pixelate

pixelate, 3 days ago to accessibility

Okay y'all, Retroarch is now accessible on iOS! You will need a keyboard or gamepad to play and use the user interface. PSP games work great though! Just download all the core updates and needed core files for PPSSPP, if you plan on playing PSP games, and you're good! #accessibility #RetroArch #blind #blindGaming #emulation #emulators #gaming #iOS Link to the App Store page: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6499539433

pixelate, 5 days ago to accessibility

Lol, folks. Listen to your article before you post it. Doesn't matter what voice. You'll catch things like this from macrumors.com. In the app's settings (accessed via ChatPGT ➝ Settings… in the menu bar when the app's main window ...

#accessibility #writing #TTS

pixelate, 7 days ago to accessibility

So, I know generative AI is supposed to be just the most incorrect thing ever, but I want you to compare two descriptions. "A rock on a beach under a dark sky." And: The image shows a close-up view of a rocky, cratered surface, likely a planet or moon, with a small, irregularly shaped moon or asteroid in the foreground. The larger surface appears to be Mars, given its reddish-brown color and texture. The smaller object, which is gray and heavily cratered, is likely one of Mars' moons, possibly Phobos or Deimos. The background fades into the darkness of space. The first one is supposed to be the pure best thing that isn't AI. Right? Like, it's what we've been using for the past like 5 years. And yes, it's probably improved over those years. This is Apple's image description. It's, in my opinion, the best, most clear, and sounds like the ALT-text that it's made from, which people made BTW, and the images it was made with, which had to come from somewhere, were of very high quality, unlike Facebook and Google which just plopped anything and everything into theirs. The second was from Be My Eyes. Now, which one was more correct? Obviously, Be My Eyes. Granted, it's not always going to be, but goodness just because some image classification tech is old, doesn't mean it's better. And just because Google and Facebook call their image description bullshit AI, doesn't mean it's a large language model. Because at this point in time, Google TalkBack does not use Gemini, but uses the same thing VoiceOver has. And Facebook uses that too, just a classifier. Now, should sighted people be describing their pictures? Of course. Always. With care. And having their stupid bots use something better than "picture of cats." Because even a dumb image classifier can tell me that, and probably a bit more, lol. Cats sleeping on a blanket. Cats drinking water from a bowl. Stuff like that. But for something quick, easy, and that doesn't rely on other people, shoot yeah I'll put it through Be My Eyes. #accessibility #AI #LLM #BeMyEyes #blind

pixelate, 11 days ago to random

Holy crap y'all 2024 is just about half way over and what have I been doing with my life? Oh my gosh what the crap y'all, how is it almost half over! What the crap! Aaaaa

pixelate, 12 days ago to accessibility

It's June 10, 2024, at 4:00 PM Central US time. Almost every blind person that owns an iPhone has installed the iOS 18 beta. Some are playing retro games with the new, AI driven screen recognition. Others are gladly using DecTalk as their main voice, the Enhanced Siri voices that use ML to speak using emotion and context, as their reading voice, Eloquence as their notification voice (sent to one ear to minimize distractions), and finding it amazing that VoiceOver emphasizes italic text, and emboldens bold text. Others are finding it amazing that they can navigate their whole phone using Braille screen input, searching to find things by typing a few letters, or just swiping down through everything. A few are connecting their multi-line Braille displays, and feeling app icons and images, made much more understandable through touch, using an AI filter.

The next day, when news of all these features filters down to Android users, they quickly begin hammering Google, wanting DecTalk and Eloquence on their Pixel phones, like iOS users have. But Google is silent as always, only just now having given Chromebook users high quality Google TTS voices.

Note: great liberty has been taken to imagine the coolest outcome for the vague feature announcements Apple gave for VoiceOver users. We'll see just how cool, or not, they actually are on June 10.

#accessibility #apple #google #VoiceOver #blind #iOS #android

pixelate, 12 days ago to accessibility

Chromebooks already have great screen reading capabilities built in...

