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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glyph, to random
@glyph@mastodon.social avatar

I just want to write some code, maybe make some music, maybe draw some pictures.

I don't want to be mad about blockchains, I don't want to be mad about GenAI, I don't want to be mad about terrible backfiring "think of the children" legislation, I don't want to be terrified about the rising tide of bigoted, racist fascism ending democracy in my lifetime.

I don't want you to have to be mad about all that either.

I wish the world would leave us all alone for a little bit.

matt,

@glyph I'm designing a new accessibility stack for Linux desktops (initially GNOME) that hopefully won't suck, and will eventually enable things that aren't even practical today on the proprietary platforms, like automatically making screenshots accessible. The GNOME Foundation is even paying me to do it, thanks to funding they got from the Sovereign Tech Fund.

matt, to random

To follow up on the post from @fedora that I just boosted (https://fosstodon.org/@fedora/112450335722898487), I'd like to thank @sovtechfund for funding my work on @gnome accessibility, and acknowledge that they're also funding other, more immediate work on GNOME accessibility, including the Spiel speech framework (https://project-spiel.org/) and a variety of improvements to the Orca screen reader. My project might be getting the most attention, but it's not the only important work happening in this area.

matt, to random

Update on Newton, the Wayland-native accessibility stack I'm developing for GNOME and (eventually) other desktops: I have an end-to-end prototype, using a Wayland protocol extension for the connection between applications/toolkits and the compositor, and D-Bus for the AT-to-compositor interface. I have an experimental branch of Orca with basic focus announcement and mouse review working. 1/?

matt, to random

My company @pneumasolutions is looking for a developer to work on a short-term contract project, audio-related, for Windows and macOS, in Rust. Please DM me if you're interested and available.

matt, to random

Came across this article on the decline of usability which, among other things, puts GNOME 3 in the same category as the notorious Windows 8. https://datagubbe.se/usab2/

I know that classic Mac/Windows conventions like menu bars and title bars aren't sacred forever. But this article does make a convincing case that the industry at large, including GNOME, has gone backward. And, at least for me, that's uncomfortable to contemplate.

matt, to random

Yesterday I boosted someone else's announcement of my post on the new GNOME accessibility blog, but apparently some folks couldn't find the link in that toot, so here it is again: https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2023/10/27/a-new-accessibility-architecture-for-modern-free-desktops/

Also wanted to add: I'm glad to be getting back to work on accessibility on desktop Linux, after ~20 years away. Hopefully with the experience I've gained in the meantime, my efforts now will be more effective.

matt, to random

Seems ridiculous that 8 GB of RAM is now, apparently, not enough to do any serious multitasking on a personal computer. https://www.404media.co/in-defense-of-ram-on-apple-silicon/ I won't go back to the Windows 9x days this time, but I remember when I could do all the multitasking I wanted on my PC with 512 MB of RAM, under Windows XP or Linux. Will we ever manage to stop this cycle of bloat? Or will there come a time when 512 GB of RAM is barely enough? I'll keep doing what little I can to not make the problem worse.

matt, to random

Wanted: an open-source OCR library that's roughly as fast and light as the Windows built-in OCR and works as well as that Windows OCR, particularly for multi-color screenshots. In my tests, Tesseract has trouble with screenshots that have multiple foreground/background colors, because of the way the image has to be binarized first. Is anything publicly known about how the Windows built-in OCR works?

matt, to random

Today I learned that ACME, the protocol used by Let's Encrypt, stands for Automatic Certificate Management Environment. Of course, that last word really wants to be "Protocol". Must be a backronym.

matt, to random

Question for folks who are knowledgeable about machine learning and specifically computer vision: Realistically, are we anywhere close to the point where a computer can look at the actual pixels in a camera feed or even a direct stream of on-screen output, understand the image, and provide to a blind person all of the information that a sighted person can see? This would, of course, be the ultimate technological solution to all accessibility problems for blind people. 1/?

matt, to random

Installing Windows 11 in a VM using Narrator, and it's clear that the use case of installing Windows with Narrator has been neglected lately. I heard some SSML markup being read. And no, I don't claim that this has anything to do with me leaving the Windows accessibility team.

matt, to random

I never got on Clubhouse, and I don't want to reward their accessibility-breaking update with a new signup. But for any people that are still on Clubhouse and have encountered the accessibility breakage in the recent update, her's a direct link to their bug report form: https://clubhouseapp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=8650221451155 I think it's important to contact them, not just quietly leave. If I had gotten on Clubhouse before, I'd do this.

matt, to random

My talk at Open Source Summit North America is now on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9psDfEFf9c And it was covered on Linux Weekly News: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/971541/9a17fa52fab73bef/

matt, to GNOME

I'm starting to prototype my new architecture for today. I blogged about this roughly a month ago: https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2023/10/27/a-new-accessibility-architecture-for-modern-free-desktops/

aral, to accessibility
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

So @gnome is removing the x11 session, leaving just the Wayland one.

