ndarilek

Thanks, super happy to hear that! If I sound harsh, please understand that it's from the perspective of someone who starts out excited about how the latest and greatest startup will disrupt my life, only to realize that half of their app is unusable to me. When I raise any issues like this, the most I can usually hope for is "thanks for your comments, they made our day, unfortunately we have no intention of fixing these issues at this time." So when I encounter inaccessibility among developer-focused tools, and think about how unemployment among disabled folks hovers around 70%, it's hard not to be jaded, and frustrated about how making accessibility an afterthought makes employment a bigger challenge for some of us.

So I'm glad to hear that you're undergoing an audit, and I hope that I can someday count ZenHub among the developer tools I can use. FWIW, Slack isn't even in this group, which is shameful given they patted themselves on the back for such a keyboard-friendly interface when they killed off XMPP. No, I'm not bitter. :P

Man, I don't know if I'm going to regret posting this tomorrow, but if folks at ZenHub are going to pop into this thread and promote themselves as a product developers are encouraged to switch to, as a blind developer, I wish they'd at least pay lip service to web accessibility best practices. As a blind screen-reader-using developer, I tried to use ZenHub as a contractor at my last gig and it was impossible. As in, I'm on my desktop doing a screenshare to my coworker across the country viewing my screen on his iPhone, and he's trying to tell me milimeter by milimeter how to move my mouse so I can dismiss one of your onboarding popups which I couldn't dismiss via keyboard on several OS's screen readers, only to be presented immediately thereafter by another. I couldn't use your broduct at all on my own until a sighted coworker helped me to dismiss your onboarding popups, then I found it hard and unintuitive how to navigate the interface as a screen reader user.

Not upset, just frustrated that I couldn't do my job, and I wish you'd done some basic accessibility testing on your interface. If that's a gap in your development staff, I'm currently looking for work. Just sayin'. :)

In any case, kudos for creating a quality product that folks I respect enjoy using. I hope that one day I can be among them.

Or the instant messaging transport, which is what I thought this was related to when I first saw it. :)

https://spectrum.im/

I use Fedora. Most of my issues seem like potential leaks/performance degradations in the accessibility stack. Performance drops over time, and doesn't seem to improve when apps are killed/restarted. The only components I can't restart are a11y-related, and the only way to get performance back is to restart or log back out and in. Maybe the issue is gnome-shell, but I can't help but feel like there'd be a revolt if everyone experienced the performance issues I do, so unfairly or not I blame accessibility.

Man, I feel like half this post was my sysadmin playbook. I eventually got sick of explaining why it was such a pain in the ass to crack open vim and edit remote files, and why it was much easier to edit locally and scp back. I credit interactive fiction for the problem-solving skills, and gopher for the boost to memorization (gopher because if you wanted to find that primitive search engine 12 levels deep, you had to memorize lots of strings of numbers to navigate those mazes of menus. Not much different than how we use appliances these days, really, though it's hell to manage if you're stoned or not 100% on your game. :)

Blind developer/sysadmin here as well. I completely agree with the above comment, and would add to it:

I'm not sure what platform you currently use, but if not Windows, you're in for some challenges if you're blind or visually-impaired. I'm currently using Linux because I'm a console-based developer (I mean, I still use Firefox and the GUI but run most dev tools from the console.) This generally works well enough for me until I need an IDE, because my current codebase is C#/CSHTML/JavaScript/HTML/CSS/TypeScript, and I can't juggle all that state in my head without something like an IDE to help out. And, as far as I know, there's nothing like that available and accessible for Linux. My hope is that VSCode can help a bit, but Electron apps are currently inaccessible under Linux, which rules out a whole bunch of traditionally useful tools (No "Electron is bloated" arguments here please, this is something else entirely.) Unless you're a Linux user who uses mostly GTK-Gecko-based tools and the console, and those GTK-based tools don't use crazy custom widgets, you can make Linux work. But QT is challenging, Electron is out, and Chromium/Chrome are inaccessible (though I hear that is changing soon.) Windows offers lots more tooling, plus access to Electron apps, which opens up many more possibilities for non-console-based development.

