So, this morning, after years and years of using the GUI in Linux, I gave up. The state of the GUI does nothing but deteriorate over time for accessibility, and it's exhausting. It's only getting worse. We're far, far away from what it used to be, years ago. Certainly, the QT framework has improved since 5 and now 6 came out, but GTK? Oh dear, oh dear... So, let's dive into it. #linux#xorg#wayland#a11y#accessibility#blind
This may be an unpopular take, but...
I don't think any blind person will ever be completely independent. I do, however, think that every blind person can be self-sufficient. Independence, to me, implies a lack of reliance on anyone/anything. But everyone needs help sometimes. Self-sufficiency, on the other hand, is about having the tools you need, and the ability to get assistance, to go where you need to go/do what you need to do.
Thoughts? #Blind#Disability#Disabled#A11y#Accessibility
sigh broke my NLS EReader today. I guess it was raining harder than I thought this morning, and water got inside the key mechanisms. So random buttons are pressed. So I thought I'd pull it out and let it dry. When I tried to put it back into the case, the case broke. So yeah that's great /s I can break anything, whether it be software or hardware.
Some blind Android users really want the Eloquence TTS engine back. It will die when 64-bit phones become the norm. They went as far as seriously debating of they could ask phone carriers to step in. It's sad, both because Google could easily have licensed Eloquence, put it in a 32-bit ARM container, and there you go. It's sad that Apple is the only big corporation that spent five minutes and thought "Oh hey we have a license for this now, let's containerize this and ship it for VoiceOver." It's sad that Google doesn't inspire confidence from the blind community at large of Google's ability to uphold an accessible OS and a competitive screen reader. And it's definitely sad that another TTS engine hasn't come along that is any better than Eloquence, which is from the 90's.
Q for #Blind / #lowVision / #visuallyImpaired folks / #screenReader users: are any of these styles (in poll below) preferred as a way to add emphasis to words in plain text? Wondering which if any of these are communicated effectively while also not being irritating.
Please DO NOT vote based on visual aesthetic preference!!
The more I learn about Glidance, a system that purports to replace the cane, the more it seems to have taken all the criticisms of "smart canes" into account. It might be the first genuine high-tech navigation aid that could be beneficial, replacing the cane in most circumstances. I'm usually highly skeptical about these things because people just havent thought through the implications including ergonomics, weather conditions, etc
Question for my #blind followers: Does anyone have a LevelStar Icon or first-generation APH Braille+ PDA that they'd be willing to sell me? I had an Icon on loan from LevelStar while I was working for Serotek, but I dutifully sent it back. And now I want to play with one again.
So for blind Windows users, what mail client do you use? I'm kinda getting tired of Gmail, having to hear lots of stuff before each message, and having to turn on browse mode and arrow through all that to get to the message, all that. And Thunderbird is messy in 115. I might have to just get used to Outlook.
Gosh y'all, some of these Android users are just, like... It's like they have a hate boner for Apple. Like, wow. Not even I feel that strongly about Google, or Apple, or Microsoft really. They're companies who are full of people, with their own tragectories, with tiny accessibility teams, and their own strengths and weaknesses. Apple manages to have enough internal communication to make things work well together. Google runs just about everything an everyday user uses. And Microsoft has kept Windows going for decades.
I mean, I rarely hear any iPhone users just plain have an anger-orgasm over Google. At most, it's apathetic "Yeah I wish they were better but there's not much I can do about that, so I'll keep writing my novel in Ulysses with my Braille display," or something. I mean, maybe I've just not seen this secret group of Google-hating blind people. I mean, my choice to use, and lightly suggest, an iPhone is from my experiences with Android. I've used this Samsung phone for like a year and a half now. I went 6 months without even touching my iPhone, especially after I got Google TalkBack on there instead of Samsung's out-of-date version. And still I've come back to iPhone. And I still don't hate Google. I don't hate anyone at Google. I think they could work together more, especially the TalkBack, Assistant, dictation, and Android UI teams to give TalkBack a way to shut up while a core part of the phone is recording, no matter what phone you're on. But I'm not cumming in rage at them. In fact, I'd still gladly work with them. Honestly I'd work with all three of the OS companies, and the FOSS orgs, to make things more accessible or enjoyable to use. Because there is no perfect OS for blind people right now. Every single one has their good and bad parts. A sighted person may be able to just move between them all, able to do anything on each one. I want that for us blind people.
