Nice, been working on this post and project for a bit over a month and a half, with the big move in between of course. Glad it finally went live.
I built an open source image description service which will eventually get its own NVDA addon, and is of course hosted on fly.io. fly.io/blog/llm-image-descript…
I, for the first time in 11 years, have a new physical address.
There are a lot of stories I could tell about that and the process of getting it, but holy shit I got out of practice. I used to switch addresses every couple years. I guess I forgot how awkward and anxiety-inducing the first few nights alone at a new place are. I don't know any of this background noise yet.
To be clear, I haven't heard anything alarming. It's just, places sound very different even if they're quiet, and I have 11 years of experience telling me dysfunctional home sounds like something else. Now I have to learn what maybe-hopefully-functional home sounds like.
So far so good with the new place. We'll see how I feel in a few months, but as long as we don't deteriorate to management actively gaslighting and deflecting me, it'll be a massive improvement. 😀
And here's me, stupid, thinking this move would be a lot easier because I had more income. It is, but holy hell have things gone to shit since I did this last in 2013.
Like the apartment I'm withdrawing my application from? They don't know if they can or will be able to get me an accessible copy of my 37-page lease. In 2024.
Deleted a much longer, rantier post about the legal shenanigans my partner noticed while she read parts of this inaccessible lease to me. I'll just say they switched a guarantor application to a resident application without my consent to work around a credit score requirement. Yeah, bullet fucking dodged. I did not consent to that individual as a resident, only as a guarantor, and the application we filled out made that very explicit.
If only I hadn't put just about everything I own into storage already. A dumpster fire at the shit show, that's my life right now. Hope yours is better.
Does Friendica not support uploading audio? Tried uploading an MP3 but both times I couldn't find the uploaded file in the posting interface.
I'm also using Windows and noticed I had to select all file types to find my MP3 to upload. So maybe Friendica doesn't disallow non-images but the file selection makes it seem like it might.
I've never messed with GPUs under Linux. Anyone have tips on how to stress-test one, or otherwise put it through its paces, that aren't gaming or mining crypto?
I realize the latter might be OK if I did it only in the context of a stress test and for a limited time, but aside from wanting to stay away from crypto on principle, this is for work and we have systems actively scanning for and flagging it.
Context is that I'm stress-testing our new GPU offering at work to find bugs. It doesn't necessarily have to be a stress-test, but I'm trying to actively break things in a way that won't trigger our scans but I don't know the first thing about this stuff.
And FWIW we've already generally run LLMs and such, so the lowest hanging fruit is already picked.
Hey blind Android users, anyone have a favorite more advanced GPS navigation app?
In particular, I'm looking for something that will let me save my own points and navigate back to them, with both directions and bearing/distance for cases where Google Maps tries to do a dumb and take me along small access roads and such when really I just need to hang a left and walk for about 100 feet, but the app doesn't give me that info because it's too busy holding my hand.
Likely moving to a new area next week, there's a lot of cool stuff to walk to, and I'd like to just mark my building entrance so I can return after exploring things. But so many of the apps I'm finding want to hold my hand more than is necessary, and that sucks.
Blind folks (or I guess anyone really): how do you take screenshots accessibly and safely under Windows 11?
By "accessibly" I mean being able to just get image content of the current window easily. There's some sort of snipping tool but based on the name I feel like that's probably based on visually highlighting what you want to screenshot, which is a non-starter. Maybe I'm wrong? I feel like there used to be a "screenshot only this window" hotkey but AFAIK that was replaced with snipping.
By "safely" I mean getting a screenshot of only the current window. I can tightly control what appears in just one window by, e.g. opening an incognito window in Chrome. I can sort of be careful to not capture things I don't want by using a separate desktop but I'd rather just grab a single window if possible.
Ultimately these will probably be shipped off to our content folks anyway, so they can make any edits to the image I request. I'd just rather give them starting material that's as clean as possible.
Windows Terminal has a feature where ctrl-clicking a link opens it in your browser. Anyone know if there is a screen-reader-accessible or keyboard-driven way to do this?
