jscholes

jscholes, 4 days ago to accessibility

#Accessibility tip: if sharing an image of text on social media along with a link to some original source, that link is a lot easier for people to reach if you place it directly in the post instead of the image's alt text.

jscholes, 5 days ago to accessibility

Headline: "I Don't Understand why we Need This!": Sighted User Furious at Accessibility Feature for Blind People.

Reginald Cavendish, of Castle Combe in Wiltshire, today made an impassioned plea for a technology company to reconsider their new #accessibility feature for #blind and #lowVision users, aimed at creating visual descriptions of images in a privacy-preserving way.

Speaking to reporters from his 1,800-acre estate, Reginald communicated his confusion about why the feature was being considered in the first place.

"I'm not clear on exactly who asked for this," he said. "When I need something, I ask one of my staff, and it just tends to get done. I take great Solace in that human touch, and I can't really comprehend why people would want computers doing things for them! My son has some friends who've seen disabled people on the television, and he didn't understand it either."

When asked whether he supported increased independence for people who are unable to see, he responded: "Look, some people have the money to pay people to be at their beck and call, to describe images or pick up their eyedrop bottles or what-have-you. I understand that doesn't go for everyone, but if someone can't afford human help, I'd suggest they'd be much happier making peace with the scraps they're thrown by society."

Editor's note: Reginald was asked to describe the featured image for this article. "Man on lawn," he offered over one shoulder, before moving off for a spot of afternoon shooting.

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, 10 days ago to random

Someone at work typed "devs", i.e. the shortening of "developers", as "DEVs" in some documentation. It's a sign of the times that when another colleague brought it up, I didn't have to work hard to convince them that it stands for "Digital Engineering Vehicles", a new corporate term being used throughout Silicon Valley.

Disclaimer: it doesn't.)

jscholes, 10 days ago to random

When using @MonaApp with #VoiceOver, is it possible to share an image attached to a post with another app? When I use the "view media" rotor action, and then triple-tap on what VoiceOver claims is the image, I get sharing options related to the alt text, or detected text, or something, but not the image itself. In the end I had to take a screenshot of the image and use that instead.

jscholes, 10 days ago to random

The joys of auto-translated technical text: "A DNS or Domain Name System, as its name indicates, is a domain name system."

jscholes, 11 days ago to random

Audient EVO 4 question: a colleague has just picked up one of these, uses NVDA, and isn't finding the software to be very accessible. When they open EVO Control, they can't initially tab around, and have to manually move focus to one of the sliders with object nav before tabbing will work. But they're then finding a lot of unlabelled radio buttons, buttons with labels like "M" without context, and so on. Are we missing an updated build or something?

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, 13 days ago to random

@MonaApp i'm encountering an extremely disruptive bug. I'm browsing my home timeline, and open a link from a post. When I come back to the app, focus has moved all the way back to whichever post I interacted with previously, before opening the link from this one. That previous post may be tens or hundreds of posts behind my reading position, requiring a lot of swipes to get back there. Hope i've explained this in a way that makes sense.

jscholes, 15 days ago to windows

I updated #calibre (the ebook software) the other day. I don't use its graphical interface, and only have it around for its command line tools. Nevertheless, every time I've opened a text-or-document-adjacent filetype since, #Windows has asked me which app I want to use. It hasn't set my file associations to calibre, just unset all of my existing ones so that I have to answer a pointless prompt multiple times per day. How does this make any sense?

jscholes, 16 days ago to apple

Costco had #Apple #AirTags on sale. Having never used one, I decided to buy a couple. I now have two smooth, round things on my desk that apparently don't stick or attach to anything without additional hardware, that I guess I can... put in a box that I might lose? Not really sure I understand this product.

jscholes, 16 days ago to random

iOS just unnecessarily corrected "filename" to "file name", but not "ghat" to "that". How useful.

jscholes, 19 days ago to random

Nice job, Audible:

<button aria-label="Buy Sum: Tales from the Afterlives now ">  
 <span>Buy Now for £7.99</span>  
</button>  

jscholes, 21 days ago to random

There are many "classic" (in intentional quotes) works of Harry Potter fanfiction I've never read. This weekend, it's the turn of the Sacrifices series by Lightning on the Wave. 80 thousand words down, only a cool almost three million to go.

jscholes, 22 days ago to accessibility

Yesterday was Global #Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD). Today, some companies will be considering switching away from #Slack to a less #accessible alternative due to #AI bullshit.

jscholes, 22 days ago to random

Most mornings, I wake up ahead of my scheduled alarm. It is never not surprising to me that Apple, even with all of their focus on sleep data, haven't introduced a feature that says: "Hey James, it looks like you're awake! Would you like your alarm to be disabled so that it won't go off the moment you put down your phone to use the bathroom?"

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, 23 days ago to random

I hope this email finds you wherever you get your podcasts

jscholes, 1 month ago to accessibility

If you were wondering whether the new #Sonos app is as bad with #VoiceOver as people said, I can confirm that it is.

The first element that receives focus has no #accessible role or name, i.e. VoiceOver doesn't announce anything for it. The screen is split up into sections, like "Recently Played", "Your Services", and "Sonos Favourites", but none of these have headings. And, as previously noted, explore by touch doesn't work; VO seems to just see that blank element I mentioned as being stretched across the entire screen.

As a result of all this, the "Search" button requires 32 swipes from the top of the screen to reach, at least with my setup. If you have more services and/or more favourites, that number of swipes will be higher. #accessibility

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

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, 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, 1 month ago to random

Fourth the May be with you

jscholes, 1 month ago to random

Spotting quite a few posts with screenshots of text, where "AI" in the #altText is replaced with "AL". Are people auto-generating their alt text, and this is an OCR error? Do people not want to type "AI"? I'm confused by how common this is, but if you are posting text from an image in your alt, please make sure it's accurate.

jscholes, 1 month ago to accessibility

So far in 2024, the #inclusiveDesign channel on the #a11y Slack workspace has had seven root messages posted to it. Two of them belonged in a thread as replies to another, and one was an introduction. So, four messages.

Despite the name of the workspace, the heavy tilt towards technical #accessibility and conformance/compliance is unfortunate. People repeatedly solving the same problems, and being so swamped by needing to fix stuff that doing it better from the beginning barely gets a mention.