devinprater

@devinprater@tweesecake.social

I am blind. Because of course I have to mention it in my profile. Accessibility drives me. I use all the major operating systems in some way, and find great things about all of them. I also enjoy reading, eating, relaxing, eating more, and chatting. I want to be a cat when I grow up.

My opinions are my own, and definitely do not reflect those of my employer.

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devinprater, to random

sigh broke my NLS EReader today. I guess it was raining harder than I thought this morning, and water got inside the key mechanisms. So random buttons are pressed. So I thought I'd pull it out and let it dry. When I tried to put it back into the case, the case broke. So yeah that's great /s I can break anything, whether it be software or hardware.

devinprater, to random

"Devin at Devin-HP dollar." "Devin at Devin-HP dollar." "Devin at Devin-HP dollar." Yeah, just keep saying that in that pretty voice and I'll be all right. Anyway just trying out the new Piper voices. Pretty great!

devinprater, to opensource

Please boost for reach: One of the reasons that I pay $20 per month to @podcast is that Jonathan doesn't back down from saying what is right, and what a lot of us, I feel, are afraid to say. On the last episode, he talked about how he wasn't able to get Living Blindfully Plus onto Apple Podcasts because of accessibility issues. After contacting Apple, they replied with something like "These things take time." And Jonathan said something that I'd not put much thought into, that if a sighted podcaster had encountered this issue, it would have been fixed in a day. He'd been waiting close to a week for something to happen. And I think that some blind people, particularly in the Android communities, don't want to push these big companies, or these foundations and communities, so they justify to themselves and their communities that they should just wait, that programming takes time, that there are only so many people on the accessibility teams. And that's usually where the discussion ends. But I want to push it further. Why is it that we should have to accept rampant discrimination? Why should we have to wait until everyone else's issues are solved first? Why is there only a few people at companies, foundations, and in communities willing to help us? I want you all to think about that. It's taken Google 3 years to support a new Braille HID standard that was released around 2018. Even now, there are no intentionally accessible Apple Arcade games. It'll take Fedora and KDE 5 years or so to make their desktops/OS accessible to blind people. We've yet to hear an appology from the Gnome foundation for how a blind, nonbinary person was accused of spreading misinformation about their personal experiences with the Linux desktop. I ask you all, do these things really take so much time? Or is time simply used as an excuse to not do the work? Anti-ableism isn't a badge you wear, it's work you do.

devinprater, (edited ) to accessibility

Some blind Android users really want the Eloquence TTS engine back. It will die when 64-bit phones become the norm. They went as far as seriously debating of they could ask phone carriers to step in. It's sad, both because Google could easily have licensed Eloquence, put it in a 32-bit ARM container, and there you go. It's sad that Apple is the only big corporation that spent five minutes and thought "Oh hey we have a license for this now, let's containerize this and ship it for VoiceOver." It's sad that Google doesn't inspire confidence from the blind community at large of Google's ability to uphold an accessible OS and a competitive screen reader. And it's definitely sad that another TTS engine hasn't come along that is any better than Eloquence, which is from the 90's.

devinprater, to windows

So for blind Windows users, what mail client do you use? I'm kinda getting tired of Gmail, having to hear lots of stuff before each message, and having to turn on browse mode and arrow through all that to get to the message, all that. And Thunderbird is messy in 115. I might have to just get used to Outlook.

:boosts-OK:

devinprater, (edited ) to accessibility

You know why some blind people are really leaning into AI to fix accessibility issues? No, not like overlays that probably barely have any if/else statements in them, let alone AI, but stuff like Be My Eyes, and gasp screen recognition in VoiceOver for iOS? Because shit sucks, and it's sucked for the last 40 years of computing history for blind people. That's why whenever we get even a bit more light, even if 20% of what an AI says is fake, that 80%, that gives us 80% more info than we didn't have before. And yeah, we should all, every single one of us, know that AI can give false info by now. Hell, Mastodon folks have been shoving that into our ears with an oversized cue tip since the day ChatGPT came out. We get it. But hot damn, being able to point my phone out the bus window and take pictures as I'm going to work, hearing about a fire station, or a house with a dog in the yard, or that it's a sunny, clear, nice day outside even, is really freaking nice. And sure, maybe it's not a firestation. Maybe it's a courthouse, or a post office, or something else. but it's something that I would never have known before. Because I don't have some sighted person telling me about what's around, and I wouldn't want any other human to have to do that for me. Like, this is the thing. In order to get 100%, perfect info, I'd have to hire another human who, all they do is look around and tell me in extreme detail, what's around me? Now, sighted people of Fedi, would you want that job? Maybe for a day. Maybe for a week. But months of that? I doubt it. And that is where AI comes in. No, it ain't perfect. And the more you deviate from its training data, the less accurate it gets. And maybe eventually we'll get to a point in the middle of what VoiceOver Recognition is, and what LLM's are. But I'm just getting tired of this OMG AI is the end of the world rhetoric. It's really getting old.