But anyway, if you can at all transition your workflow to Windows before things get more challenging, I think you'll be in a better place. I'm about to ditch Linux soon, but for a high-end PC which will run VMs for anything I might need. Running a pile of VMs is probably the best solution to this issue, but second best would almost certainly be Windows. MacOS and Linux trail behind, unfortunately.

I also wish you good luck. Happy to chat if I can help more. nolan at thewordnerd dot info

What's the deal with this? The Atlantic, Wired, and dev.to all tell me I'm offline on first load. I have to use ctrl-shift-R to get any page content, and I've never been offline when this happens.

I mean, I'm assuming there are service worker shenanigans at play here, but given that it's always wrong about my online status, this seems like a fairly big bug on someone's part. Just wish I knew where to file or check its status.

My screen reader, Orca under Linux, read those as "sigma" and "almost equal to." So I suppose those work, though I'd have to hit Google to find out how to type them. :)

Haven't thought much about line length. I tend to write longer lines just because I don't see the point on the screen where they'd logically break, and when I'm arrowing through code, I generally prefer to hear as much of a construct as possible without having to arrow 4-5 times through a single statement. If I'm calling something on a long list or string then I might break the list out over several lines, but if I'm dealing with a single long function call then I just let it go long. Formatters are certainly fine, it's just annoying to find and configure them for each language I use.

Hey, kudos to you for thinking about this! Background: I'm totally blind, have programmed for nearly 3 decades, kind of do the in and out of half a dozen languages thing these days. Today's favorites are Rust anywhere I can get away with it, Python because it runs in places where I need it (Home Assistant, Mycroft, etc.) and JavaScript because if I hold my nose and don't think too much about the atrocities I'm committing, I can run the same or similar code in various form factors. I'll try to give a few pointers. Note that these are specific to blindness, and specific to me. I don't claim to speak for the disabled population as a whole, as we're kind of a grab bag.

1. Indentation: Pretty much a solved problem at this point. If I were reading Python code line-by-line, my editor might speak something like (not sure if my newlines will make it, but imagine them where they should be): def hello(world): 4 spaces print("Hello, world.") 4 spaces 1 tab 4 spaces print("What was I thinking when I indented this line?")

So I wouldn't worry too much about that. I've never had issues with an indentation-based language, and anyone blind who does likely just needs to change their tooling a bit. This is usually just a checkbox in the screen reader settings, so doesn't even usually require an editor/IDE change.

2. Avoid crazy symbols. Scala gave me some grief with this, with every library author having method names like %^&@^$# because I assume that set of symbols looks like performHttpRequest(...) in some visual way. I exaggerate a bit. Only a bit. Note that operator overloading is fine, at least from an accessibility perspective. It's when people decide that a series of connected punctuation symbols evokes the idea of making an HTTP request or opening an Option that I start to get annoyed.

3. Create good command line tooling. Rust has this nailed. I like how Rust's own installer just uses rustup under the hood, or at least I think it does, and every blog post advertising a new component also includes the rustup incantations to grab it. I assume the editor interfaces are as nice or nearly so. I guess the takeaway is, package your language installation tooling in a library so you can invoke it from the CLI, editor plugins, etc.

4. Put error messages at the bottom of stacktraces rather than the top. Python does this right, and everyone else gets it wrong[1]. Say you're running a compiler from your command line. You get an error, and your cursor lands on the input area, ready for a new command. As a screen reader user, you discover that error by entering your window's review mode and moving up. With JavaScript, Rust, and just about everything else, I have to arrow through the callstack in reverse as I move up the screen to the line containing the error. Python puts this error last, near the input cursor, so all you're doing is arrowing up a couple lines. It's a few seconds per error, but can add up immensely over the course of a day. NPM, infuriatingly, shows the error, followed by disclaimer text that the error isn't in NPM, then barfs up an NPM error just to confuse things. So any JS package I use that uses NPM for its scripting requires arrowing back through 2 stacktraces to find the original error. It's enough to drive me to drink.

I can probably come up with more, but I haven't finished my coffee yet. Perhaps that's a good thing...