We use Teleport at work, which regularly prompts me to visit a long-ass URL to log in. The only way to do that is to use NVDA's review cursor to find the "http", set a start marker, arrow by character past the URL (which ends in a UUID so that's always fun since I have to review past 36 characters for that), set an end marker and copy the link. Rinse/repeat for any link dumped to the terminal. Takes me 20 or so seconds when all is said and done and I wish there was a faster way.
Does anything like this exist? I regularly find myself typing the same Slack bot commands, same shell commands, etc. Looking for a Windows app with a global hotkey which, when pressed, pops up an autocomplete box with titles like "Lock gateway," "Lock dev host", "Strip ANSI codes", etc. Each title is associated with text which, when the title is selected, gets pasted in. The autocomplete box also has an item for adding new snippets.
It'd probably be easy enough to write but it seems like it ought to exist already.
Wanted to gut-check a project idea to see if anyone other than me would find value in it.
I have NVDA running across a handful of machines. I also, over the years, have done lots of subtle config changes, installed a handful of addons I prefer, etc.
Was thinking it'd be nice to have an NVDA sync service. Create an account, link your NVDA installations to it. Optionally mark specific config keys/addons to not be synced from specific installs, but otherwise keep everything synced everywhere else.
Add an ollama image recognition endpoint as an optional, or possibly limited-use, service addon for anyone wanting that capability but unable to run/host it locally. That'd probably be a paid feature, but config/addon sync is probably easy enough to do for free. Hell, maybe even train a chatbot with NVDA docs, GitHub issues, etc. and see if it can handle support requests.
Creating/hosting that all should be easy enough, sans the AI bits which would eventually cost but I could probably prototype something for free, though I'd eventually need to monetize it even if only to pay its own hosting costs if I'm ever unable to cover those myself. This feels like something I'd use, but I'd rather not spend the time if I'm the only one.
Never thought I'd be that guy raving about how great his company is, but...
Just got out of a nearly hour-long work meeting with the folks we're contracting with about audio describing the visual aspects of our town halls. Demos, presentations, I'll have my own personal audio describer in a shared Slack channel and huddle describing things out loud and answering my questions. We're also going to hash out presentation guidelines so folks doing demos do a few things to make everyone's lives easier, including watchers on phones where they can't see commands or screenshares.
Mind absolutely blown. Do FAAMG-scale companies do this for their employees, or just mine? This was a unique situation for everyone in the meeting, including the multiple companies contracting and subcontracting on this, so I suspect I just hit the jackpot and no one else does this.
I'm truly spoiled. Fly.io set the "cares about employees" bar pretty high and if I ever lose this job I'm going to be hard-pressed working for anyone else.
Set up an ollama server on my home network a while back and it's kind of magical to have all this capability just available to me anywhere (thanks to my Wireguard VPN, at least.) It's CPU-bound so a bit slow, but I've used it for everything from cleaning up writing to generating fanfic for my cat.
Since I set it up a couple months back, they've added support for image classifiers and OpenAI compatibility. Sorely tempted to buy an external GPU to speed things up. I do have access to cloud-hosted GPU hardware through work, but there's kind of a cool factor to running the AI on my assorted pile of hardware in my home. Wonder if anyone has integrated it with Home Assistant's voice assistants yet.
I haven't done a #fedora install in a while. Previously I'd boot into a live environment, manually start Orca, click a desktop icon called something like "Install Fedora" and go through the installation accessibly. Now the F38 Workstation spin seems to drop me straight into the installer and I can't start Orca with either alt-f2 or the keyboard shortcut.
Is this how the installer now works? If so, is there another method to go back to how it worked before?
If it's not obvious from the above, I'm a blind screen reader user. Right now I'm pressing Enter right when the boot media loads. If there's some combo of arrows/enter that can get me to the previous live environment, that'd be very helpful.