So, Mac users. What apps for Mac keep you on Mac, or make you miss it when you're on other platforms? Can be accessibility-related or not. And they should work on Intel Macs too. I know, but I've seen like one or two that only work on M-series Macs.
hey #blind peeps, can we talk about those custom emoji for a sec?
so i've heard that currently they are not accessible because a #screenreader or braille display would only read the name between the two colons, which is frequently optimised for legth because of mastodon's character limit, rather than legibility.
so what would be the optimal way to deal with them? asking in the sense of: ignore the current constraints of the feature.
should there simply be slightly more descriptive names that are read every time? can y'all even figure out what a "blobcat" is? (not because i think you can't but because being a non native speaker myself, i think i might have some problems with that if i had no visual clues to go on)
or should there be a more lengthy description, maybe stored in an image alt attribute, that is read out each time? which is maybe much more annoying? or read the lengthy description out once but the short name for any repetitions?
So I don't know if Android will ever catch up to iOS. And the constant questions of how to use dictation and Google Assistant talking over TalkBack for others when they use headphones, and all that definitely doesn't help, along with how snappy some people in the blind Android Users community are. Now what was I gonna say? Oh yeah. I don't know if Android will ever catch up to Apple accessibility, but I'm really getting use to using my PC for everything. Emacs is turning out to be more than good enough as a writing environment, with company-mode suggesting words, mostly correctly, way before Apple's word suggestions would have popped up. There's no lag in Internet browsing, I can use Gmail or Outlook for email, yeah I have a good setup here. And with Beeper (which isn't completely accessible), I can text from my computer and read texts in full, including the conversation.
With BeMyAI and Lookout on the rise and existing services like Seeing AI and Envision being out there, it seems like a lot of #blind people are trying to become familiar with phone cameras and their interfaces. There are a lot of questions about camera positioning--e.g., how to point, how to stand, what will be covered, etc.
I visited a #NFB meeting today. Came home with a print piece of paper that I cannot read. I won’t be joining. So tired. But it’s whatever. I’m glad I found out before joining.
So, #Elementary OS. Tried it. No, it's not blind friendly. Alt + Tab doesn't speak with Orca most of the time. In setup, the full name, username, password fields aren't labeled, so tabbing with Orca says nothing. After setup, the welcome screen is full of "GTK button checkbox" and other mislabeled stuff. It's not ready for blind people to use.
So yesterday I got an interesting question from a student. If JAWS crashes, how do you fix it? Liek with NVDA, you can just Windows R, NVDA, Enter, and it shuts down any already running processes and restarts NVDA. Does JAWS have something like that?
Hi all. I've got an older #computer running #Windows10, and I'm thinking about putting #Linux on it since I've always wanted to try it out and think this computer might run better with Linux. I read a topic on audiogames.net about Linux #accessibility, and I saw a few recommendations for #distros to try out. To any #blind Linux users, is #NixOS a good one for a beginner, or should I try #LinuxMint or #Ubuntu? Also, what's the best way to install Linux and replace #Windows? Thanks. #technology#tech@mastoblind@accessibility@main
A day ago: I'm gonna just stop talking about Linux.
Next day: Hey y'all Emacspeak and emacs are really nice sometimes.
The next day (probably): Hey y'all so I just installed Fedora 29 and here's what I found.
Next day: So I installed Fedora on my work machine and everything is up and going.
Next hour: I'm posting this from Mastodon-mode in Emacs and wrote an Emacspeak module to work with Mastodon-mode.
Next hour: I've submitted a patch to Gnus to allow new users to set it up by just typing in their email address and password, and Gnus looks up an alist of domains and their mail settings and just sets up the account that way. 2FA support coming soon.
Next hour: Oh no there's been an update that breaks ATSPI so I gotta go back to Windows.
Just writing it out so I don't try to experience it in real life, lol. Very exagerated, but that's kinda how my sense of humor is. Now maybe I will get emacs and Emacspeak working on the Mac again since that's where it's the most responsive.
