jscholes

jscholes, 11 months ago to accessibility

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague told me they were too young to have used Nuance Talks. Which made me feel both old, and sad that they'd never experienced one of the best #ScreenReaders ever made. #accessibility

jscholes, 11 months ago to accessibility

I installed and subscribed to #ParamountPlus, learned that #audioDescription isn't available on many pieces of content in the UK, and discovered that a US-based VPN doesn't work if you subscribed to the UK offering. I have now unsubscribed from and uninstalled Paramount Plus. #accessibility #exclusion

jscholes, 1 month ago to random

Number of days since I forgot that I'd sent Google Chrome through a non-default audio device, and assumed YouTube was broken when I couldn't hear the playback: zero.

jscholes, 11 months ago to Windows11

Today, I'm setting up a #Windows11 device for the first time. So far, my desktop icons are checkboxes, mnemonics in the Win+X menu are announced in a nonsensical way that includes the Alt key, I hear an ad for the Glastonbury Festival each time I open the Start Menu, and I've twice lost audio after a reboot. #accessibility

jscholes, 2 months ago to random

Today is the day some people will make a "not found" joke because of the date, as if "d/mm" or "mm/d" actually makes sense as a format.

jscholes, 23 days ago to random

Writing this on the Clicks keyboard case for iPhone. Not sure what I think of it yet... its certainly gonna take some getting used to.

jscholes, 1 month ago to random

With apologies for any misspelling, does anyone know what ever happened to Ali Al-Hajamy? A blind person I followed on Twitter and a couple of other places, seemed to adore reading and literature above all else.

jscholes, 11 months ago to accessibility

In #VoiceDream Reader, does anyone know if it's possible to use Backreferences for group captures in a regular-expression-based pronunciation dictionary replacement? I've tried \1, $1, and \k<1>, but the syntax is always passed directly through to the synthesiser without the text captured by the group. #VoiceDreamReader #accessibility

jscholes, 2 months ago to iOS

Completely bewildered by the #VoiceDream subscription announcement. The blog post links to #Stripe for making a subscription payment, but that's not how subscriptions to #iOS apps are usually managed. Meanwhile, I can't see anything in the app itself about an account, #AppStore purchases, or subscriptions. If I pay through Stripe today, am I supposed to assume that at some point, the iOS app will be updated to respect that new subscription?

jscholes, 1 month ago to random

I don't know about you, but when a TV show or movie makes a joke out of some device accidentally connecting to a #Bluetooth speaker, the lack of realism takes me right out of the moment. It's hard enough to connect to some of them on purpose.

jscholes, 4 months ago to accessibility

Purely for their optimism, I admire anyone who asks an #accessibility professional to put #userExperience (#UX) aside when assessing some mark-up or component. There is rarely a perfect solution for well-designed user flows, let alone ones that are fundamentally broken in some way to start with.

jscholes, 2 months ago to accessibility

The current owner of #VoiceDreamReader is the Applause group, who offer #accessibility auditing and testing services to many high-profile clients. When Applause are paid to evaluate the accessibility of a product, they are expected to point out some of the exact issues that have been raised in relation to their work on #VoiceDream, such as controls that have no labels or accessible role information, images without alt text, etc.

This hints at a wider problem in the industry, where companies are "cashing in" on the market for accessibility-related services without actually being that invested or incentivised to do good work. Do Applause work with #disabled testers? Was anybody there tasked with testing the application with a #screenReader and other #assistiveTechnology? If not, it raises questions about whether their accessibility services are a force for good, or are actually causing harm.

jscholes, 2 months ago to random

"Salary Range: reasonable for a non-profit". What does that even mean?

jscholes, 1 month ago to random

Needed to run a couple of quick commands over SSH from my phone. I wanted to copy the input for one of them from another app. But each time I backgrounded the SSH client, it disconnected from the server. When I reconnected, VoiceOver's edit rotor was empty of options; no paste. I went back to the original app to try again, at which point VoiceOver decided to simply stop allowing me to read forwards by character within text fields (which it's still doing as I write this). In the end, I memorised it and typed it out by hand. The entire exercise took about 10 minutes instead of the 20 seconds it would've on Windows, and I'm so happy to have this computer in my pocket that is mediocre at everything.

jscholes, 6 days ago to python

Needed to rename a test fixture in a #Python file, and find/replace wasn't up for the job. So I decided to give #VSCode a go:

I started by pressing Ctrl+F2, for "Change All Occurrences". I think that is basically find/replace, and hence didn't do what I wanted.