Does anyone know of a CLI utility that can take a bunch of logs, parameters like which log level to focus on and maybe a few others, pipe that to an LLM, and get back an executive summary of any problems found, trends, potential issues, etc.?
As a screen reader user, I can't stand having to read logs because they're in about the least speech-friendly format ever (first the timestamp, next the level, then finally the thing I care about, rinse/repeat for each and every line.) Didn't occur to me until recently that an LLM might be a good solution for dumping in a bunch of logs and getting back some succinct analysis.
Asking because if it doesn't exist, I might score some work time to build it. But I'd rather not if someone already has.
Any fellow #blind or #disabled folks have tips on getting delivery drivers to actually follow delivery instructions?
I hate to sound entitled, but sometimes those are very important. Like, I just don't order coffee or drinks anymore because I had a delivery driver leave a large coffee on the probably inch of flooring between the entrance of my unit and the top of the wheelchair ramp. "How could he possibly not see that?" the driver surely must have wondered. I thought I was smart bringing my cane to find it where I expected it'd be--the bottom of the ramp--and my cane is what knocked it over when it barely cleared the threshold. And then of course I had to clean it up off the sidewalk because that's who I am.
Speaking of wheelchairs, my partner uses one. Her instructions ask drivers to use the green table near her door so she can reach the food (as do mine, incidentally, because we have that same green table for very similar reasons.) If they just dump it on the ground, she physically can't retrieve it, so it sits out there and goes to waste or gets stolen.
I get that there are worse problems in the world, but if you're going to do that job, thank you so much, and please follow the damn instructions. I've always tried to tip very well because I have a lot of respect for the folks who we subject to the regrettable practice. Tipping well doesn't seem to matter anymore, though.
Any suggestions? Or should I just get over myself and accept that this won't go away?
I'd appreciate help debugging why Firefox seems to rev my CPU fan heavily after either a few hours or maybe a day or so of use, sometimes locking up completely if I don't shut it down first.
Firefox shows up at the top of task manager sorted by CPU use, and exiting it causes fan use to drop.
I've disabled every single extension, including ublock origin.
Process manager shows a single entry for Firefox with something like 140% CPU use and 700+ MB of RAM, but every other entry is substantially less than 0.5% CPU. RAM use looks fine.
This is a recent generation Framework with 32 GB of RAM so I doubt it's the hardware.
GPU use is at 1 GB. Not sure if that's particularly high.
I'll get some numbers after a restart to compare and will update this thread accordingly.
Never thought I'd be one of those folks going on about how great their company is on social media but here I am.
We have a web-based terminal that pre-installs/auths our CLI so you can upload code and launch apps from the web. As a blind screen reader user, I don't often need web-based terminals, but when I need them I need them and usually they're a11y hot garbage.
Asked in Slack where the code for ours was, pulled it down, discovered it used xterm.js which has a screenReaderMode flag which, I've learned, is essentially what VS Code's terminal uses.
15 minutes later and my PR adding this in is up for review. Waiting for it to get more testing to determine if we'll need to make it a toggle, but I fully expect this to be live within the week.
I've made a lot of small, quick win a11y changes on our platform over the past couple months. Meanwhile I met with the vendor for our collaborative wiki, suggested some very simple landmark changes that they could have made in 15 minutes, and guess whether any of those are in?
Company culture really does make all the difference, and the Fly folks have gone out of their way to empower me to change things, and to make things more accessible for me without me having to ask. A thousand points to them.
Took the co-op several days to reinstall my toilet and clean up the clumps of dried sewage in my shower after shitpocalypse 2 wound down because, wait for it, they apparently forgot they'd removed it and had to be reminded.
I wrote a nastygram and fed it through Chat GPT with instructions to make it less emotional and more impactful. It did a pretty decent job, but at one point I'd written something about being tired of our "fuck around, find out" approach to maintenance.
GPT translated that to me being tired of our "neglect and discover" approach to maintenance.
Neglect and discover. Love it. Punchy and vaguely ominous.