1. Right and wrong are of course subjective. This is just one blind dude's opinion, take it for what it's worth.

Does SSB still make it impossible to share a single identity across multiple devices? (I.e. I'd like to log into my identity from my laptop but see that same identity's feed on my phone.)

I want to participate, but periodically I check https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/faq/applications/multiple-devices... and it hasn't changed, and for me, having a single device to which the entirety of my identity is tied is a non-starter. Even so, the tech seems interesting, and I hope that limitation goes away one day.

"Seventy-two new “fast radio bursts” from a mysteriously noisy galaxy 3 billion miles away"

Wait, what? I thought space is big. Really big. This mysterious distant galaxy is practically in our backyard.

Second this. I'd ask that any dependencies in node_modules/ override whatever is cached.

For a work project, I'm updating a dependency written against an undocumented specification. Much fun is being had doing this, I assure you. Being able to crack open the sources in node_modules/, instrument things with logging, and fix fix fix until I get something working is very helpful. I'm sure I can track things down in a cache directory and do the same, but it's nice knowing that my changes are limited to just this particular project, and that a checkout/reinstall of the module in another project will get the original broken sources for comparison.

I have a related question. How do you bypass them in the context of an RSS reader/podcatcher? I was building a service to parse some podcast feeds into JSON, and noticed they were failing on NPR podcasts. Pulled up the URL fine on my laptop, but it failed in Hetzner.

Of course, it failed because it was getting some sort of GDPR page at the podcast feed URL. I'm wondering if there was some way around this, because it's not like podcatchers can opt into something via an RSS feed...can they? I'm pretty sure I passed headers only accepting feed content-types, but even that wasn't enough.

Sure I can host elsewhere, but I just didn't care enough about the project to do that. But if there's a way around this, then I might pick it up again.

Right, but opening from the keyboard is only a tiny fraction of what is needed. If I tab around on the display, I get a bunch of buttons that are likely column headers (I.e. "Status", "Transferred", etc.) but I never reach a list of actual requests through which I can arrow. I press Space on a button labeled "Start performance analysis" which immediately plunks focus into a text field from which I can't seem to escape. The entire developer tools interface is littered with these sorts of inconsistencies.

The HTML inspector is similar. I can pull up a tree of elements, but sometimes I can expand tree levels from the keyboard and sometimes I can't. I've taken to using the context menu to copy an element's inner HTML into a text editor, then inspecting it that way. Often, clicking Inspect Element from the context menu doesn't open the inspector with keyboard focus on the element I'm inspecting, either, which is a massive pain when I'm trying to tell a developer what is needed to make a site accessible. So, IOW, I can't even file actionable bug reports for web apps without putting forth lots of effort to even identify the element that is at fault.

I hope this means the developer tools themselves will actually become accessible. As a blind web developer running Linux and Orca, bunches of things have been broken for a very long time, to the point where I'm considering switching to ChromeOS and running Linux in chroots/containers just to get a better set of web development tools. I'm glad that they're empowering developers to create accessible websites, but if blind/disabled developers were empowered to develop on equal footing, then that'd be another way to achieve the same goal.

As one example, I can't navigate the network inspector via keyboard in any meaningful way. Firebug used to have this nailed, to the point where you could even enable an accessibility mode (though arguably accessibility mode should have just been the only mode.) And yes, I'd happily file issues for this and half a dozen other things, but at some point I actually have to do my job, and in this case that might mean jumping ship to a browser that seems more accessible.

Got it. I assume the unknown target will never be able to link against native libraries beyond those provided by Rust's core itself? I assume the answer is no, but a few years ago I assumed I wouldn't ever be able to do what wasm is letting me now, so I don't want to hold too tightly to those assumptions. :)

Does any of this tooling (I.e. wasm-pack, wasm-bindgen) work with the wasm32-unknown-emscripten target? All of the examples I see use wasm32-unknown-unknown, which is (I think) of limited use to me since I'm linking a fairly complex chain of native libraries against my current wasm target.