Instead, I installed the recommended Python extension, and pressed F2 for "Rename Symbol". That claims to have only made one change, and the references to the function are still using the old name.

So, consider me confused. I'm using #pytest, whereby the test fixtures are referenced as function arguments rather than being called directly. Maybe that's what VS Code is struggling with? Either way, I've now spent more time on this than just manually editing the text.

#VisualStudioCode

jscholes, 11 months ago to random

I find myself using two Windows machines quite regularly, and at a loss as to how I should conveniently sync settings, e.g. NVDA, between them. I need a two-way sync, because I make changes on both during usage that I want to see propagated to the other. Does anyone have a good preexisting solution to this problem?

jscholes, 8 months ago to random

#Safari 17 changes the time stretching algorithm for audio/video from the terrible, deprecated lowQualityZeroLatency option to timeDomain (the default for apps since iOS 15). This now means that speech-based audio is much more pleasant to listen to when scaled up in a web app, and is something I've been looking for in #WebKit release notes for a while.

jscholes, 1 month ago to random

#VoiceDream apparently now has beta Kindle support in the main app, i.e. a beta version isn't required. There are reports on the mailing list that you need to be a subscriber to see it, that there should be a "Kindle beta" option in the "Settings" menu, and that you can't lock the screen or background the app while reading a Kindle book. I subscribed and updated the app, but it isn't showing up for me, so I don't know any more than that.

jscholes, 8 months ago to iOS

My #WhatsApp on #iOS has stopped allowing me to record voice messages. If I tap and hold the button, I'm only given the hint about how to record after releasing it no matter how long I hold it for, and no message is sent. If I swipe up to lock recording, and then press "Send", the message is sent with a length of zero seconds, and trying to play it reports that "This audio is no longer available". Reinstalling the app and rebooting my phone have not helped. Sending from Windows still seems to work, but I'm at a loss as to what else I can try.

jscholes, 5 months ago to random

What a strange device name: "Headphones; James’s AirPods #4 - Find My Stereo".

jscholes, 5 months ago to random

So far this Sunday morning, I've decided that the world would be better without the following in it: CodePen embeds, the phrase "my dude", and the suffix "don't @ me" on Mastodon posts.

jscholes, 10 months ago to random

@MonaApp I'd appreciate your consideration of the following feature requests relating to content warnings (CWs) on Mastodon:

1. A setting allowing all CWs to be expanded without user interaction.
2. VoiceOver not announcing the CW of an expanded post before the post text.
3. VoiceOver not repeating the CW before the text of every post in a thread when the CW is the same on all posts in that thread (probably solved by #2).

jscholes, 10 months ago to random

I think this passage of writing relates to a door, but can't be certain:

"She started scrubbing the counters, in an effort to do something that would take her attention away from the door. The eerie silence told her one of her parents had put a Silencing charm on the door, and she experimentally lobbed a butterbeer cork at the door, thinking she could put an Extendable Ear through the crack under the door. But it veered away from the door. Finally, when there was nothing left to do, she sat at the table, and glared at the door."

jscholes, 13 days ago to mastodon

How do people meaningfully search and/or export their #Mastodon favourites? I've been favouriting (not bookmarking) a bunch of useful and/or interesting stuff since I came here, but the data seems difficult to access in a useful way.

When I use my instance's website, there's no search facility on the Favourites page. It only loads a subset of favourites upfront, so without pressing the "load more" button hundreds of times, I can't use my screen reader's find feature either.

When I try the favourites timeline of Semaphore, it also only loads a subset of my favourites, but apparently without a means of loading more of them.

In Mona on iOS, I would likewise have to keep finding, and then pressing, "load more posts".

When I try to find information on the internet about possible qualifiers for searching my own favourites, I get results about API calls and installing Elasticsearch as an instance owner.

In the "import/export" section of my account preferences, it doesn't say anything about favourites, and doesn't make it clear whether my posts archive would include them.

jscholes, 1 month ago to accessibility

Please just stop it:

<header aria-label="Header section of the website. Containing: The logo, Primary navigation, Page title and Search box">  

#accessibility