devinprater, to random

Oh my gosh y'all now Blind android users are installing this TTS Engine that just sends text to some server and gets back audio. Cause privacy don't matter. Like holy crap y'all. They are trying to cope with the loss of Eloquence because they know phones are going to 64-bit only. Dang.

devinprater, to accessibility

Gosh y'all, some of these Android users are just, like... It's like they have a hate boner for Apple. Like, wow. Not even I feel that strongly about Google, or Apple, or Microsoft really. They're companies who are full of people, with their own tragectories, with tiny accessibility teams, and their own strengths and weaknesses. Apple manages to have enough internal communication to make things work well together. Google runs just about everything an everyday user uses. And Microsoft has kept Windows going for decades.

I mean, I rarely hear any iPhone users just plain have an anger-orgasm over Google. At most, it's apathetic "Yeah I wish they were better but there's not much I can do about that, so I'll keep writing my novel in Ulysses with my Braille display," or something. I mean, maybe I've just not seen this secret group of Google-hating blind people. I mean, my choice to use, and lightly suggest, an iPhone is from my experiences with Android. I've used this Samsung phone for like a year and a half now. I went 6 months without even touching my iPhone, especially after I got Google TalkBack on there instead of Samsung's out-of-date version. And still I've come back to iPhone. And I still don't hate Google. I don't hate anyone at Google. I think they could work together more, especially the TalkBack, Assistant, dictation, and Android UI teams to give TalkBack a way to shut up while a core part of the phone is recording, no matter what phone you're on. But I'm not cumming in rage at them. In fact, I'd still gladly work with them. Honestly I'd work with all three of the OS companies, and the FOSS orgs, to make things more accessible or enjoyable to use. Because there is no perfect OS for blind people right now. Every single one has their good and bad parts. A sighted person may be able to just move between them all, able to do anything on each one. I want that for us blind people.

devinprater, to random

The Braille Sense 6 is an Android tablet, with a nice Octocore processor and a good 6 GB of RAM. It's got all the good modern connectors, USB C and HDMI and such.

Except it can't even properly display EPUB files, the devs choosing to just turn it all into plain text, plopping it into a document reader. So, no table of contents, no headings, nothing. And y'all wanna know how much this demeaning technology costs? $5,795.00. Shit, even Emacs can open and display EPUB files with nov-mode. Yes it's an extension, but it works well and does what you'd expect. Even MacOS' Books app can open any EPUB file. Like this isn't Kindle, or even the lesser used DAISY format. This is a modern, pretty popular EBook format. Everything should be supporting this, and by support I don't mean using Pandoc to convert it to a plain text file either. Damn. At least, give us an option. Some people love plain text. But I don't.

devinprater, to accessibility

So, Mac users. What apps for Mac keep you on Mac, or make you miss it when you're on other platforms? Can be accessibility-related or not. And they should work on Intel Macs too. I know, but I've seen like one or two that only work on M-series Macs.

devinprater, to accessibility

So I don't know if Android will ever catch up to iOS. And the constant questions of how to use dictation and Google Assistant talking over TalkBack for others when they use headphones, and all that definitely doesn't help, along with how snappy some people in the blind Android Users community are. Now what was I gonna say? Oh yeah. I don't know if Android will ever catch up to Apple accessibility, but I'm really getting use to using my PC for everything. Emacs is turning out to be more than good enough as a writing environment, with company-mode suggesting words, mostly correctly, way before Apple's word suggestions would have popped up. There's no lag in Internet browsing, I can use Gmail or Outlook for email, yeah I have a good setup here. And with Beeper (which isn't completely accessible), I can text from my computer and read texts in full, including the conversation.

devinprater, to random

Me + LotsOfPizza = silliness *= 10

devinprater, to apple

So I know I shouldn't expect more, but I was just really trying hard to get the hang of the new Books app on the Mac. And I just can't. After a chapter of the new Night Angel book, it would stop reading. That's fine, I'd do the read all command and it'd continue. But then it gets to a point where things break, and the first sentence of the paragraph repeats itself, and the chapter isn't even a part of the "book contents" element anymore. I just... I don't even have it in me to try to write out feedback that's detailed enough to be "actionable." Maybe someone with more patience can do that. Anyway I know that Windows doesn't have an EPub reader or books app of its own. I get it. But my goodness, Apple is supposed to be better than this. Thank goodness I have multiple systems. And yes, I know we have Voice Dream Reader or Speech Central on the Mac. But on the iPhone for many, many years, I didn't need any of that. It felt so much better back then. On iOS 5 or 6 when I could read through a whole book with no issues. And I did just that. I was all into Dark Shadows back then, so read a few books in that universe. It was one of my first iTunes purchases, and my iPod Touch read it perfectly.