Awww Google, how cute of you. Great? Nope. Next time, remember. Nothing about us, without us. ChromeVox has barely been updated in years, just like VoiceOver for Mac, and Narrator. ChromeVox barely has any options for fine-tuning verbosity, keyboard commands, pronunciation, and some keyboard commands, like Search + Control + A for accessibility actions, aren't even well-documented. I should know. I had to use an Acer Spin 713 for a good 3 months as my primary laptop. So kindly stop talking, then ask, then act before you speak further.

"Updated keyboard shortcuts and first-letters navigation in Google Drive"...

First letters navigation? Come on. Any blind person can tell that this wasn't written by anyone who uses these technologies.

And nowhere in this article is anything new for ChromeVox. See? This is the kind of, frankly, bullshit that I hate on GAAD. Just shut your mouth and listen for once.

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/global-accessibility-awareness-day-2024/

#Accessibility #blind #google #ChromeOS #Chromebook #ChromeVox #GAAD

pixelate, 12 days ago to accessibility

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD). Today, I want you to ask yourself, then act, before you speak. Do you have an app you're maintaining? Look at some #accessibility resources for the framework you use for the user interface. Do you know if it's accessible or not? If it's not accessible, are you doing anything about it? Do you tell disabled visitors to your app/site that it's not accessible, and give them a timeframe, if any, when it will be? Do you have a website? If so, do you know if it's accessible or not? Are you an artist of any kind? Is your media accessible? Are you a writer? If so, are the images in your book described with #AltText?

If you're a part of a company that has anything to do with accessibility, including proudly posting about it, do you have any disabled employees? If so, do you show them that they're appreciated? If not, why don't you have any? If you create art about people with disabilities, do you have disabled people take a look at it before you share it? If you write books that have images in them, have any disabled people checked to make sure the Alt-text makes sense, and that the book is accessible otherwise? If not, why not? And when you get disabled people to check out apps, books, sites for your professional needs, do you pay them for it?

Please do remember us on every other day of the year, but particularly today, please remember: nothing about us without us.

#blind #disabled #disabilities #access

pixelate, 14 days ago to accessibility

A few more notes about video games and VoiceOver Recognition: the story mode of Blazblue reads very well with screen recognition, even better than Windows OCR! In some games, when menus have descriptions, you can tell which menu item you're on by the description of the item at the bottom. With the Provinence app, audio latency is amazingly low with my AirPods Pro 2. So, playing games using those is really, really amazing! No game mode needed! I can't wait for more blind people to get into this! #accessibility #blind #gaming #Provinence #iOS #RetroGames #emulation #emulators

pixelate, 18 days ago to accessibility

Well, this is awkward. I'm having to restart NVDA today, on my laptop, due to WASAPI probably, more than Orca, using Pipewire probably on Fedora 40 Mate spin yesterday.

#accessibility #blind #linux #Windows #NVDA #Orca #linux #foss

pixelate, 19 days ago to accessibility

Anyone ever had to OCR a webpage to find a link? I did today. On a supposedly accessible college site, with nice fluffy captions on tables telling us poor simpleton blink blinks what the table will contain. Well it didn't contain the one link we were looking for! So yeah, thank goodness for OCR.

#accessibility #blind #college

pixelate, 19 days ago to accessibility

Just spent today at work with Linux. Fedora's Mate spin still works well generally, and Orca is much more stable. And, according to Orca, the system never even ran over about 3 of the 16 GB of RAM on that Intel NUC. I set up Emacs and Emacspeak, Firefox, Bitwarden, VS Code, and never even took my laptop out of the bag. Of course, I really miss a lot of NVDA addons, like the OpenAI one, sounds for entering browse and focus modes, and the Thunderbird addon most of all. But I was able to log into, and use, Salesforce and Google Sheets. So now when I get a good workflow with Markdown and such, I think I'll just about, maybe, be able to start using it more. Packages are all up-to-date, Orca will alwasy be current, and hopefully I can one day move to a desktop environment with a proper notification center! Oh, and I'll have to see if Pidgin still takes up more RAM the more I use it.

