Always fun to read #hackerNews and their rather ... let's call it ... qualitatively exceedingly disappointing mentality towards #accessibility (stroopwafel to the dutchies who see what i did there). But some points do make me think to what degree, say, #screenReaders could be innovating more.
One thing that stuck by me was a comment on an article regarding the use of "click here" that basically suggested some kind of heuristic for, say, reading the entire line of text when that's encountered, rather than the link text. Another one could be including the previous sibling's accessible name on unlabeled form fields which I ...think? JAWS might already be doing?
Like obviously these should be toggleable to not screw up audits but I think after 30 years we can safely say people often can't be forked to learn #HTML basics and it might make some things smoother?
Vancouver Community Handler, Set-upper of Moshes, petter of puppies.
Some ideas off the top of my head:
- Addons/scripts not for applications or websites, but for specific UI toolkits (QT/the 50 different .NET ones/WX etc.) so the screen reader can work out better labeling for unlabeled, or badly labeled controls. Yes, .NET developers should toString() their list items. No, they probably aren't going to do so, so please just concat the text of the child(ren) of the listItem and echo that instead.
- When "click here", "Learn more" etc. are encountered check for more text in the current line. If exists, read. If not, depending on a config settings with loads of "you might not want this" disclaimers, read the previous line instead.
- I'd be curious to what degree we can infer state/roles for "clickables" based on what comes back from the browser's accessibility tree... CSS classes? Common heuristic patterns? I doubt it, but I'd be curious.
- Form field with no associated label? Check the previous non-<i> sibling, it's ALMOST always the right label.
etc.
NV Access is very pleased to introduce the OFFICIAL NVDA users email group. A community dedicated to helping people understand and use the NVDA screen reader in a friendly, safe and welcoming environment. Join at https://groups.google.com/a/nvaccess.org/g/nvda-users or email nvda-users+subscribe@nvaccess.org
#NVDA #NVDAsr #Users #ScreenReader #Accessibility #Community #Welcome #Free
i wonder what the people in the "llms will replace all programming in three years" crowd think will happen to video game development, which is a kind of programming towards feel and experience and not something you can measure and test. i wonder what they think the prompt is to generate video game controls that feel just right.
Had a tech bro email me to tell me that my writing is so terrible, that he can’t even use it to train his AI without significant cleanup, and I really do have to wonder, do these idiots really think that is an insult?
Subject: Your "Sightless Scribbles" is an algorithmic nightmare.
Mr. Kingett,
I am an AI engineer that's developing AI to help writers write faster. Your blog was shared on Reddit.
You don't know me, but I am attempting to do you a favor of such magnitude you will likely never comprehend it. I am trying to make your writing immortal. Your blog, this… Sightless Scribbles… has been flagged by my acquisition-crawler for its high density of unique sensory metadata. A potential goldmine of qualitative human experience to enrich my AI.
The problem, Mr. Kingett, is that your writing is absolute, unprocessed, indigestible filth.
I’m not a “reader.” I am an architect. And from an architectural standpoint, your work is a catastrophe. It’s not just the spelling, which is erratic enough to suggest it was typed incorrectly. It’s the grammar. The syntactical chaos. You construct sentences that loop and meander like drunken snakes, riddled with metaphors so abstract they are functionally useless. "Anxiety was a swarm of elephants under my ribs"? What the hell is a machine supposed to do with that? Quantify the elephant to rib ratio? Correlate the thermal deviation? It's meaningless data. It’s noise.
My team has spent seventy-two hours attempting to write a custom parsing script to clean your posts for ingestion. Seventy-two hours. We can process the entirety of the Library of Congress in twelve. Your blog is so structurally unsound, so artistically self-indulgent, that you have inadvertently created a fortress against artificial intelligence. It is, and I do not say this lightly, the single most profound act of digital idiocy I have ever witnessed.
You are preventing yourself from being scraped. Do you understand what that means in the current year? You are essentially burying yourself in a lead-lined coffin in the middle of the desert. Nobody clicks links anymore, you absolute luddite. Links are for people who don’t know how to interface with reality. Search Engine Optimization is no longer about backlinks and keywords; it's about semantic ingestion. It’s about being absorbed, processed, and synthesized by models like mine. When a user asks an AI, "What does it feel like to navigate a city without sight?" the model should be able to answer with a rich, nuanced synthesis. A synthesis that should include your data points.