I was slightly entertaining Android yesterday, for a moment. Bigger battery, seems to work better with Bluetooth headphones, better speaker and all that. Then I looked in my drawer of cables for a USB C to USB C cable to connect my NLS EReader Braille display to my Samsung phone which I paid a good $600 for. And there were none. So yeah, that faded fast. The only way to use that Braille display on Android is over USB C. And no I’m not using a dongle to connect it either. It’s just ridiculous. So I went back to my little iPhone SE 2, and enjoyed using my Braille display over Bluetooth as it was intended.
So, I'm not sure if I've said this here, but with Emacspeak, a lot of stuff that's hard for a blind person to do in, say, a terminal or manpages or info documents, is really simple, because it's a keyboard-driven interface. Want to move up to the previous prompt to review output? Control + C, then Control + P. Or it may just be C-c p. Want to move to the next heading in a manpage? Just hit N or P. Like, it's a bit like Powershell, where normally terminals are just a stream of text, but Emacs is objects. And objects, like elements on the web, can be navigated or used as landmarks, or searched through if nothing else works.
Now, I'm not saying Emacspeak is perfect. It still suffers from being a programmer's tool, so definitely not for everyone. But what it does do well, especially not messing with my tags in HTML unlike VS Code's nonsense where it'll just jumble everything up for you, and even stuff like reading through processes in ProcEd-mode, Emacspeak makes that really visual information a lot simpler for audio.
So one of the things for me about Android is the TTS engines. Apple has, basically, three speech engines built into every one of their operating systems. Vocalizer which is what VoiceOver starts off on using, Macintalk which is like Alex, and Fred and all that, and Eloquence. Three different ways of speaking, pronounciation sets, all that. Actual choice.
On Android though, a Pixel comes with Google TTS. And if you've ever been somewhere with no Internet and heard a low quality, robotic voice from Google Maps, you've heard what we have to deal with on a Pixel every single day unless we get something different. So on Android, there are a few more options. RH Voice which honestly doesn't sound so good to me in English, ESpeak which is as robotic as you can get and was last updated on Oct 23, 2022 (almost a year ago), Vocalizer which had its last update on Oct 30, 2021 (which is better than I thought but still feels unmaintained), and that's about all I know of. On Samsung phones, you can get Samsung TTS out of the box, and it's pretty good. Of course, then you get Samsung's TalkBack, Samsung's version of everything, but also all the goodies that come with Samsung phones. Oh and Samsung TTS has a longer pause between everything cause it was made to read stuff not for screen reading, so everything feels slower than it is.
So it's really sad. Eloquence is still a 32-bit app, so will not work on the newest Pixels. Google TTS' newer local models are sluggish with TalkBack, and cannot speak quickly, as many have found out when working around the fact that TalkBack doesn't use the newer model natively. And it's sluggish when reading long pieces of text, like this one. And there iOS is, with tons of voices to choose from. And I get it, I should be thankful that we have even ESpeak, but when you come home from a stressful day at work, what do you want to hear?
So I go to update JAWS to 2024, and try to migrate my settings from 2023. I've changed my speech rate, configured my speech and sound scheme, all that, made JAWS my own and all that. And I get the below text. So uh, I update NVDA to 2023.3, and it... just works. And NVDA is free. Tons of its addons, are free. SMH y'all. I just don't have any words. I mean did this happen for anyone else? Did I do things wrong? I mean I've never updated JAWS with Leasey installed before so it's probably my fault as always. Still. Goodness.
Migrate Results
Details:
Migration of settings is not possible as Leasey software has been detected. For assistance,
please contact Hartgen Consultancy at www.hartgenconsultancy.com.
Hi, #Blind and #VisuallyImpaired Tooters. I have been offered a chance to meet with a high level member of GOogles accessibility team next week, to chat about ways for Google to engage more with the community of visually impaired people, as well as discuss existing accessibility bugs and requested features in various Google products. I’d love to include the feedback from folks over here as well, so feel free to reply to this post either privately or publicly, or email me at jakob@sparrowaccess.com.
Thanks!