James Scholes

Another appliance search blighted by the existence of touch screens and the fundamentally exclusionary practice of cramming them into everything regardless of suitability. Want the best feature set? It's on the unusable model. Need accessibility? You'll need to sacrifice useful features, some of which would make the device more friendly to disabled people. I'm struggling to come up with fresh ways of articulating how mentally draining this is. To occasionally want to spend a bit of your hard earned money on something nice, only to repeatedly be shown that nice is synonymous with "we didn't think about disabled people." to see exclusion worming its way into cheaper and cheaper appliances, relegating disabled customers to an increasingly basic category of products that might eventually disappear. But what's the use in articulating it at all? The only people reading this here already know it because they live it every day. But at least I get to go to work and help make something I find morally deplorable more accessible in a bit! Happy Thursday.

Adding copying text to the clipboard to the list of things Siri AI can't do.

@saustrup@mstdn.dk They're all in on AI when they're the ones peddling it and using it as an excuse to fire tens of thousands of people. Being unwilling to accept the very thing they're pushing down everybody else's throats makes me despise them more, not less. @nixCraft@mastodon.social

"Starting on 1 September 2026, you’ll no longer be able to log in with your username. Verify your email to make sure you can always access your account." Okay, and how do I do that? The options with a screen reader are "primaryCta," "secondaryCta," and "tertiaryCtaDismiss." I hope I choose the right one, otherwise I might have to "uiFormBtn" my account in September.

In November 2022, following the discontinuation of the HearthstoneAccess project by its initial developer, Blizzard announced that they would be quote "exploring what it will take to implement native accessibility features that allow for our #blind and #lowVision community to get back into the game" unquote. This was shortly followed by an update to implement separate volume levels for music, dialog, ambient sounds, and sound effects, as well as for the game overall. A very welcome #accessibility feature for multiple audiences. As of September 2026, no native keyboard or #screenReader accessibility has materialised, or been mentioned ever again as far as I'm aware. Meanwhile, every time there is a new in-product launch, the mixing of game audio is modified to be more in your face to the degree that a user's custom volume levels are effectively discarded.

Come for a football match between European and South American teams, both from Spanish-speaking countries. Get a performance of the US national anthem, a display of US military strength, and a monologue in English from an American actor who couldn't correctly identify the two main groups of fans. Yawn.

@bscross32@tweesecake.social Really useful, thanks! The only part I will strongly disagree with is the need for math skill as a prerequisite to do anything meaningful in programming. It is demonstrably false outside a specific subset of development work, and I know it to be practically untrue because I am likewise lacking in the math department beyond the absolute basics. This ties in nicely with your point about learning resources. A lot of them do introduce or demonstrate concepts via math-oriented examples. This is a problem with the materials, not a personal deficiency. @matt@toot.cafe

Today we had the rather dubious honour of dining at a restaurant while one table away, a crew of influencers loudly recorded, and re-recorded, and then re-recorded a few more times just for good measure a video for their "experience" channel. Including about seven takes of a short interview with the chef who presumably agreed to give them a free meal—I didn't witness them paying—in exchange for publicity. He shouldn't have bothered; they only have 2,800 followers. There are cats on Mastodon with more.

@matt@toot.cafe I'm particularly interested in this question, and the related psychological effects, in relation to those who legitimately cannot read or write code for themselves. I have a hunch that such people have a view of software development velocity and practice that we would find skewed, and that they would likewise struggle to accept just how slow and involved the process really is when an LLM isn't in the mix.

@matt@toot.cafe My favourite is when Explorer just stops reflecting file system changes. E.g. I rename a file, it shows the old name and throws a "doesn't exist" error if I try to interact with it without refreshing.

@mahryekuh@hachyderm.io Unrelated curiosity: why do you run npm through Docker?

@JonathanMosen@caneandable.social @Jage@mas.to Yes, they partner with Mullvad and I've had success with that and the iPlayer. The very best option is when someone is kind enough to give you access to a Tailscale exit node in their living room, which are increasingly easy to host on an Apple TV for example.

@matt@toot.cafe "heading level September second fifteen" @ricky_enger@mindly.social @alpuzz@mastodon.social

@milly@mstdn.mad-gamer.com @mewproj@fwoof.space Quite a lot to unpack there.

@mewproj@fwoof.space And the great thing is: my joke becomes less offensive the more people repost about your software. I'm providing incentive here!

@mewproj@fwoof.space Windows is stable like my mental health: only for as long as I know how to control it. @serrebi@serrebiradio.com

@TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space Interesting. Bbraille and code have never clicked for me, even just on the output side. Then again I also don't read code with punctuation set to all or tones for indentation either, which I gather are both popular preferences.

@TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space While I don't think you have anything to be humble about because as far as I can tell you weren't wrong in any of your critiques, I am surprised that you're finding code authoring to be such a productive experience on a braille keyboard. Are you relying quite a bit on autocomplete and/or AI?

@TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space If it's not a jab at a six-thousand-dollar notetaker, is it a jab at a 400 MB text editor with six thousand menu items?

@prism@infosec.exchange Jesus Drew, what a thread killer. @stevenscott@tweesecake.social @Scott@tweesecake.social @mew@fwoof.space

@Scott@tweesecake.social BRB, need to vibe code a VoiceOver audio delayer so I'm not too startled. @mew@fwoof.space

@fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca Accessibility work: come for the good feelings, stay because the job market is fucked, leave when you can no longer think of ways to describe someone's efforts as pathetic in a professional way.

@mahryekuh@hachyderm.io The last bit makes sense. Does the first bit imply that the internet-facing prod site is hosted inside Docker too?

