RobMurray

What makes Christians more worthy of empathy?

The article kind of dismissed Microsoft Soundscape as a failure, but for blind people who want awareness of what is around I still don't think there has been anything that beats it. I work on one of it's successors, Soundscape Community [0]. It is based on the code Microsoft released as open source when they shut down the project.

[0] https://github.com/soundscape-community/soundscape/

I wouldn't trust them. I have seen screen time over 24H at least twice.

> If you were interested in whether cash usage declined during the Pandemic, it sure did. However, correlation !== causality, so please don’t draw any meaningful conclusions from this.

I think we can be certain that reduced cash use didn't cause the pandemic, and a common cause for both is also hard to imagine. That only leaves the pandemic causing a reduction in cash use. Am I missing something?

Can we maybe blame the people who use them irresponsibly instead of blaming the technology? These glasses have been a life changer for so many visually impaired people.

clearly not true. the weights are the preferred form for making modifications. Do you really think people should be downloading hundreds of TB of training data and running make to build the model on their own cluster of GPUs?

Why are you being so hostile?

It also, and I would say more commonly, means a round thing that can be turned. I've never heard of anyone avoiding the term.

latency would be the killer. a very tiny delay between pressing a key and hearing a response can make a screen reader feel unresponsive.

Yes, I have a passport which is accepted by every other company I have had to verify id with. Apple doesn't offer it as an option for UK accounts for some reason.

I agree, but I just created anew Apple id, and got a developer subscription straight away on the web without it asking for id. I suppose they will probably require id if I submit to the app store, but the fact that I already paid should carry more weight I hope.

because it is Israel doing all the fucking mass murder of innocent people?

I tried to get a personal developer account (I'm already a developer through an organisation). The app required a Driver's license as the only accepted ID. I don't drive because I'm blind. They did a screen share and talked me through applying on the web site. It failed. They never gave a reason and ignored me when I asked for one. They just said

"Hello Robert, Thank you for your patience while I awaited a response from our operations team.

Upon review, we have found that we can’t verify your identity with the Apple Developer app or provide further assistance with the Apple Account for Apple developer programs.

You can still take advantage of great content using your Apple Account in Xcode to develop and test apps on your own device. Learn more about Xcode development.

I do apologise that I was not of more help to you in this situation but wish you the best of luck for the future. "

They will destroy the developer experience when they add identity and signing.

It can trigger it's self, when it decides it needs to try lots of different options to get clicks into an installer running as admin. There's basically nothing you can do to prevent it.

I didn't know this. Looks like I dodged a bullet - being totally blind meant the chance of issues was high but luckily it worked. It triggered the id check while trying to get computer use to work for an installer running as admin on windows. Actual reverse engineering I got it to do in the past didn't trigger it.

Apple could simply be ordered to include a hardware backdoor, and legally be prevented from talking about it. Everything else in the architecture could work exactly the way they claim in the PCC paper.

wow! are you really saying that Palestinian children should have no rights because of something their ancestors did? Should people get to violently remove them from their homes and land because of something written in history books?

It's honestly shocking to me that there are humans in the world who are comfortable defending such evil with some perceived amusing fact from history. This is happening today! The killing of people in their thousands based on their ethnicity is happening today. There is no defence for that. It's not war, it is genocide.

That isn't some wild internet conspiracy theory, it is a consensus of genocide scholars.

But I guess you will go on with being "amused" at any argument about stolen land, even though there isn't a human on earth who's ancestors haven't done terrible things.

We should be better than that in the 21st century.

No need to issue a recall, they could just release a firmware update that disables unauthenticated firmware updates over BLE.

wifi, bluetooth, and microphones. Yes microphones. I have a very cheap smart bulb with a mode that responds to music. That's not even unusual for smart bulbs.

Yeah, all Israel ever wanted was peace. That's why they stole land that was already populated, and continue to take more and more. Bomb women and children. confiscate baby formula. starve innocent people. destroy their homes and schools. Perfect way to keep peace.

ARIA is a solution to a specific problem, not something that should be used on every site. HTML is accessible out of the box when semantic elements are used as intended. If you are using a div as a button, you probably aren't hand writing HTML. It is likely part of a library. Adding the necessary ARIA attributes benefits every site using the library. Your boiling the ocean analogy implies that every web developer needs to scatter ARIA attributes all over their code, which just isn't true.

It's not a binary. most web sites are accessible to some degree. Just the fact that semantic elements exist at all makes a big difference. Popular frameworks have accessibility built in.

I'm glad that a large proportion of web developers are happy to boil the ocean then. I use the web every day with a screen reader. It works. 99% of what I want to access is fine. Often not perfect, but a whole lot better than what I could get out of AI.

I do use ChatGPT to research things, but I don't usually see that as accessibility solution. I completely agree that screen readers and browsers would benefit from AI, as they already are; Chrome and Edge can generate missing image descriptions. AI can certainly enhance accessibility, but it can't replace the existing technology that already works quite well a lot of the time.

The other positive about AI for accessibility is that the frontier models have a good understanding of what works. Instead of learning all the guidelines, you can just ask an agent to review the page for accessibility and fix any problems.

I realise I am only looking at it from a screen reader point of view, and yes, we are quite a small minority. But good universal design helps everyone, whether they just need to zoom the page for comfort without it breaking, their eyes are not that of a young person, they have dexterity issues using a mouse, and many more. Accessibility in general isn't serving a tiny minority,. I imagine most of us will come to appreciate it in some way.

Clients can't automatically fix all existing web pages, because the semantic information just isn't there. AI doesn't excuse web developers. It wouldn't even be a fix. Who wants to wait for an AI agent for each interaction?

Not all accessibility tools are expensive:

   - NVDA is free and open source
   - Narrator is included with windows
   - Voiceover is included with macOS and iOS
   - Orca is free and open source.
   - Talkback comes with Android
   - Chromevox comes with Chrome OS

I did read the article. Why do you need to label a div? It's just a container, not a semantic element. If you really want to use a div for something semantic you can set role and aria-label. That is done all the time and works with screen readers.

To hell with using vision based AI for web accessibility. it really isn't that hard to get right. Semantic html is already accessible. ARIA can help when devs want to use the wrong elements for some reason or for custom controls.

Really? I haven't used Android recently, but I very much doubt 7 year old Talkback was any where near as good as Voiceover. I also haven't seen a single accessibility improvement in Windows recently. The most accessible Windows apps are usually based on older toolkits like win32. Edge is very accessible, but 99% of that comes from Chrome.

Apple was first to market with Voiceover. Google took a very long time to come close to catching up.

Ideally that is what AD should be like. too often you set the volume right for a movie so the characters can be heard, then the AD is like an insanely boomy voice that shakes the room. Plus for some reason the also turn the movie audio down, as if that would be necessary.

It's still AT-SPI for wayland, the main difference is how screen readers grab keyboard input events.[0] I don't think there is a big difference from a toolkit point of view. I don't personally have experience with Wayland because most blind people recommend Mate as being the most accessible desktop still.

Thanks for considering a11y for your toolkit - it really makes a difference to those of us who are disabled. Are you implementing a11y separately for each platform? If you use accesskit[1] you only have to implement it once for all platforms. I recently vibe coded accessibility for the Swell toolkit[2] used by Reaper. I have a branch using accesskit and a branch implementing at-spi. Accesskit made things a lot easier and more performant.

Let me know if you would like a screen reader user to help with testing your toolkit.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/1025127/

[1] https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

[2] https://github.com/RDMurray/WDL/tree/accesskit

and my fork of accesskit with some features and fixes for unix: https://github.com/RDMurray/accesskit/tree/swell-fixes