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.
I got bored and ran the script of a scam call I got through Eleven Labs. Then I got more bored and ran it through @shaysters 's cloned voice. Then I got more bored, started playing with the settings, and... it... did this.
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.
I find myself using two Windows machines quite regularly, and at a loss as to how I should conveniently sync settings, e.g. NVDA, between them. I need a two-way sync, because I make changes on both during usage that I want to see propagated to the other. Does anyone have a good preexisting solution to this problem?
@jscholes What about something like syncthing.net? Been using it for years for these types of use cases. You can add the folder containing your NVDA settings, then sync that between any machines you associate that folder on.
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.
@liamerven Thinking of taking a pretty big step in that direction myself so it's interesting to hear you say that.
My living room runs on a 10+-year-old cheap receiver with a pile of inaccessible buttons and an inaccessible screen. Been past-due on an upgrade to that for a while and have been eyeing Sonos. Ecosystems scare me a bit, though. 😀
I'm looking at it in terms of failure cases, and in terms of what I have now. I think I'm more interested in self-contained systems per room which can play any audio thrown at them vs. having sound follow me and such. In terms of failure cases, it looks like the speakers continue working even after the software stops getting upgrades, so I'm guessing I'd just lose the following and maybe some of the app features, but that's fine as long as I can push audio to them over HDMI/optical. In terms of what I have now, having a less-smart system in a similarly accessible form factor would be an upgrade.
If there's any good-quality, similarly accessible home theater gear, I'd seriously like to know about it. But it's looking like it may be Sonos or bust.
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.
@talon And you're someone whose opinion on audio quality I'd trust, so how's that? It's hard to know what's hype and what isn't when someone's ads are all over a bunch of the podcasts you listen to.
@talon@nick OK, so mobile apps are great but the desktop app has a bunch of unlabeled buttons and some keyboard shortcuts. Is that accurate?
Has anyone used Sonos hardware on a desktop or laptop? Last time I used an HDMI soundbar it had some feature where it shut off when audio wasn't playing, so the first bit of screen reader audio was cut off. The NVDA bluetooth addon didn't fix that. Ultimately I needed Silenzio and a custom sound clip of very quiet high-frequency audio to keep it awake, but that kind of scared me off HDMI audio with screen readers.
@talon@nick Wait, .3 seconds even with a line-in connection, and even when directly using sound from the device you're connected to? Wow, I was thinking of standardizing everything on Sonos but that sounds like a dealbreaker at least for my PC. Guessing that'd suck for gaming on consoles connected to TVs as well. Yikes.
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.
Where does this trend come from where people describe their physical appearence during presentations? Who asked for this? I personally am rarely curious what anyone looks like or what they are wearing. If I am, I'll ask. It feels more like a narcecistic desire of theirs, to tell us how they look and what they are wearing. Which is okay, I guess, but I thought we were supposed to not judge based on appearence? And also, it puts pressure on everyone else to do likewise. Nothnx!
@objectinspace Oh gods yeah. I'm actually vaguely terrified I'm going to be facilitating/presenting one of these virtue-signally things and will have to be like "Yeah, I'm Nolan. I'm a bit overweight, sorry about that. I'm wearing...I dunno, something that passed the sniff test this morning so it's probably not giving me cholera...what else you wanna know? Oh, I just realized there's an empty beer can I forgot to throw away sitting off to my right, damn, should have thrown that away earlier. And I left my vape out, shit, oops, sorry I'm a train wreck. Oh, you want to know what I look like? Can't help you there, anyone want to try describing me? Anyone? Aaaaanyone? I'm glad this inclusivity exercise isn't the slightest bit awkward, I certainly feel included."
Oh rip. The Godot accessibility plugins seem to be completely broken with the newest Godot releases. That's really sad. Can we have one accessible engine please? That'd be nice. I'd pay you too!
@talon@zersiax Bevy integrates AccessKit in that it makes it easy to add accessibility nodes to entities, mirrors Bevy's hierarchies partially to AccessKit, etc. It also implements partial support for the 3 or so widgets bevy_ui currently has.
In theory, it should be able to integrate with egui's AccessKit support once everything is on the same version and I've gotten the bridge code into bevy_egui. And it should make it fairly easy to add AK support to Bevy's existing UI toolkits but I haven't done that work and likely won't have the time. Wouldn't be a bad project for anyone looking for one, though.
@talon@zersiax Oh sure. At the end of the day a rising tide lifts all boats, and I'm also excited about the Godot work, particularly as I've been watching that PR and they're making multiple rebased squash commits in pretty quick succession. For context, I believe this is the same person who mainlined TTS support into Godot 4, and that's been going on for a few years now, so they're in it to win it AFAICT.
Is anyone having trouble with the applications key on Windows 11? It appears to be opening from the mouse rather than my keyboard focus. So if I arrow to a folder in windows explorrer and hit shift+f10, rather than opening the context menu for the folder, it will open the menu for some other part on the screen. Is there an option I need to change in Windows somewhere to fix this?
Hoping someone can explain this to me because I'm genuinely curious.
What is TLOU doing when it sits around for upwards of an hour, claiming to be building shaders, and telling me performance will be bad if I play while it's happening?
Is it just not possible to, say, prebuild and distribute whatever the final product of this build process is alongside the game like any other binary artifact?
Not even for fairly standardized hardware, like the Steam Deck?
Haven't played TLOU in a couple major updates, and now my poor Deck is building shaders again. At least I can stick it in another room and leave it on the main menu while it does, but jeez. I have no idea what they were smoking when they briefly claimed this was Steam Deck certified. What, someone brought theirs into the office one day during development?
@objectinspace@matt@raph Ah, that makes sense. And because the consoles control everything, including mandating upgrades and having only one driver for everything, this doesn't happen there.
@objectinspace@matt@raph Correct. Maybe they do/will do it for official builds, but they make it clear that there's no support beyond providing drivers.