there are lots and lots of community maintained, alternative firmwares available. So starting Tuesday morning, I fired up Claude and set out to work on a project that seemed hopeles at first given the device’s specs, and after several rounds of designing, testing, tweaking speech samples, adjusting EQ parameters, firmware tweaking and stripping out animations and visuals that would otherwise have taken up too much memory for the screenreader to run, I’m finally able to navigate, use and enjoy a device that was never really meant to be accessible to a completely blind person like myself.
Yes, I can now navigate the Flipper's menus and apps, scan for infrared signals and create universal remotes based on them, I can use it to scan NFC tags and have it speak the data which they contain, and I hopefully will be able to troubleshoot my WiFi with it once work on that functionality is complete. It's not exactly the best accessibility experience there is, mostly because that piezo speaker just sounds super muffled and scratchy. It's clear enough and perfectly usable for me, but that's a real limitation. Also, on-device speech synthesis just is not possible given the severely limited resources. The solution to this is a script that extracts all text strings from the firmware, then creates pre-recorded audio clips for each which the screenreader then plays back. If you've ever used an mp3 player with the Rockbox screenreader, this is the same idea. My goal is to clean this up over the coming days and weeks as best I can, and then release the modified accessibility firmware on GitHub for all to enjoy. I'd also love to know if any of you have heard of the Flipper Zero before and maybe wanted to buy one, but didn't due to the absence of a screenreader or any other accessibility feature. Or maybe you actually already own one and have been using it via the console over its USB to serial interface, because yes that too would be a way of using this accessibly while tethered to a computer. It just feels crazy to think that only a few days ago, I received a device that had absolutely no accessibility functions at all, yet here I am only 3 days later and the same device is perfectly capable of speaking all its various menus and texts, enabling me to use most features accessibly. What a time to be alive!
#FlipperZero #Accessibility #Screenreader #AccessibleSoftware

From Mathieu via AppleVis: BrailliantConnect: your Brailliant in the Finder, no macFUSE https://www.braillists.org/uncategorised/from-mathieu-via-applevis-brailliantconnect-your-brailliant-in-the-finder-no-macfuse/

Clicks Communicator lands in December with 12GB RAM, two months of free data https://9to5google.com/2026/09/18/clicks-communicator-lands-in-december-with-12gb-ram-two-months-of-free-data/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

The book entitled the Ultimate Guide to StationPlaylist and JAWS for Windows is progressing nicely to the point where the Table of Contents can be shared.
As can be seen, this is an enormous project which has taken several months to prepare. It is very much hoped this will be available in late September or very early October.
This has been an ambitious project. To this point, a full text reference of every function of the StationPlaylist products for use by blind people has not existed.

The book can be pre-ordered from here or you can read the full promotional information.
https://hartgenconsultancy.com/scheduled-for-september-the-ultimate-guide-to-stationplaylist-with-jaws-for-windows/

RIM for iOS is here!   Connect accessibly to your home computer from your iPhone, or support clients, friends, and family while you’re out and about.   Just in time for Remote Incident Manager’s fourth anniversary, we’re proud to bring RIM to iOS. Accessible remote desktop is now in the palm of your hand.
Learn more: https://pneumasolutions.com/introducing-remote-incident-managers-mobile-debut/
Download the app: https://apps.apple.com/app/remote-incident-manager-mobile/id6775977908

Another 20K Listener stories collection. In this one, there is a story about the intentional sound design behind mechanical keyboards. That was definitely my favorite, just to hear how such an ordinary sound can mean so much to different people, in the switches they choose and why. https://castro.fm/podcast/194ce1bd-1661-463e-98ef-94fde39d637d

RE: https://w3c.social/@timbl/117208788570043139

It's like book candy! Looking forward to reading this one.

RE: https://social.lansky.name/@hn500/117195119938663350

Hey, @lerven and @alyssa6595. Since you guys are fans of birds, here's another project you may want to set up. Bird identification using security cameras.

which bus and train lines you can easily transfer to when searching a station or tapping on a trip plan - We made sure that scheduled disruptions appear in all the various places that they should have been appearing in all along! (Like putting strikes on cancelled departures when you tap open a line or trip plan. (3/4)

Oopsie.) - A couple little typographical tweaksie-doodles on the Home Screen widget that helps you plan a trip to a saved location Hope that satisfies your fixins for bug fixes! Now it’s time to meet all of the lovely suitors who moved into our house to keep our family company while we were at sea… PS: rate us five stars if the best way to enjoy a bug fix update is in 70mm IMAX." (4/4)

But the lotus flowers were delicious (from what we remember) and boy, do we have stories: - Boston Green Line riders rejoice: we defeated the six-headed sea monster of branched train lines: instead of making you swipe through six different train “directions” (when it was really the same train, just stopping at different platforms) we now show just two train directions, with the branches and platforms nested underneath - We added better handling for connecting lines, so you know… (2/4)

The Transit app is always a treasure trove of amusement with its App Store bug fix updates: "It hasn’t just been a summer. It’s been an Odyssey. We’ve returned from the Trojan bug wars looking a little bit worse for wear. (1/4)

And finally, the release you've all been waiting for: Paperback 0.9.0! The changelog is so large it had to be completely
restructured, and wouldn't fit in even two full-length posts at over 6300 characters, but here are some highlights: native macOS support has arrived, alongside ARM64 Windows builds! Documents are now paginated, so even multi-million-word books load in seconds flat. You can customize every single keyboard shortcut through a simple dialog; a new readability tab lets you control fonts, background color, line/paragraph/letter spacing, and text alignment. Audio books are now supported, including DAISY audio and folders of audio files, with play/pause, seeking, and syncing the caret to playback. DAISY 2.0
and 2.02 books are now supported too! There's a brand new pb command-line tool for converting any supported format to HTML,
Markdown, or plain text. It also adds temporary bookmarks, a full screen toggle, and a locate button for missing books, dozens of bug fixes across RTF, PDF, Mobi/AZW3, DAISY, and much more. This release covers Windows and macOS; Android
and iOS test builds are coming soon via TestFlight and Play testing, ahead of a unified 1.0. Grab it now at https://paperback.dev/downloads, full changelog in the readme at https://paperback.dev/readme.html.

😂

Rest in peace Dolly Parton. Thank you for the joy you brought with your talent, humour adn most of all your music. We may not have you, but we'll always have that. May God's best angels keep you well.