If this goes out before Orca, the GNOME screen reader, is fixed to work on Wayland, it will mean that people who rely on screen readers will have no way to use one on GNOME. And thus on the major Linux distributions.

So I’m hoping the plan is that this change will not land until GNOME has a working screen reader.

https://peoplemaking.games/@ailepet/112077559713299711

matt,

@aral GNOME folks are well aware of the problems with Orca on Wayland, and actively working to fix them. There's even funding for this work, thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund. I'm personally working on a new Wayland-native accessibility stack that aims to eventually replace AT-SPI and support sandboxed apps, but there are also efforts to fix problems in the existing stack in the short term. cc @sonny

matt, to random

I read on Wikipedia that 1.5 billion people, or about 22% of the population, are nearsighted. I wonder about an alternate world where the same percentage of people instead had a wide range of visual impairments that we don't know how to correct. Maybe then everyone would take it for granted that of course it's necessary to accommodate varying levels of vision, and that having little or no vision isn't a problem to be fixed but just a characteristic, like having no sense of pitch.

matt, to random

Clearly we need to figure out a better way to convey emoji in screen readers.

I got a marketing email from PayPal with the following subject: Here’s how to 🤸🏾stretch🤸🏾your budget further with PayPal

NVDA with espeak-ng read it like this: Here’s how to person cartwheeling medium dark skin tone stretch person cartwheeling medium dark skin tone your budget further with PayPal

No, I won't ask everyone else to change how they use emoji. I know how unrealistic that is.

matt, to random

Two out of three desktop GUI accessibility APIs don't have a role or control type for terminals. I guess it's no surprise that AT-SPI, the GNOME accessibility API, is the one that does.

matt, to random

When I was a teenager, my family shared a PC with a 120 megabyte hard drive, which was always filling up, requiring me to keep freeing up space. Now I keep having to free up space on my 500 gigabyte SSD. Will I live to see the day when 2 petabytes of storage on a personal computer isn't enough?

matt, to random

I'm re-reading Rich Harris's "In defense of the modern web" (https://dev.to/richharris/in-defense-of-the-modern-web-2nia), which is largely about the advantages of client-side navigation, as in single-page apps. He talks about prefetching links as soon as a user begins a touch gesture, fancy animated transitions between pages, and more prominent (visual) indication that a page is loading. At the risk of being overly idealistic, I think such things should be delegated to the browser, a.k.a. the user agent, if the user wants them.

matt, (edited ) to random

If you've taken time to write descriptions of images that you post on the fediverse, how would you feel about those images and descriptions going into a training dataset for a language-vision model? Feel free to reply with more in-depth thoughts; I couldn't fit much in the poll choices.

matt, to random

I'm making more progress on the new Wayland accessibility protocol extension I'm developing with funding from the GNOME Foundation. Here's the current draft spec, with a new interface for accessibility consumers (e.g. screen readers): https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mwcampbell/wayland-protocols/-/blob/accessibility/staging/accessibility/accessibility-v1.xml Still working on implementing this. The document notes the current known protocol limitations, which are still major.

matt, to rust

My company, @pneumasolutions, is looking for a developer to work for us on a contract basis, to enhance the screen capture and mouse input implementations in our remote desktop product (https://pneumasolutions.com/products/rim/). This project will involve #rust, #webrtc, native Windows and macOS APIs, and integration with an existing Electron app. A more detailed high-level spec is available to qualified candidates. Please email employment@pneumasolutions.com if you're interested and available.

matt, to random

Question for anyone who writes JAWS scripts or NVDA add-ons to make niche applications usable in a job environment: When working with Windows applications that don't use old-style Win32 controls, a.k.a. "standard" controls, but use a newer framework like WPF or UWP, do you ever have a use for the UI Automation class name property on individual controls? Not to be confused with the window class; in these newer frameworks, there's typically just one window class for the top-level window.

matt, to random

Question: Has anyone run into any real accessibility challenges in a work or (more likely) educational environment because Linux GUI apps aren't accessible with ChromeVox on Chrome OS? Thinking about a potential future project that could build on my current Wayland accessibility work. Wondering if it's really worthwhile though.

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