#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.
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.
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.
@mdione@jscholes "Change all occurrences" is using language-specific semantics to find uses of a variable. Here is a function called fx, but it's never used:
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.
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.
@pitermach That's what I did. It just gives me a menu relating to text. When I press "Share", and then choose e.g. "Save to Files", it wants to create a text file. @MonaApp
@jscholes@MonaApp Hm, I can get it to work here both on media with and without alt text. I do see the option to copy the alt text but also things like share image, save, copy image link and so on
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?
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.
@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@simon@MonaApp This is happening to me also, and it doesn't seem to matter whether I open links in the Mona browser or in Safari. This just started happening following the latest Mona update.
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?
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.
Even if they stuck to things, they're way too big to put on an AirPods case, way too expensive to attach to groceries, and so on. I could put one in my suitcase... except I don't travel that often and only take hand luggage when I do.
Note that I'm not looking for "why did you buy it if you didn't know what it was?" responses. I'm not complaining about the money spent, which was my choice, only saying that I don't understand the utility.
@jscholes They're great to put in a bag if you're a bag-carrying person like I am. Wallets too. You can attach them to a keychain or keyring. People who own a vehicle often put one there, in case it gets stolen or even to find it when parked.
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.
@simon They're very well known, and almost two decades old by this point. I'm surprised I haven't read them until now. Some people have theorised (or in some cases claimed to have outright proof) that Lightning on the Wave now writes under the pen name of Lomonaaeren: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
@jscholes I either remember very little of these books or never got past book 2 at first. There's a lot to like about them; I can see why they were popular. Do you know if they were the start of the whole WBWL trend? I always thought that was a weirdly specific thing for so many authors to do, especially when you invent a whole brother for Harry.
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?"
@rooktallon@jscholes They kind of did, actually. The Apple Watch theory is in fact correct, if you start walking around with sleep mode turned on it will offer to do this, but even on the phone if you have the sleep focus enabled, but then turn it off before your scheduled alarm it’ll come up with a prompt to disable it. This works at least with the alarms you set when setting up the sleep schedule, I haven’t tried with alarms set outside that.