Note that I still wouldn't expect a regular computer user to get into Linux, as far as setting it up. But, honestly, having the #BTSpeak out on the market makes me hope that more power users and programmers will hammer Linux into more of a shape that blind people can be at home with.

#accessibility #blind #Linux #Fedora #foss #Orca

pixelate, 23 days ago to random

Oh my gosh why can't book stores use freaking headings! One heading per book result! Jesus! Is it that freaking hard?

pixelate, 26 days ago to accessibility

Please boost for reach if this kind of stuff interests you. Will post more on this later.

Once upon a time, there was a cool emulator frontend called Retroarch. This emulator wasn't accessible until I and a few other gamers went to them and asked about adding accessibility. An amazing person known as BarryR made it happen. Now, if you turn on accessibility mode in settings, or pass the "--accessibility" (or something like that) flag on the command line, you get spoken menus, including the emulator's pause menu, good for saving states and such. Then, using PIL and other image processing Python utilities, running a server and hooking into Retroarch, the script allowed players to move around the map, battle, talk to NPC's, ETC. The only problem was, no one wanted to test it. The blind gaming community pretty much spoke, saying that we want new games. We want cool new, easy accessibility. So that's what we have no, follow the beacon or get sighted help in the case of diablo and such. It's sad, but meh. It's what we wanted I guess. No Zelda for us. So, this is about as far as he got:

To expand on what devinprater was saying: I am working on an accessibility pack/service for Final Fantasy 1 for the NES (this was what was shown in the latest RetroArch update). The idea is similar to how Pokemon Crystal access works, but it's using the RetroArch AI Service interface to do so.
Right now, the FF1 access service is mostly done, but I need more testers to try it out and give me feedback on how it's working. Right now, you can get up to the point where you get the ship, but there's no code to deal with how the ship moves, so that still needs to be done. Likewise with the airship later on.
The service works the latest version of RetroArch, on linux and mac, but not windows. This is due to how nvda reads out the text and until the next major update to nvda (which will have a feature to fix this), it'll have to wait. If you have those, I (or maybe devinprater) can help you set it up on mac/linux to test out. The package itself is available at: https://ztranslate.net/download/ff1_pac … zip?owner=

#accessibility #finalFantasy #RetroArch #blind #emulator #emulation #Python #ai #ML #MachineLearning

pixelate, 29 days ago to random

Oh appleInsider, never change.

> While AppClips and Widgets both made their debut later in 2020 with iOS 14, the Wallpaper Collections feature was only introduced with iOS 16 two years later. This serves as an indicator of how careful Apple is when it comes to quality control.

Careful. Right.

pixelate, 1 month ago to random

Do people really just repeat talking points this much?

Person 1:

What Apple's done is also violating antitrust laws, which has gotten them in trouble with the DOJ recently. And it's about time. They are a business, but an abusive anti-competitive one that has serious lock-in that bars competitors from their platform for no good reason other than to make even more money. They also forbid some apps because Apple releases something similar, and they don't want any competition. If they did allow competition they might not have made so much money, but they also wouldn't be the subject of major lawsuits in the US and in the EU.

Person 2: Um, there’s something called Android. No need to be on the Apple platform at all. You can switch to it if you’d like. When I walk into a Tesla dealership I don’t expect to be able to buy a Chevrolet.

Person 1: Um, whataboutism isn't a valid defense with the DOJ. Go read the many counts the DOJ is suing Apple for. It's extensive and points to a systemic problem at Apple stifling competition in many ways. Microsoft lost their antitrust case and they weren't doing 1/2 the shady stuff Apple is doing.

Person 2: You’re right. They make Android bubbles green. The horror.

I mean, LLM's could definitely fill up comment sections with that, lol. Boring.

pixelate, 1 month ago to random

Can someone please turn me into a kitten? I'm tired of being a person.

pixelate, 1 month ago to foss

Okay y'all, I can officially say that Fedora 40 Workstation is inaccessible. After you install the OS, the first start window opens, allowing you to choose a network. I cannot move around in this window. I cannot use Orca commands in this window. Alt + Tab only leads me back to that window. Control + Tab, F6, F10, Super + F10, do nothing.