It seems like cargo-web has lots of this ground covered already. I'm wondering why build these other tools in that case? I don't have a dog in this fight, I'm just working on a wasm-based app that I'm hoping will serve me for quite some time, and seeing what appears to be duplicated effort at such an early stage worries me a bit.

Either way, thanks for building this!

Oh man, makes me so happy to see the accessibility concerns at the top of this thread. I hate Slack so much. Nothing has made me say "is 10 AM too early for a beer?" quite so much as that absolute pile of uselessness. I thought they'd actually improved their accessibility story when my screen reader read various elements as buttons. Later I discovered that, while they'd likely added the correct ARIA role to a <div/>, they didn't bother adding expected keyboard behaviors. I'm fortunate enough to work with co-ops, and the company I'm founding hosts its own tools specifically because those I can control, and I can pick the more accessible open source chat solution. But I can't count how many times I've had to be some company's special snowflake because I can't use Slack, can't use Toggl, can only use parts of Basecamp, and as such can't participate in a bunch of their processes. Now I'll encourage companies further away from Slack than I already do. Forget not touching it with a 10-foot pole. The 100-footer is coming out for this one. I'm sorry to post such an unproductive comment, but if you're working for a silicon valley company and not doing accessibility then you're doing it wrong, and you can pay me or any number of other talented blind developers with some of that investor capital if you want us to show you how to do it right. There is no excuse for being so exclusionary.

If that's how you feel, making your company a cooperative or a platform cooperative is probably a safer bet, albeit possibly more work. Giving away shares, while it appears easy, is illegal and has other disadvantages.

https://platform.coop

Got it, thanks. Do other platforms support 5.1+? Also, can Resonance be used in wasm projects? Wondering how practical it would be to use binaural output for the web, then recompile and port to native platforms if 5.1+ is needed. Wasm at least would eliminate the need for a rewrite from JS.

I'm poking the docs, can't find an answer for this, so am hoping someone smarter than me can help. For years I've wanted to build audio games on the web (see http://audiogames.net for examples of what I mean.) The resource requirements for these just aren't that intense, so JS/the web seems like an interesting delivery platform, but the Web Audio API's support for what I'd need to do this is...disappointing is the nicest way I'd put it.

My biggest missing feature is a listener/sound source API that renders to 5.1/7.1 surround. Does Resonance do that? Yes I understand that headphones/binaural rendering is ideal, but I have a decent surround system and sometimes I want to put it through its paces. :)

The Getting Started section demonstrates stereo downmixing. Peeking at the API indicates I can pass something called an ambisonic order into some functions, but even the constant for the default gives me no obvious indication of what this means. So maybe this is something audio developers know, but as someone trying to evaluate Resonance, it seems like they've just handwaved around this concept.

And if Resonance doesn't do this, does anything? Even if I compiled to wasm, which is certainly something I'm open to, it looks like the only wasm options are SDL-based, meaning simple stereo and no spatialization. But maybe I've just picked terrible keywords to search for.

As a blind person myself, I think I get from where you're coming here. But, as has been suggested by others, my first read of this was "non-native English speaker" rather than "offensive." I can't count how many times we've been referred to by folks as "blinds," which cracks me up every time (in a good-natured way, that is.) My girlfriend, a wheelchair user and speaker of 4 languages, regularly finds such things amusing as well, particularly as she can usually understand the linguistic reasoning behind much of the awkward phrasing.

That said, I'm glad they seem to be working with blind/visually-impaired folks. I hope they likewise staff their company with blind developers/designers as well, since we're still not terribly well-represented in tech, and it always makes me a little sad to see companies building products for us, but only involving us in the testing/final steps. I'd love to hack on something like this myself, and have played with Arduino-based echolocation augmentation for help with solo cycling/sports/other non-basic use cases. I hope there are blind developers working with you on the firmware.

As a blind person...wow, what a pile.

First of all, Berkeley didn't have to take down their courses. They elected to, then threw a tantrum about it. And yes, they could have spent money making their videos accessible, but let's not forget that they spent money to get those videos made in the first place, and it isn't as if the requirements that this content be accessible are a huge shocker to a public university that should be no stranger to accommodating disabled students. This is why those of us in the accessibility profession tell clients to build in accessibility right from day one, and this continuing trope of "OMG I didn't realize we needed to make our content accessible! Woe, woe are we!" passed through the realm of disingenuous and into that of pure bullshit a long, long time ago.

