miki

miki, 6 months ago to random

It looks like I can no longer publish any posts that mention other users since updating to TC 0.17.0 (this includes replies). Has anybody else seen this perhaps? cc @app

miki, 11 months ago to random

This might be an unpopular opinion, but after two years of using a Mac with Voice Over, I have absolutely no regrets. There are issues for sure, really big ones, sometimes it really seems like the grass is greener on the other side, but it usually takes me 10 minutes with my Windows laptop to want me to go back. My Windows computer is not a bad machine on paper, the specs look great, I’m pretty tech-savvy and I knew what I was doing when I was buying it, but it just has too many little and not so little hidden problems to make it almost unusable. There are use cases where I'd choose Windows for sure, if I was dealing with Google Docs or Salesforce, for example, I wouldn't be as happy as I am, but for what I do, the Mac really works. If you use your computer for fun and you don't mind things breaking once in a while, Windows is great, and Linux might be even better. If you need a machine that is going to work tomorrow in exactly the same way that it worked yesterday, go for the Mac. Mac OS has bugs, but they're bugs I know how to handle, I can postpone updates all I like, and I can make sure that it works when I absolutely need it to work.

miki, 1 year ago to random

I just found this in my qAudio favorites, and OMG this makes me laugh every time

miki, 10 months ago to random

I’m not one to engage in language debates often, but I will point out that “consenting adults” is a uniquely American expression, and should be replaced with “consenting people” if we want to be precise, inclusive and stop propagating #ageism.

In many cultures outside the US, the age of consent for sexual activity is much lower than the age at which you become an adult. This is even true for much of Western Europe, 16 is common, Poland has 15, and Germany has 14. Saying something along the lines of “consenting adults should be free to have sex with people their own gender" is tantamount to saying that discrimination against homosexuality is fine as long as it happens to people under 18, and that's probably not what you actually mean.

miki, 11 months ago to random

But Seriously, Zuckerberg should be having a stroke right now. Oculus is the new Blackberry.

miki, 28 days ago to random

What's up with this weird connection between American colleges and protests?

This seems to be an exclusively American thing. We've had student protests in the past, but they were about extremely serious issues happening here and affecting those studennts' daily lives, not every single issue that is popular and trendy at the time, from the Vietnam War to BLM to Gaza.

This seems to be an exclusively AMerican phenomenon.

miki, 9 months ago to random

I’m kind of tempted to make myself a tool that logs everything my screen reader says to a database, perhaps with some metadata like date, time and the currently running app, and then makes the whole thing searchable.

miki, 11 months ago to random

I just wrote a Python script that extracted all my old Twitter DMS into a human-readable format. 10 minutes later, I realized that I don’t actually want to read my old DMs.

miki, 5 months ago to random

I hate supposedly accessible PDF forms. People really try, and it's all for nothing. I'm now trying to install Adobe Reader on Windows, hoping it works better than Preview on Mac, Firefox on Mac and Firefox on Windows.

miki, 8 months ago to random

This is probably a really unpopular opinion, but IMO one of the biggest ethical issues in tech is that we still have core system libraries written in languages that aren’t memory safe. “Rewrite it in Rust” is a meme at this point, but there are literal human lives at stake here, thanks to Pegasus and similar software. I’m not saying nobody should ever use C or C++, if you’re working on a hobby project, aren’t handling untrusted user input or run your code in a sandbox anyway, there’s nothing wrong with these languages, but using them for core infrastructure is frankly irresponsible at this point.

miki, 1 month ago to random

In the last few months, we went from AI music being a curiosity you needed a good Linux box to play with, to something pretty crappy but looking somewhat interesting, to... this.

miki, 6 months ago to random

A very initial beta version of my image describer tool for Mac is now on Github. Hammerspoon, some tech skills and a custom OpenAI API key with GPT-4 access are required for now, more features coming soon. https://github.com/mikolysz/DescribeImage.spoon

miki, 11 months ago to random

I don’t know what I would do without Magic Wormhole.

miki, 4 months ago to random

Did you think that you were safe from your posts appearing in search, crawlers and other bots on Mastodon? Did you believe that not opting in to search makes you unsearchable? Please, for the love of God, think again.

About 15 minutes ago, I posted a link that triggers an email to me every time it is visited. THe email contains some basic details of the visitor (notably a user agent and the IP address). This kind of information gets transmitted every time you click any link on the internet, any website owner of any website you ever visited has access. Literally seconds after that link was posted, the first shady crawler took the bait, and there were a few more in the minutes to come. This wouldn't be possible if these crawlers didn't have direct access to Mastodon. This proves that there's somebody out there meticulously scraping all our content and doing god knows what with it. If you post something publicly, expect it to stay public, forever, and don't believe the snake oil about a possibility to opt out.