Linux evangelists may say "Well there are different spins, dude! Use the Mate one, dude!" That's not the point. What do people see when they go to download Fedora? Do they see Mate first? KDE first? No. They see the Fedora 40 Workstation, using the Gnome desktop. Their flagship is not accessible. I cannot say that I'm surprised. I might try the KDE spin next. Or I might just go to Mate where at least I know it can't get any worse than that.

#foss #Linux #accessibility #blind #Linux #Fedora

pixelate, 1 month ago to accessibility

Hey, just clone the Github repo, I thought.
Just edit one simple file, I thought.
Dude, you can surely add an accessibility label to that one button, it's easy, I thought.

Nope. There are contributor guidelines. There are tons of files, and maybe a storyboard I probably can't access on Windows. Ugh. I need to start with actually small things lol.

https://github.com/rileytestut/Delta

#accessibility #blind

pixelate, 1 month ago to accessibility

Honestly, since the fast variants of the voices are a thing, I think I could really switch to the Sonata Neural Voices in NVDA full time. Now remember folks, these are AI voices. Scary, untrustworthy, AI voices that will smear your reputation all over fedi for using these voices! See, they even react to exclamation marks! Isn't that scary? :) Nah, the worst that'll happen, mainly with the HFC male and female, is that big numbers are garbled together. But every other voice does fine. I use Amy for work, and HFC for reading because those are among the most lively voices I've ever heard. And amazingly enough, we can make our own new voices. So, some people, from the Github repo's readme, are building more professional voices. And there are already versions of old TTS engines from the past that have been brought back to some semblence of life with this tech.

#accessibility #tts #ai #blind

pixelate, 1 month ago to random

New Piper TTS NVDA addon! https://github.com/mush42/sonata-nvda

pixelate, 1 month ago to rant

Okay, so I get that news is mostly for non-technical people. I get it. But my goodness, can we not get a little better than "6 rumored iPhone 16 camera upgrades?" The camera? Again, and again, and again! Like is that all people think about? #rant

pixelate, 1 month ago to random

Kittens

pixelate, 1 month ago to emacs

got the Windows Emacspeak server working thanks to @tspivey, I think it didn't like Windows-style paths but who knows which thing fixed it. Anyway, it talks. But it's still very early development and I just wanna use a nice interface for a while so I'm gonna like, not worry about that for like a while. Gonna play a fun game when I get home from work and ain't nobody gonna stop me. I know I should do this stuff more often, to get more used to it because I need to do this more and test stuff more, but goodness my brain feels all stretched out now.

#Emacs #Emacspeak #Windows #accessibility #blind

pixelate, 1 month ago to emacs

Awww, tried to make the new Emacspeak speech server for Windows, and got this. Maybe I need an older dotnet SDK? I'm not sure.

Determining projects to restore...
C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpwin\SharpWin.csproj : warning NU1604: Project dependency System.Speech does not contain an inclusive lower bound. Include
a lower bound in the dependency version to ensure consistent restore results. [C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpwin\SharpWin.sln]
C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpwin\SharpWin.csproj : error NU1100: Unable to resolve 'NAudio (>= 2.2.1)' for 'net8.0'. [C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sha
rpwin\SharpWin.sln]
C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpwin\SharpWin.csproj : error NU1100: Unable to resolve 'NVorbis (>= 0.10.5)' for 'net8.0'. [C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\s
harpwin\SharpWin.sln]
C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpwin\SharpWin.csproj : error NU1100: Unable to resolve 'System.Speech ' for 'net8.0'. [C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpw
in\SharpWin.sln]
Failed to restore C:\Users\devin\Nextcloud\src\sharpwin\SharpWin.csproj (in 104 ms).

https://github.com/robertmeta/sharpwin

#Emacs #Emacspeak #Windows #accessibility #blind

pixelate, 1 month ago to accessibility

An Emacspeak speech server for Windows! No, I've not got this working yet, this was released just today.

https://github.com/robertmeta/sharpwin

#accessibility #Emacs #emacspeak #blind #Windows