matt

@matt@toot.cafe

Software developer, formerly at Microsoft, now leader of the AccessKit open-source project (https://accesskit.dev/) and cofounder of Pneuma Solutions (https://pneumasolutions.com/). My current favorite programming language is Rust, but I don't want to make that part of my identity.

Music lover. Karaoke singer. Science fiction fan. Visually impaired (legally blind). Secular humanist

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matt, to random

I just had an idea: It would probably be feasible to implement a way to install and run any Flatpak-packaged desktop Linux app on Windows and macOS inside a micro-VM, using a virtual machine host like Firecracker, or more likely, Firecracker's progenitor crosvm, which was designed for running an arbitrary Linux userland on Chrome OS. I believe crosvm can even run on Windows, using the Windows Hypervisor Platform (also called WHPX).

matt,

Yes, there's WSLg, but you have to be pretty familiar with a Linux command-line environment to get started with that. I'm thinking of a Windows or macOS app that could just install any app from Flathub or the like, with the Linux underpinnings kept behind the scenes. Also, the Windows host side of WSLg is proprietary, being tied to the Microsoft RDP client, which means, among other things, that I can't hack on accessibility support end-to-end in that system.

matt,

Now, it's very likely my idea is just an instance of cool tech without a real use case. After all, Windows and macOS already have all the native apps people want and need. Probably very few people want to run Linux apps on Windows or macOS; it's the other way around.

matt,

Then again, Microsoft did see fit to invest some resources in running Linux GUI apps on Windows via WSLg, so I don't know.

matt,

@13hannes11 Have you already tried running those Linux apps on Windows using WSL?

FluidEscence, to random

hmmm. Udio playback in tc... How?

matt,

@FluidEscence The question is, do they server-render enough of the page, and have sufficiently weak or non-existent anti-bot measures, that you could fetch it with requests (or urllib3 or whatever) and parse it with one of the Python HTML5 parsers? Or would you have to go full headless Chromium?

matt,

@FluidEscence I hear you. At least now I know better than to pull information out of pages using regular expressions. I used to do that when I was like 22, and as a consequence, Serotek's screen-scraping was even more brittle than it absolutely had to be.

matt,

@jscholes @FluidEscence Here's my favorite (with human-written lyrics): https://www.udio.com/songs/7YDVBJ8NwjMq2D9DC5UbN4

matt,

@FluidEscence @jscholes Lots of web apps developed in the fashionable single-page application (SPA) style, using React or the like, use a REST-ish API internally, even if it's not officially documented.

matt, to random

I recorded a quick demo of the current state of the Wayland-native accessibility stack I'm developing for @gnome (and eventually other free desktops), code-named Newton. In the demo, I run the GNOME Podcasts app on the Newton accessibility stack, using my GTK branch that integrates AccessKit. So in principle, the same app should also work on Windows, and soon, macOS. The demo was featured in the latest edition of This Week in GNOME: https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2024/05/twig-148/ This work is funded by @sovtechfund.

matt,

Instructions for setting up the whole stack are in the README on my branch of Orca: https://gitlab.gnome.org/mwcampbell/orca/tree/newton The instructions assume some familiarity with building and installing system components like GTK and Mutter using Meson, in a way that doesn't break your distro installation or on a throwaway system. Let me know if you have any trouble, or if you get it working.

matt,

@JoSuus AT-SPI kind of works on Wayland. There are problems though stemming from the fact that there's no connection between the AT-SPI accessibility tree and the actual Wayland surface. For example, Orca can't tell what's under the mouse pointer with AT-SPI on Wayland. That already works in the Newton prototype, though I didn't cover it in this demo. Also, AT-SPI is incompatible with strong sandboxing. I hope to demo a fully sandboxed Flatpak app with Newton soon.

matt,

@JoSuus Also, with AT-SPI, Orca can't observe keyboard input on Wayland unless you use a toolkit that supports the legacy AT-SPI method of key snooping, which GTK 4 does not, because that old method has various problems, like the requirement of an IPC round trip for every keystroke. I don't know if the Newton prototype's current solution to that problem will make it to production; there have been other efforts to solve that problem on Wayland.

swelljoe, to random
@swelljoe@mas.to avatar

If there's one thing about me, I'm gonna type that old command name, no matter how long I've known about better newer alternatives. wget, tcpdump, iwconfig, screen, ls, grep. I finally started typing ip instead of ifconfig and route habitually a year or two ago, because it's shorter and does everything.

matt,

@swelljoe In your defense, wget is a bit more convenient when you want to download a file to the current directory and follow redirects. Only by three characters though ("-OL" in the curl command line).