"There's clearly a huge difference between having a building code and requiring people to design websites in a certain way. It doesn't matter what your opinion of wheelchair ramps is; the two situations aren't comparable." OK, so as a blind person, I'm supposed to do what? Drive my car to the store when a website won't let me access that store's services? Pay more than someone with their own car to take a Lyft or Uber, assuming either exists in my location? Arrive at said store and hope whatever I want is in stock, take extra time to find an employee to help me shop (which isn't always available...) Where is all this time supposed to come from, and who are you to deprioritize it against that of the large corporation building those accommodations? And BTW, my girlfriend is a wheelchair user, and it does feel to me that the situations are often comparable. She routinely takes extra time accessing a building or its facilities, sometimes can't at all, and let's not even discuss inaccessible bathrooms and the literal blood and tears spent trying to use them. So take it from someone who has experienced both, they are very comparable.

And let's not forget the websites that don't have a physical location associated with them. Just last week I saw a few startups advertising their services here, thought I might use them, went to apply/sign up, then found their sites were completely inaccessible. Their huge, obscure crime? Using div elements without ARIA attributes instead of the HTML markup that would have achieved the same thing. So in the past few weeks I've been denied the ability to apply for jobs, purchase products, or even launch interesting side projects that might build my skills or improve my resume, all because web developers can't be bothered, and let's not forget that when I am hired by someone, I either can't use tools like Basecamp and Slack effectively, or they're such pains that it's easier to self-host open source tools llike Rocket.chat and Wekan, both of which I've submitted accessibility patches to. And people wonder why I don't bother looking for work anymore.

"I am absolutely 100% against the government doing the equivalent of zoning law for privately owned websites." Then on behalf of disabled folks everywhere, stay the hell away from building websites. I for one am sick and tired of fighting with people like you whose anti-regulation stance happily throws me under the bus, and I haven't even scratched the surface regarding the ways that an inaccessible web has and continues to hinder me.

If I seem furious, well, here's a challenge. Fire up Orca, NVDA or VoiceOver, all free screen readers, and try to use api.ai with your eyes closed. Fail, then imagine you spent the last few hours reading up about how you might build a Google Assistant bot to provide real-time transit information, and that you now need to find an api.ai alternative that is accessible, assuming such a thing exists (wit.ai is also inaccessible, my accessibility issues apparently made the support staff's day to read about, but they're probably not resolved and probably never will be.) Multiply that by, say, 10 for a handful of other projects I named. I could call out more recent startups, but I'd probably start stepping on the toes of some folks reading this, and if you aren't building in accessibility from day one or paying me to advise you on fixing it, then I'd basically be volunteering for a full-time job's worth of work pointing out the ways in which a given complex service isn't accessible.

1. The div is not keyboard-focusable by default, so you need to add `tabindex="0"`. 2. By default, the div does not trigger click on Enter/Space, so you need to add a keyup handler to make it do so. 3. Screen readers won't report the div as a button because they can't identify widgets based on how they look, so add `role="button"` as per the ARIA spec (only on first cup of coffee now, so I'm not providing a link.)

Yes, it isn't super complicated, but a) most don't do it because they look identical and b) multiply that by any other widget where the HTML version is replaced with a div and suddenly things get complicated. If you're not a keyboard user, you may not understand how the web works without a mouse. All that is lost when switching to divs.

This says nothing about how OS/screen reader combinations differ in key handling, nor about how complex widgets such as multiselects include similarly complex key handling. Also, the above ARIA is super simplistic. It doesn't handle situations where, for instance, you have multiple roles and have to toggle some of them based on what item is selected, what item is focused, etc.

So, TLDR: It's so much better to use the HTML elements specifically designed for a certain task because you get a lot for free that is taken for granted. That said, I like how Semantic specifies how my UI might look, an wish I could have the best of both worlds.