There seems to be reasonable consensus that for #languageLearning, putting images on the front of flashcards is a decent idea for increased memorisation and reduced reliance on translation. Obviously this doesn't work at all for #blind people. Does anyone have any resources on the efficacy of an audio-based alternative? For example, if I'm trying to acquire the Spanish term for "washing machine," is it at all useful to have the front of the card play a short sound from a spin cycle? I'm interested in any resources exploring and evaluating this as a technique, as well as practical experiences or guides from people who've done this. #language #accessibility

@miki@dragonscave.space @cachondo@defcon.social @matt@toot.cafe @alexhall@mastodon.social Probably, at least for stations with national coverage or with multiple regional branches. These days the airwaves consist mostly of such stations but independent ones were still a thing when I was younger.

@TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space I wonder why YouTube hasn't implemented Google's own Widevine DRM (plus FairPlay for Apple)? Not that I think they should, but it would mostly be game over for downloaders at that point.

@bscross32@tweesecake.social @matt@toot.cafe I appreciate you might not know what you don't know, but I'd be curious to hear more specifics about what you struggled with.

@hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange @FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com I may be misunderstanding the description here but if you put the fork down to use the knife, how do you hold the thing you're cutting in place?

@cachondo@defcon.social @alexhall@mastodon.social Does it stop arguments by virtue of nobody being able to hear each other if you turn it up loud enough? Among a certain group of people I can imagine few things likely to cause more resentment than being subjected to a beige pop music station. Or worse, TalkSport.

Notably, I purchased a high-profile ebook related to #accessibility and #inclusion earlier this year and the experience was decidedly not like this. I had to create accounts on two separate Services, manually type out my personal and payment info, and link the two accounts together. After all that, I had a license to read the content in exactly one app. While contributors to the book showed dismay and understanding, their response was to send me a copy as a PDF which felt so incredibly inadequate that I'm still struggling to formulate a productive reply. A DRM-free version is still not available months later.

@emassey0135@caneandable.social @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space Maybe productive was the wrong word to use because I wasn't really thinking about speed. Rather, all the symbols which I frankly don't know how to type in braille but use all the time.

@FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com Right. I've pointed to your work more than once in conversations about AI's ability to produce real apps with meat on their bones. So it's important to me that you know my problem is not with you or the software you're producing. @mew@fwoof.space @daygar@tweesecake.social

@matt@toot.cafe I don't know your family, but that would require people to consistently use it and I think some people legitimately want their reactions seen for some reason. Probably better to have a way you yourself can opt out of notifications for replies to a thing, collapsible threads, and the like.

@TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space So Evolve users have to run the bundled version of NVDA to get Evolve-specific features?

@fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca Do you know how many posts come across my timeline to which I want to unproductively respond to with "Aye, good luck with that?" Not that this is related in any way. Don't know why I'm even bringing it up.

@cordova5029@dragonscave.space @datajake1999@dragonscave.space Like a drunk macOS Fred.

In order to use Kagi as the default extension in iOS Safari, you install their app and it then redirects requests to one of the search engines Safari does actually support. In other words: you keep your default search engine set as Google or whichever. When you perform a search, the Google page appears for a fraction of a second before you're redirected to Kagi. As well as being wasteful in terms of resources, this breaks the back button in the browser. If you want to return to the page you were on before performing a search, good luck with that. Each time you navigate back from Kagi, you go to Google. But the Kagi logic then redirects you forwards to Kagi which is where you just came from. In theory it might be possible to tap the back button multiple times fast enough to avoid the redirect. In practice, I use VoiceOver and the screen reader is far too unresponsive to make that feasible without turning it off and hoping I tap in the right place. All because Apple have decided not to support such a basic feature as custom search engines.

If they could somehow solve every single bad thing connected to large language models, both perceived and demonstrable, I still wouldn't want to talk to one by voice.

@cachondo@defcon.social @matt@toot.cafe @alexhall@mastodon.social Such a quintessential part of pre-DAB British holidays! How long will it take for somebody to press the scan button? Are we all secretly relieved that we don't have to listen to Pulse 95.7 anymore?

Oh no our IPv6 is broken again whatever shall we do without this critical piece of network infrastructure

@draeand@social.the-gdn.net @alexhall@mastodon.social To be clear: it knows what category of meat you cook because you choose it in the app, not because it's spying on you. You choose it in the app so it can advise when it's done. The app notifications and emails are annoying; there are better ways to determine the accuracy of their recipes over time. And for all I know, they're handing over info about the popularity of different cuts of meat to supermarkets and whomever else. But people are willingly handing over the information, so I don't know if it counts as creepy.

@matt@toot.cafe @cachondo@defcon.social @alexhall@mastodon.social Oh, me too. I guess I'm just atypical in that I'd prefer silence over lowest common denominator crap, or find it more interesting to listen to someone's opinionated choice even if it wasn't personally to my taste.

I'm so glad the basics of email, like people's names, are all completely solved problems. According to iOS Mail, this thread is between "Kelly, 'Paul, Paul & 'Kelly". There are two people in the conversation. What do the apostrophes mean, and why is the recipient summariser keying off of name rather than email address? No idea.

@serrebi@serrebiradio.com @mewproj@fwoof.space You will swear. Probably quite a lot.

@Jage@mas.to The BBC are very aggressive in their VPN blocking; AFAIK they have an allow list based on IP address ranges that have been designated residential. So e.g. a user physically located in the UK could use a British VPN for increased privacy on coffee shop wi-fi or whatever and end up blocked.

@mewproj@fwoof.space This already has more reposts than there are Linux desktop users.

@TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space As opposed to just putting it all in a downloadable add-on. Okay.

ITV have offered audio description on their free streaming services for years. Sky can afford to buy ITV. Sky have never offered audio description on any of their paid streaming services and still don't to this day. Interesting that.