There's no way to do anything about this if you want to stay federated, my post is already replicated across at least a dozen instances, and we have no way of knowing which one of them is selling their database to the highest bidder.

miki, 6 months ago to random

Coming soon to a Mac near you

miki, 6 months ago to random

Do I just suck at life skills that much, or is cane travel in the snow as difficult as it seems? I still can't figurre out how to do it properly.

miki, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

Voice Dream's upcoming changes are violating Apple's App Review guidelines, specifically guideline 3.1.2(a). If this concerns you and you don't want these changes to actually be made, I suggest doing the following:

1. If you have friends at Apple, particularly in Corporate, ask them to find somebody to report the violation to, probably at the App Review or accessibility teams.

2. send an email to Apple and tell them that this is happening. Be professional and not angry, use a corporate email address if you can, name.surname@provider if you cannot. Have a signature with your postal address and phone number, look like a professional, not a "random blindie". Mention that they're taking away features from users who already paid and mention the specific guideline number. You should also emphasize how important the app is to you and to the disability community in general. Bring their attention to the fact that the app has an Apple design award and is featured in App Store collections. Tell them why built-in iOS features aren't enough and how the app changes your life. Send the email to accessibility@apple.com, abuse@apple.com, abuse@icloud.com and tcook@apple.com. Those are not the right people to handle this, but the people manning[*] these email addresses are very likely to have far more agency than ordinary customer support representatives, and there's no way to contact the relevant people directly. If we cause enough of a ruckus, somebody is going to notice and get the message across to the right department, and you don't just ignore messages from the office of the CEO, even if they don't actually come from the CEO directly.

Edit: I originally mistyped the guideline number.
To be continued.

miki, 6 months ago to random

I think there is a new kid on the block when cross-platform accessible GUI toolkits are concerned. There is a project called Toga, which seems to be a Python toolkit that uses native controls and works on Windows, Linux (GTK), Mac OS, iOS, Android and via Web Assembly. I only tried the Mac OS version so far, and I could not find a single accessibility issue. The API seems pretty nice and Pythonic, not like the abomination that is WX. They use some CSS-like layout engine, laying everything out via boxes, which seems very doable from a blindness perspective. So far, consider me impressed.

miki, 6 months ago to random

company: accidentally pushes a bug that affects 10% of users to production
Affected users: “Oh no, you have a bug in your software, please fix it ASAP”
company: accidentally pushes an accessibility bug to production
users: “This company thinks that disabled people don’t deserve to live, we should boycott them and write sappy blog posts about how terribly we are treated.”

I’m really sick of this shit sometimes.

miki, 3 months ago to random

If anybody tried selling girl scout cookies here, our equivalent of the FDA would put them behind bars so fast.

There's definitely precedent for them going after small fry, there was a pretty famous incident of a priest who tried selling some famous pastries that the Polish Pope liked, and he was quickly shut down, although I'm not sure if there were any legal consequences.

You need an insane amount of paperwork to be allowed to do something like this, and knowing our government, I'd be surprised if they would issue the appropriate permits to anybody below the age of 18.

miki, 8 months ago to random

In episode #582748265 of “English is weird”, there’s an interesting difference between the expressions “iOS developer” and “Chrome Developer”. When we say the former, we usually mean somebody working on applications for iOS but not for Apple itself, where the latter would mean somebody working for Google on improving the Chrome browser.

miki, 8 months ago to random

whisperX can transcribe a 3.5 hour audio file in 6 minutes, 20 seconds on an RTX 3090. Six minutes. The original whisper takes nine for a 25-minute file. This thing is insanely fast.

miki, 3 months ago to random

I've done it.

Committed the ultimate crime against humanity.

Fedi's equivalent of killing kittens or kicking helpless puppies.

I followed Elon through a Twitter gateway and reposted a post of his.

miki, 3 months ago to random

If you enjoy reading accessibility battles between blind users and absolutely clueless software developers, oh boy do I have a thread for you.

This guy is trying to add accessibility to an open source slicing tool for 3d printers, he's even willing to do a lot of the work himself if he gets assurance that his PRs are going to be accepted, but the developers are just not seeing it.

I think my favorite quote in the thread is the following, from one of the lead devs:

"it may be better to have these features NOT accessible to the screnreader[sic] at all (which means they are effectively removed from the UI), because there is no point in presenting a feature that a person cannot use"

Along with a suggestion to implement a half-assed, blindness-specific GUI with half the features later down the thread.

The whole discussion is here, for those brave enough to read it https://github.com/prusa3d/prusaslicer/issues/7595

miki, 22 days ago to random

The fundamental problem with the concept of alt text is that it's language specific, while pictures are not.

There are plenty of social media accounts that post pictures and videos that are universally funny, beautiful or interesting, regardless of the language you speak.

This is one more reason why fixing accessibility problems by inventing better technology for ourselves is a better approach than fixing accessibility by advocating for it. Even if you teach every single content creator on the planet to write alt descriptions and write them well, which is a monumental task in itself, this still won't solve the problem for the creators that have a multilingual audience. If you teach an AI to write good alt descriptions for those pictures, the problem will be solved for everyone.

To be clear, we're not quite at that point yet, as good as GPT Vision now is, it still doesn't beat a skilled human describer, but I think we'll get there quite soon.