As a blind web developer, I want to like Semantic. My usual mode of developing HTML, once it's at the "I need to make this look good" stage, is "show it to my girlfriend and ask her various questions." She says things like "I wish X were a bit larger," or "Y should be blue," and pulling that off in Bootstrap is challenging. I can drop down to lower-level CSS, but have no clue how my changes interact with Bootstrap's defaults, or indeed if they take effect at all. I mean, I can tweak font sizes and hex codes, but at the end of the day they're all numbers, when what I want to do is say "No really, make this thing larger relative to these other things," not "make it 125%, with this hex code I scraped out of some color list and hope looks nice."

But, gods, buttons as divs. Maybe they're easier to style, but if I had a dollar for every time I couldn't use someone's site because they used a div as a button, then didn't do the several other things that <button/> gives you for free that make all the accessibility difference, well, I'd not worry about money ever again.

I'm glad to see that the homepage example at least uses <button/>, but then the rendering of the example isn't keyboard-focusable or actionable. Then, when I look at the actual code they're rendering, it's back to divs. So they're not even rendering their example code.

Can I use Semantic with the actual HTML elements that the divs are meant to style, so I can use the CSS class names some folks hate and derive their benefits to me, but still get the accessibility benefits of the tags? I'd read their docs and check, but I don't know if they're linked from the main page. I see links to 1.X/0.X docs, but I can't find a link to 2.X docs. There's a "Menu" link which may pop up more links, but I can't seem to trigger this with Enter. I seriously spent 10-15 minutes on this page looking for docs using only my keyboard, before deciding that I really had better ways to spend my day.

I hate to advise people to avoid projects because I'm not so arrogant as to think my language/stack/framework/whatever is anything other than my favorite, and I do want to like this one, but every time I look at it the accessibility story is disappointing, and given that it's a framework, that means other sites will likely inherit disappointing accessibility stories too.

And now it's back to drinking, which seems to be the only fix for this[1].

1. Not really, but damn am I tired of a) fighting the same battles again and again and b) answering the same questions about said battles again and again. All of this stuff is exhaustively documented by folks who are smarter than I am, so it isn't obscure, nor is it something I need to (or am even highly qualified to) answer.

Flavor: Desktop Headline: A real commitment to accessibility for disabled users

About ten years ago, I was a happy Ubuntu user. At that time, it stuck fairly close to the GNOME stack, which is good for me as a blind user since GNOME is reasonably accessible and has a small but dedicated group of folks working on it.

Then Canonical significantly abandoned GNOME for Unity. While Canonical advanced Unity, wrote its own mobile-optimized interface, decided not to use Wayland in favor of its own home-grown solution, it to the best of my knowledge assigned one (one!) staffer to work on the accessibility story for all the greenfield stuff it was building. Sure, you could run GNOME in Ubuntu if you wanted to be a version or two behind. Also, sometimes you'd get something like GNOME 3.10 accessibility components shipped with GNOME 3.8, which worked 95% of the time, but when it failed it failed hard. I wish I could remember specifics, but at the time I was busy feeling like Canonical had basically thrown its non-able-bodied users aside. The only Canonical accessibility staffer I knew of was claiming that the goal was to only make Ubuntu LTS releases definitely accessible but no commitments for any in between. That completely disregards how the accessibility stack itself sees improvements, and sometimes things become more accessible by virtue of nothing more than using a newer at-spi/atk. Sometimes I upgrade GNOME not for the New Shiny(TM), but because GNOME 3.next brings accessibility improvements that will make existing apps more stable and usable. But you can't always just ship a newer atk with a GNOME release a year and a half behind, so telling me I'll only get accessibility fixes in 2-year increments when access tech changes about as quickly as any other is, well, short-sighted.