So I pulled the trigger and bought myself a Komplete A61, stand, and sustain pedal. Also picked up the piano by ear audio courses. I played piano for years as a kid and enjoyed messing around a bit as an adult, so hopefully these will be a good refresher.
Maybe I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, but are there any accessible live performance setups for the Komplete ecosystem? Or do folks just run Reaper even when playing live? I did a few jams in college and really enjoyed them, but that was 2002, and hauling my multiple-10-pounds of gear back and forth on the bus was painful enough that I only did it a handful of times. Might be more interesting with more portable gear. I guess remote jams are a thing now too
I'm so glad I live in a forward-thinking state that cares so much about the big and consequential issues like the threat transgender folks pose and which bathrooms they use. That's so much more important than whether our power grid can hold up through a drizzle.
In related news, guess whose server lost power in last night's minor storm, whose BIOS shit itself, and who is scrambling to reconfigure his network because, once again, VMs running DNS/DHCP servers aren't coming back up? Me, that's who. Feels like we lose power for at least 20 minutes every few weeks, and now apparently excessive heat and rain are threatening our grid. Our last outage was less than a week ago.
We need to be out of this madhouse stat, before Texas Man becomes the new Florida Man (assuming it isn't already.)
Thinking of pulling the trigger and getting a Komplete Kontrol A61. Anyone wanna talk me out of it, blind or otherwise?
I played piano a lot as a kid, and had a Yamaha Motif in my 20s, but that was one of those expensive giant inaccessible controller/sequencer combos with a million buttons and using it for anything other than pulling up an instrument and playing was a chore and a half. I had an M32 before I carelessly broke it a couple months back, so am familiar with the Komplete ecosystem and its assorted quirks. But the M32 was less about performance and more of a control surface. The A61 seems a bit better in that regard.
And some of the Komplete-compatible instruments sound absolutely amazing. I'll definitely be grabbing whatever electric guitar instrument SightlessKobmat rocks out with on his streams sometimes.
It looks like it's just the one app and all their hardware--is that accurate? "Yes" seems like the logical answer, but I have a Bose bluetooth speaker and headset and they both use different Bose apps.
I wouldn't mind a less "smart" audio setup, but I'm getting sick of inaccessible hardware. My only dissatisfaction with my 10-year-old receiver is that all I can do is turn the volume knob, because there's no way to accessibly interact with the bunches and bunches of buttons and inaccessible LCD. But if anyone has a recommendation for that then I'm all ears, no pun intended.
It finally happened. Got my Discord username modal today. And there's no audio CAPTCHA option, only the accessibility cookie that I guess requires me to compromise browser security. Fuck that shit with a hot rusty spork, is what I say.
I clicked the "I'll do this later" button, but if they haven't fixed this issue by the point where they force it, I'll be leaving Discord on principle until they do.
I'm a lot less butthurt about the fact that Discord's response to me submitting an amazing resume and cover letter for a senior accessibility developer position several years back, in the midst of a huge Texas snow storm, was a canned automated rejection a month later with no interview. I pulled out all the stops--mentioned that I'd written an Android screen reader along with mini screen readers for several UI toolkits, was familiar with accessibility in multiple web frameworks, etc. I should have at least gotten an interview. But the message is as clear today as it was back then: we don't really want disabled users on our platform.
So if it comes down to it, I'll be figuring out how to make Matrix work better for me and mine. The writing's pretty thoroughly on the wall for Twitter and Reddit. Now it looks to be there for Discord as well.
Twitter fired its accessibility team. Reddit apparently never cared about accessibility to begin with, and is torpedoing the lifeline lots of folks depended on to use it. And now Discord's username changes are apparently forcing folks through inaccessible hcaptchas. I hate to suggest that we need to collectively migrate back to hosting our own shit in order to have semi-stable communities where accessibility is a core tenant of those communities, but the alternative is looking pretty bleak and the tech bros don't care.
Excuse me while I alt-tab into Discord to figure out if I'm finally on the chopping block^H^H^H^Hup for username reassignment.