@jscholes@dragonscave.space
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jscholes

@jscholes@dragonscave.space

Digital #Accessibility Engineer/Analyst, #ScreenReader user, and occasional #software developer. #a11y

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jscholes, to accessibility
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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, to accessibility
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Please just stop it:

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

#accessibility

jscholes,
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@simon To be honest, the misplaced period bothers me as much as the verbosity. It should either have a comma between "website" and "containing", or be written as "Header section of the website. It contains the logo, ..." which hilariously is the same number of syllables. @purrsnikitty

jscholes,
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@simon Oh, granted. I was kind of putting that to one side given that a website's header doesn't need any name at all, whether short or long. Any excuse to pick at someone's grammar, but websites have copywriters for a reason. When a dev finds themselves writing copy for only one audience, they have gone astray. @purrsnikitty

alexhall, to random

I think I'm becoming a fan of putting each function or method parameter on its own line. It takes up more space, but it's easier to review them one at a time, and I can move the order of parameters around simply by using my IDE's command for moving lines up and down.

jscholes,
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@TheQuinbox That's painful to read, no matter how many lines it's spread across. @alexhall

jscholes, to random
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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,
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Also, if you're at all tempted to reply to this with something about Android or otherwise using the right equipment for the job: I highly recommend writing out that response so that it's no longer rattling around inside your head, and then pressing cancel.

jscholes,
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Imagine spending 1,200 dollars on a computer that can't keep a TCP socket open for 45 seconds and doesn't consistently let screen reader users paste from the clipboard. If you're struggling to imagine it, ask a blind person who bought an iPhone.

jscholes,
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@simon It's enabled both generally, and for the specific SSH app (Prompt).

jscholes, to random
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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,
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@simon Well, I've always wanted to hire a private investigator for something...

mckensie, to random

Hey everyone! I've got some very good news! So did you guys think that the natural voices would be exclusive to narrator? Did you guys think the natural voices wouldn't even make it to other screen readers? Well, you all thought wrong! Because guess what? Thanks to a video on YouTube, I found out there is an NVDA addon for these voices! And it even works on windows 10! You can get this addon at datajake.braillescreen.net, TTS, synthesizers for NVDA, and titled neural voices. The rest of you guys can thank me later! Feel free to boost this post! It deserves one!

jscholes,
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@NoahCarver The add-on is 620 MB, because it includes voice data. There's also at least one license or API key in the code. Not commenting on the legality either way, because I simply don't know. Only sharing a couple of observations after quickly scanning through it on my phone. It does seem to use some Azure-related services, but I'm not clear if that means it sends anything to the cloud. @datajake1999 @DavidGoldfield @mckensie

jscholes,
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@NoahCarver If it was sending everything to the cloud for synthesis, it wouldn't need 600 MB of bundled voice data. The code also seems to explicitly disable two types of telemetry. But I'm just not sure what role the Azure SDK is playing in this case, and it makes me cautious. @mckensie @datajake1999 @DavidGoldfield

jscholes,
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@drew Yeah, maybe that's it. @NoahCarver @mckensie @datajake1999 @DavidGoldfield

jscholes,
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@drew Good to know. There is a server.exe, which spins up when you select the synth but seems to be shut down when you switch to a different one. I expected that, though; the binary and source code are in the add-on package. @NoahCarver @datajake1999 @DavidGoldfield @mckensie

jscholes,
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@drew Thanks for testing that! @NoahCarver @datajake1999 @DavidGoldfield @mckensie

jscholes,
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@NoahCarver From the Microsoft page Drew linked to, this particular embedded TTS tech is quite heavily restricted. Which is weird, given that it doesn't use any Microsoft cloud resources. I doubt the add-on author met the requirements and went through the laborious registration procedure, and so the key was probably extracted from Narrator or something. I don't even know if it's required; offline speech synthesizers very rarely have license key enforcement. Disclaimer that this is all conjecture. @drew @datajake1999 @DavidGoldfield @mckensie

vick21, to accessibility
@vick21@mastodon.social avatar

I believe this is the first of its kind implementation on the web, i.e. first-letter navigation, so kudos to the Drive team! :) https://unmute.community/@payown/112369398805758817

jscholes,
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@vick21 Well that's one way of looking at it. Another take is that it's 2024, and Windows probably had first-letter navigation in Explorer (plus list views in general) in 1995.

jscholes,
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@vick21 I've helped clients implement it on the web, personally. But I was commenting more on the fact that Google Drive has existed for 12 years, which is an inexcusably long time to go without a basic feature that's been known to be useful (some would say essential) since the 1990s.

jscholes,
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@vick21 It's a business-critical feature for me to use a file manager effectively. The web is full of UIs where basic productivity features like this are never implemented, which in turn has lead to a generation of designers and developers who have no idea that they exist. And that's how we end up with modern Microsoft Windows as an example, which fails to provide a baseline level of efficiency across much of its newer controls.

jscholes, to random
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Fourth the May be with you

simon, to random

In case you think you're having a bad accessibility day today, or you wonder how much things like the ADA actually matter, @hmaealdeza is currently locked out of the #1 payment app in the Philippines because they introduced a non-optional face verification, and randomly decided to log her out. The app asks you to take a selfie, but now requires you also look at the camera and blink at the right time.

jscholes,
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@simon Yuck! Is this a bank? Or an app for sending money to people. @hmaealdeza

fireborn, to random

Has anyone got the Clicks keyboard case for iPhone? If you have, how is it? I've got one on order and I'm excited to try it but looking for other opinions.

jscholes,
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@fireborn I don't think they gave me any such option, although it was so long ago that I don't remember. If they did, I definitely paid for it. @simon

jscholes,
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@fireborn Note that I live in Mexico. Delivery reliability is a very different equation here to in... the UK is where I think you are? @simon

jscholes,
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@fireborn Yep. According to the tracking it just landed in-country. So if it does ever arrive, I'll try and remember to let you know what I think of it. @simon

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