I'd really like to see Ubuntu make more of a commitment to accessibility in this or some upcoming (but near) cycle. If you can build your own custom desktop environment and display manager, then surely Canonical can assign more than a single person or two to improve the accessibility of all that new tech. I remember Shuttleworth writing a blog post near the end of 2012, claiming that Ubuntu would leave no one behind, and that it would be relevant to all types of computing. As a blind developer, I tried to constructively comment that not making accessibility a priority more than once every two years both left me behind and made Ubuntu less relevant to me. My comment vanished into the moderation queue and was never published. Maybe it wasn't the congratulatory pat on the back folks were hoping for in that post. Today I'm on Fedora and, while it isn't perfect, the fact that it stays close to GNOME makes it significantly better for me. All your new tech can be just as accessible, but it won't happen if you make it a single person's job to do that work. And, if you can't make it accessible because of limited resources, then you are leaving people behind and might want to scale back your efforts in other areas to compensate.

Here's something I'm curious about. First off, I understand that few of you are lawyers, and any of you who are aren't being paid by me so none of this constitutes legal advice. :) I'd certainly talk to a lawyer before acting on it in any case, I just can't wrap my head around how Delaware is such an advantage.

I read that Delaware C corps/LLCs are the way to go because they're inexpensive. I'm in Texas. It looks like Texas would consider a Delaware entity as foreign, and require me to pay additional fees to do business in Texas. So that would appear to nullify any cost savings, since (IIRC) that fee was larger than registering the entity here when I last checked (I.e. I could just register a Texas LLC for $300 vs. registering somewhere else and paying a larger fee to transact business here.)

Is that just another in Texas' long and growing list of stupid things? Or, if your business is internet-based, are you not considered to be doing business in Texas in the sense that a more traditional corporation would? Not sure how that'd make sense, but...

It looks like, according to BOC 9.251, transacting interstate commerce doesn't automatically qualify as doing business, so if you might argue that a majority of your transactions are interstate by virtue of you being internet-based, I wonder if that makes a difference? So I'm wondering if this is a way that Texas is strict that other states aren't because, as I understand it, other states charge significantly more for LLC filing?

http://www.sos.state.tx.us/corp/foreign_outofstate.shtml

Thanks.

Came here to ask exactly this question.

Further, and I don't even know if this question is a meaningful one, but are there any curated lists of libraries known to work with wasm, or do you just compile something and hope for the best? I'm curious if there are any gaming-oriented sound libraries known to work well, and with bindings to Rust? I'm a blind developer with a casual interest in building audio games, a niche gaming genre that's basically what it (har har) sounds like. Unfortunately, much of what is available is Windows-only, and I'm a Linux user. But increasingly over the past few years, the web has struck me as a great platform for building these sorts of games. You don't need a powerful CPU for one thing, and the browser's built-in TTS APIs abstract away one of the biggest platform hurdles. There really isn't a good cross-platform hook into text-to-speech systems, and often you need speech presented in ways that clash with how screen readers work.

Anyhow, I've been wanting to experiment with multi-player gaming, and Rust's new wasm support along with Firefox 52's inclusion seems like a nice bit of synchronicity. If only I could find a good audio library known to work, particularly something with spatialization.

And yes, I do know about the Web Audio API, but was disappointed to learn that its panner nodes don't support more than 2 speakers. That said, I don't know if there are any wasm-compatible libraries that'd work with Rust and support 5.1. I'm also looking for a fun project to use Rust with, and an audio game that uses the strengths of both the web and Rust might be just the thing.

Pardon the diversion, but I'm stupidly excited about using the browser as a cross-platform runtime via a language more sane than JavaScript. :)

Haven't read the article, but as a blind person myself, nope. Much of the infrastructure designed to "help" us is so inconsistent, non-intuitive or broken that I don't bother using it, far preferring my own skills and knowledge of my surroundings.

For instance, I have an audible signal near my house. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes one side of the street works, and which side that is varies from day to day. In Austin, we have a variety of signal designs with no standard placement and, in some cases, a non-intuitive pattern of beeps which you can only learn by listening to the traffic patterns and correlating them with the sounds. So, in short, if I walk up and press a button, I have no indication whether that button will give me an audible signal, and historically giving me a signal is no indicator of getting one in the future. I feel truly sorry for anyone who actually needs the things. For my part, traffic never lies unless you get a bad driver, in which case an audible signal wouldn't save you anyway.

Thanks for reading my mini-rant on the fucked-up state of shit to "help" blind folks. :P