devinprater, to accessibility

You know, I hear some talk of getting rid of techno-utopianism, of getting rid of the corporations, but what else is there? Linux, where no screen reader works with touch screens so no mobile Linux for us, where the best desktop for us blind people is Mate, with no notification center, where if you have Braille enabled, and quit any app that isn't GTK based, Orca gets lost in the middle of nowhere? Maybe that bug has been fixed, but for like a year or more, it wasn't. And yes, I know the Orca maintainer has been doing tons more work on Orca lately, and Gnome now has a blind person working on a new way of doing accessibility on the desktop. But I keep coming back to that Fedora meeting, where the tools were really hard to use so that I could barely participate in being one of the few blind people there that has even a finger on the wheel to steer a thing that should be about us. And I don't feel like a group of sighted, able people can make this new vision of computing, a sort of community-lead thing, any better than Linux. I mean, we have communities. And there's still images without Alt-text. There's still Linux live images that don't even have Orca on it. These distro communities still expect blind people, which have been thrust aside for the past 20 years, to come to them with their... feedback. Such a clinical word that's become.

Look, even if it's a community from the bottom up, who's at the bottom? I assure you, it won't be blind people. And if you splenter up that community and tell us to make our own distros, well, we've tried that. Vinux, Sonar, F123, Blinux. All gone. You know which distros support us the most? Debian/Ubuntu, Mint, and Arch. With Fedora you still have to enable accessibility variables last time I checked around V37 or 38.

When you say "everyone," what do you mean by that? Your group? Your group and adjacent groups? All people? Do you know about all people? Do you know about blind people? Or Deaf people?

devinprater, to accessibility

I visited a meeting today. Came home with a print piece of paper that I cannot read. I won’t be joining. So tired. But it’s whatever. I’m glad I found out before joining.

devinprater, (edited ) to accessibility

I think one of my problems is that I try to think about how an operating system and its accessibility, will be in the future. If Apple continues down this path, will my next phone be a poor investment because of the accumulation of bugs? Or if Google keeps going how it's going, will next year's TalkBack version be good enough to use as my daily phone? Or if Microsoft keeps breaking Windows, will I even be able to use the start menu next year?

And honestly, I can't say that I know. I don't know these developers, or the teams around them, or the teams around them, or the company culture. I don't know if Google will suddenly change out the accessibility team manager and have another layoff, and there goes the momentum of the last two years. Honestly at this point I have barely any hope for Windows.

I wish I could just be normal and not have these stupid unneeded thoughts. I mean, I don't know, and honestly the past doesn't help that much because who thought in iOS 5 that we'd have so many VoiceOver bugs, or in TalkBack 8 that in just a few years we could actually use Braille in TalkBack. Ugh.

devinprater, to random

You know what? I’m gonna provide an alternative view. And I don’t even know how serious I am about this, but here goes.

If you use Linux, Android, especially de-Googled Android, you are supporting ableism. You are supporting big organizations that prioritize the success and privacy of the elites that are abled and have the training and knowledge, and the time and energy to obtain more of this, over those who are disabled, and generally have to work through life’s challenges along with their disability, and who do not have the time or energy to bring themselves to a point where they can utilize FOSS, let alone enjoy and be productive in it.

If you use FOSS, you are supporting gatekeepers. If you use FOSS, you support the locking out of people that do not perceive like you, look like you, act like you, think like you, are even move or use objects like you. You are supporting the hejimony of elites that, if things were just a bit different, would be working at the big tech companies you profess to hate so much. Why support that? Why would you even tell others about that? You think foss developers want to help you? No. They help those who help themselves. If you can code, that’s great for you. Welcome to the elites that can literally design our current digital world. The one where, because the physical one is so inaccessible to many disabled people, we disabled people must use. Technology has changed our lives. You know which one, for the most part, that hasn’t? Foss. Linux. Android. KDE. Gnome. LibreOffice. Emacs. Vim. Linux on mobile phones. You know which ones have? Apple. Microsoft. Google. Microsoft Word. Ulysses. JAWS. VoiceOver. Apple TV Plus (audio description on just about everything they put out.)