_inside, to random
@_inside@mastodon.social avatar

Apple introduced API that enables recording audio from other apps or the entire system in macOS 14.4, but it's poorly documented and there's no sample code available, so I decided to fix that: https://github.com/insidegui/AudioCap

matt,

@_inside How is this different from using ScreenCaptureKit to capture audio? That was introduced in macOS 13. Thanks.

jscholes, to accessibility
@jscholes@dragonscave.space avatar

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

matt,

@jscholes I wonder how the new self-hosted version of Campfire from 37signals (https://once.com/campfire) stacks up. Of course, that would only be an option for small companies. They've got an interesting business model BTW; you buy it once and get the code. So a customer or third party could do accessibility fixes. I don't really feel like fixing another app developer's accessibility problems for free though.

matt,

@jscholes Yeah, you're definitely right about DHH. Good to know that Basecamp's accessibility wasn't good.

FluidEscence, to random

WinAmp is getting open sourced on September 24. This is great news! https://about.winamp.com/press/article/winamp-open-source-code

matt,

@FluidEscence I'll be interested to see how hard it would be to make the skinned windows properly accessible using AccessKit.

wingo, to random

new bloggery: on hoot, on boot https://wingolog.org/archives/2024/05/16/on-hoot-on-boot

matt,

@wingo I didn't realize Suno was that good at doing full songs now. I think Udio.com does better vocals though.

matt,

@wingo You're talking about the one you already posted, right? Yeah, I've got that chorus, "the boot, the boot, the boot of Hoot" stuck in my head.

pixelate, to accessibility
@pixelate@tweesecake.social avatar

Chromebooks already have great screen reading capabilities built in...

Awww Google, how cute of you. Great? Nope. Next time, remember. Nothing about us, without us. ChromeVox has barely been updated in years, just like VoiceOver for Mac, and Narrator. ChromeVox barely has any options for fine-tuning verbosity, keyboard commands, pronunciation, and some keyboard commands, like Search + Control + A for accessibility actions, aren't even well-documented. I should know. I had to use an Acer Spin 713 for a good 3 months as my primary laptop. So kindly stop talking, then ask, then act before you speak further.

"Updated keyboard shortcuts and first-letters navigation in Google Drive"...

First letters navigation? Come on. Any blind person can tell that this wasn't written by anyone who uses these technologies.

And nowhere in this article is anything new for ChromeVox. See? This is the kind of, frankly, bullshit that I hate on GAAD. Just shut your mouth and listen for once.

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/global-accessibility-awareness-day-2024/

matt,

@pixelate I mostly agree with you, but:

> First letters navigation? Come on. Any blind person can tell that this wasn't written by anyone who uses these technologies.

Here I think you're reading way too much into a minor grammatical slip, possibly by a non-native English speaker. Sure, this post was written on behalf of a megacorp, but it was still written by a fallible human, and we should be reasonable about minor mistakes like that.

matt, to random

Regarding my last boost, about both light and dark mode being necessary, one thing that I think would be made feasible by my current Wayland accessibility work, with some help from the compositor, would be re-rendering the whole visual UI using the contents of the accessibility tree, continuously in real time. I don't think the current accessibility APIs are up to that, because of IPC overhead.

matt, to random

All the positive coverage of PyCon US that's coming across my timeline makes me wish I was there. And, for that matter, that I used Python more these days. Mind you, my experience of the Rust community has also been good, including RustConf last year. But PyCon sounds like a lot of fun.

glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

Does anyone happen to know if it is possible to get a projector for an open space at ? I have some ideas that involve discussions of code where it would be useful if a participant could share their screen with a larger group.

matt,

@glyph (No, I'm not at PyCon, so the question is only hypothetical.)

rimu, to random
@rimu@mastodon.nzoss.nz avatar

@glyph That's interesting. I moved from Mac to Linux because as a programmer I feel more free and empowered there. But I see now that only some people would have the time, interest and skill to exercise that.

What about a Mac gives you agency? Is it the usability?

matt,

@glyph @federicomena Ooh, looking forward to seeing what comes out of this conversation, given Federico's status as a cofounder of GNOME.

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