Guillem Leon

I have encountered more image descriptions on Mastodon in 24 hours than I have in Twitter in a couple of years. Seriously. I'm not exaggerating.
As a blind person, this means a lot to me. If you read this and you describe your images, thank you so, so, so much on behalf of all of us. If you don't, now you know you'll be helping random Internet strangers make sense of your posts by typing in a few more words than usual.

Silly me! Silly me for thinking that subscribing to a newsletter for a store with rotating stock which I enjoy visiting would yield useful information. Silly me, stupid, clueless me, for thinking that the newsletter would contain something other than "link image see more", "link image see more" and "link image see more".

This is, of course, not because the newsletter contains no text, or because the only text it contains is "see more". it's because this is 2026, and everything has to be an image. Text has to be in an image. Even images have to be images nowadays. Go figure.

But hey, at least we have OCR, at least screenreaders are doing a little bit to make this whole situation less hellish. At least, and hear me out because this is going to make some people very angry, we have AI. At least we can use a combination of all of these tools to counter the carelessness and laziness and exclusionary practices (intentional or not) of those tasked and paid to disseminate information.

Windows is the kind of OS that will forcibly push an unwanted 10+GB update up your urethra, take 5 minutes to install it on startup while confidently showing you a "You're 100% there" banner for 3 of those minutes, and then forcibly open Edge (ignoring your default browser settings) to a latest features page.

"Look, we just snuck up to you while you were asleep and force-fed you 50mg of THC, which like, you were fine before and you didn't want them, but doesn't it feel great? Doesn't it? DOES IT NOT?"

In other Thursday morning news, VoiceOver has decided that it will sometimes read * at the beginning of a line as "star" and sometimes as "asterisk". This might have something to do with VoiceOver's language switching or it might have something to do with VoiceOver sending stuff to Eloquence weirdly. Thank god VoiceOver is so transparent with its internals and respectful to its users and will let me diagnose this without much hassle. Ahahahahahah funny joke. It's okay though, because this is one step from all of our synthesisers being replaced with AI voices whose text-to-phoneme rules are governed by the designs of divine providence alone.

Any blind Joplin users around? I'm trying to figure out whether this is just the least unpleasant to use out of the unpleasant to use notetaking apps or whether there's actually a reason to properly like it. So far I find the focus on the Mac app to be quite unreliable when moving around the note list, the editor on the iOS app seems to have terrible navigation around the text with VoiceOver...