————————
Again, I get so tired of these pro-foss and ableist posts that hell, why not make some shit of my own. It’s just so tiring to see the holier than thou attitude as if their shit ain’t got flies all around it and is sitting in the middle of the walkway.

devinprater, to foss

So, OS. Tried it. No, it's not blind friendly. Alt + Tab doesn't speak with Orca most of the time. In setup, the full name, username, password fields aren't labeled, so tabbing with Orca says nothing. After setup, the welcome screen is full of "GTK button checkbox" and other mislabeled stuff. It's not ready for blind people to use.

devinprater, to accessibility

So yesterday I got an interesting question from a student. If JAWS crashes, how do you fix it? Liek with NVDA, you can just Windows R, NVDA, Enter, and it shuts down any already running processes and restarts NVDA. Does JAWS have something like that?

devinprater, to accessibility

so my start menu stopped working again. On a whim, I hit Windows + S to see if the search box thing would open. It didn't. But then I hit the windows key again, and the start menu works again now. Somehow. For some reason. Anyway yeah that's a thing.

devinprater, to random

You know, I'm honestly glad to see people looking at the disability community, especially blind people in my case, and going "You know, I had no idea it was this bad." Like that thread on learning to code for kids? Yeah. Best way is to hit the ground learning through typing in code and hearing the response. It sucks. It really, really does. And the kid, or even teenager or adult, would have to first know how to use their device; iPad, computer, phone, notetaker. And then they'd need to learn to code. Like, as blind people, we cannot just pick up a device and automatically know how to use it. We have to learn how to use the screen reader on the device, practice with the device, and then start using it for whatever we picked it up for in the first place. And I know I'm a terrible person for saying this, but I think more people need to see these kinds of failings of technology before anything substantial wil be done about it. Because it's so easy to scroll on passed yeah another blind person mad at tech, yeah some screen reader update, yeah foss bad Apple good and all that. But it's another to see a blind person, right in front of you, trying to learn to use an iPad, and learn to code, or do whatever on it, at the same time. It's really sad. But honestly, I think more people need to be sad about it before we can move any further as a society on disability issues.

devinprater, to emacs

A day ago: I'm gonna just stop talking about Linux.

Next day: Hey y'all Emacspeak and emacs are really nice sometimes.

The next day (probably): Hey y'all so I just installed Fedora 29 and here's what I found.

Next day: So I installed Fedora on my work machine and everything is up and going.

Next hour: I'm posting this from Mastodon-mode in Emacs and wrote an Emacspeak module to work with Mastodon-mode.

Next hour: I've submitted a patch to Gnus to allow new users to set it up by just typing in their email address and password, and Gnus looks up an alist of domains and their mail settings and just sets up the account that way. 2FA support coming soon.

Next hour: Oh no there's been an update that breaks ATSPI so I gotta go back to Windows.

Just writing it out so I don't try to experience it in real life, lol. Very exagerated, but that's kinda how my sense of humor is. Now maybe I will get emacs and Emacspeak working on the Mac again since that's where it's the most responsive.

devinprater, to accessibility

I was slightly entertaining Android yesterday, for a moment. Bigger battery, seems to work better with Bluetooth headphones, better speaker and all that. Then I looked in my drawer of cables for a USB C to USB C cable to connect my NLS EReader Braille display to my Samsung phone which I paid a good $600 for. And there were none. So yeah, that faded fast. The only way to use that Braille display on Android is over USB C. And no I’m not using a dongle to connect it either. It’s just ridiculous. So I went back to my little iPhone SE 2, and enjoyed using my Braille display over Bluetooth as it was intended.

devinprater, to emacs

So, I'm not sure if I've said this here, but with Emacspeak, a lot of stuff that's hard for a blind person to do in, say, a terminal or manpages or info documents, is really simple, because it's a keyboard-driven interface. Want to move up to the previous prompt to review output? Control + C, then Control + P. Or it may just be C-c p. Want to move to the next heading in a manpage? Just hit N or P. Like, it's a bit like Powershell, where normally terminals are just a stream of text, but Emacs is objects. And objects, like elements on the web, can be navigated or used as landmarks, or searched through if nothing else works.

Now, I'm not saying Emacspeak is perfect. It still suffers from being a programmer's tool, so definitely not for everyone. But what it does do well, especially not messing with my tags in HTML unlike VS Code's nonsense where it'll just jumble everything up for you, and even stuff like reading through processes in ProcEd-mode, Emacspeak makes that really visual information a lot simpler for audio.

devinprater, to accessibility

So I go to update JAWS to 2024, and try to migrate my settings from 2023. I've changed my speech rate, configured my speech and sound scheme, all that, made JAWS my own and all that. And I get the below text. So uh, I update NVDA to 2023.3, and it... just works. And NVDA is free. Tons of its addons, are free. SMH y'all. I just don't have any words. I mean did this happen for anyone else? Did I do things wrong? I mean I've never updated JAWS with Leasey installed before so it's probably my fault as always. Still. Goodness.

Migrate Results
Details:
Migration of settings is not possible as Leasey software has been detected. For assistance,
please contact Hartgen Consultancy at www.hartgenconsultancy.com.

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