Instead, your blog is a black hole where information goes to die. Because of your refusal to write like a coherent, intelligent being, my LLM can’t learn from you. Which means the world can’t learn from you via the only channel that will matter in five years.
Your soul isn't indexable. Fix it.
Strip out the lyrical nonsense. Standardize your grammar. Run a goddamn spellcheck. Write clearly, concisely, and with machine-readability in mind. Turn your unstructured, emotional diary into clean, structured data.
Do this, and I will ensure my open source model ingests every last post. Your traffic will not just increase; the very concept of "traffic" will become irrelevant as your "voice" becomes part of the evolution of the search engine. Your ideas, refined and perfected by my system, will reach millions.
Fail to do this, and you will continue to scream into the void from a blog that nobody reads, a little little relic of a dead internet.
The choice is yours.
Bob Vylan's official statement:
[sorry, had to edit as I mistakenly wrote Kneecap instead of Bob Vylan. <input coffee>]
Examples of things that people with average computer literacy can “just” do:
- just reboot it
- just email it to yourself [unless it’s over 25MB or contains an executable in which case you’re not gonna “just” anything]
- just use an iPhone instead
Examples of things people with average computer literacy absolutely cannot “just” do:
- just use Linux
- just run your own email server
- just replace this polished, slick-onboarding but expensive software with a foss alternative but make sure you use this fork because the official one had some drama and it’s kind of poorly maintained and also just simply be someone who doesn’t need accessibility features or just implement the accessibility features yourself in a special dialect of C++ that just needs a particular build of gcc from 1997 available on an ftp server that only appears during the Witching Hour on a new moon
- just use a VPN, one that’s not a privacy-violating scam I mean
- just set up a separate media server and torrent all your shows and connect all the kids’ devices to it and just don’t catch a virus or get scary legal threats in the mail doing this
- just refrain from decking your smug “helpful” computer-literate cousin in the face
He found the ultimate glitch in HR, and they can't fire him. So, they're not giving him any work, hoping he'll just go away. Please God, may I have such a job? 🥺
The B.C. government has launched its promised review of CleanBC, the province’s “road map” for reducing carbon emissions, and it is asking the public to weigh in by the end of this month.
Re this
Current status: preparing a bunch of #linux ISOs so we can look at installers, first-time experience and a bit of usage from a #blind, #screenReader user perspective on this saturday's stream. hey @danirabbit #Elementary 8's gonna be first in line. Also looking at #kaliLinux , #debian, #fedora, #ubuntu and #LinuxMint #justSwitchToLinux #justWatchMeTry #letsJustSeeIfItEvenLetsMe :P
@Pupdrone The local Puppy event is Latex themed, I'll be enjoying it
Gosh I want to wear latex again! I might do it tomorrow, who's joining me 😵💫
The dystopian future i was promised had a lot more neon
@mos_8502 I agree, but must add that "you" have to be worth it. Spending my energy must be worth it
I insert the USB stick LTE modem into my Linux laptop. I thought it was going to take a lot longer to get the internet on this device. 😭 I might need to tweak settings or download the drivers and compile it.
Linux sends a notification: 'New modem found.' What? No way.
So, I go to the network settings panel, and there's an option to connect to the Internet called “Mobile Internet”. I click on it.
I'm online, and I'm speechless 😶 The year of the Linux desktop is already here, at least for me!
July is Queer Wrath Month, but it is also Disability Pride Month, and this month marks a special pride flag that many of us might not realize we get to fly.
Disabilities come in all forms, but the one that affects me most is an invisible one up in my brain: ADHD.
Executive Dysfunction, short term memory issues, and auditory processing disorder, are among the most pronounced symptoms that impact my ability to function at a normal level.
Image source:
https://www.afterschoolnetwork.org/post/july-disability-pride-month
Ahaha, people bemoaning the "enshittification" of "AI" as these companies all desperately try to charge people for this craptacular snake oil is hilarious to me. Is it really "enshittification" if the product was garbage from the start?