//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog
<name>devinprater</name>
<title>Random Updates</title>
<updated>2021-10-17T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-10-17:/gemlog/2021-10-17.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Random Updates

Just some random, more personal updates.

## New Mastodon Instance

I now have my own instance. "There can't be a safe space on the Internet" my big fat ass. I guess if you're not the owner of an instance there can't be, but about $6 a month is a small price to pay for a space where I can be myself and not just a subset of myself. @devinprater@devin.masto.host is where I post now. I think it'll be a good home moving forward.

It's still a new instance, and so hasn't federated with all the ones I remember from the dragon's cave, but it serves its purpose. I don't know if I have all the followers from there on here. But I don't care. The people who give a damn will find me.

## A Chromebook

We got a bit more equipment at work a few weeks ago, one of which is a new Chromebook. I got to take it home, and I've installed Linux, and some Android apps, on it. It works pretty well, as it should with 16 GB RAM and some Intel processor.

</content>
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<title>On the stagnation of screen readers</title>
<updated>2021-10-14T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-10-14:/gemlog/2021-10-14.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># On the stagnation of screen readers

## October 14

If you have sight, imagine that in every digital interface, the visuals are beamed directly into your eyes, into the center and peripheral vision, blocking out much else, and demanding your attention. All "visuals" are mostly text, with a few short animations every once in a while, and only on some interfaces. You can't move it, unless you want to move everything else, like videos and games. You can't put it in front of you, to give you a little space to think and consider what you're reading. You can't put it behind you. You can make it softer, though, but there comes a point where it's too soft and blurry to see.

Also imagine that there is a form of art that 95% of other humans can produce and consume, but for you is either blank or filled with meaningless letters and numbers ending in .JPEG, .PNG, .BMP, or other computer jargon, and the only way to perceive it is to humbly ask that the image is converted to the only form of input your digital interface can understand, straight, plain text. This same majority of people have access to everything digital technology has to offer. You, though, have access to very little in comparison. Your interface cannot interpret anything that isn't created in a standards-compliant way. And this culture, full of those who need to stand out, doesn't like standards.

There is, though, a digital interface built by Apple which uses machine learning to try to understand this art, but that's Apple only, and they love control too much to share that with other interfaces on other company's systems. And there are open source machine learning models, but the people that could use it are too busy fixing their interface to work with breaks in operating system behaviour and UI bugs to research that. Or you could pay $1099, or $100 per year, for an interface that can describe the art, by sending it to online services of course, and get a tad bit more beauty from the pervasive drab, plain text.

Now, you can lessen the problem of eye strain, blocked out noise, and general information fatigue by using a kind of projector, but other people see it too, and it's very annoying to those who don't need this interface, with its bright, glaring lights, moving quickly, dizzyingly fast. It moves in a straight line, hypnotically predictable, but you must keep up, you must understand. Your job relies on it. You rely on it for everything else too. You could save up for one of those expensive interfaces that show things more like print on a page... if the page had only one small line and was rather slow to read, but even that is dull. No font, no true headings, no beauty. Just plain, white on black text, everywhere. Lifeless. Without form and void. Deformed and desolate. Still, it would make reading a little easier, even if it is slower. But you don't want to be a burden to others or annoy them, and you've gotten so used to the close, direct, heavy mode of the less disruptive output that you're almost great at it. But is that the best for you? Is that all technology can do? Can we not do better?

----------------

This is what blind people deal with every day. From the ATM to the desktop workstation, screen readers output mono, flat, immovable, unchanging, boring speech. There is no HRTF for screen readers. Only one can describe images without needing to send them to online services. Only a few more can describe images at all. TalkBack, a mobile screen reader for Android, and ChromeVox, the screen reader on Chromebooks, can't even detect text in images, let alone describe images. All of them read from top to bottom, left to right, unless they are told otherwise. And they have to be specifically told about everything, or it's not there. We can definitely do better than this.</content>
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<title>Digging into TalkBack's source code</title>
<updated>2021-10-11T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-10-11:/gemlog/2021-10-11.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Digging into TalkBack's source code

## Braille

### October 11, 2021

For a while now, I've been curious about which platform's accessibility is, at its foundation, more secure, more "future proof", and better able to be extended. Today, I'm looking into the TalkBack source code that is currently on Github, which I cloned just today. I'll go through the source, to see if I can find anything interesting.



First of all, according to this file:

=> https://github.com/google/talkback/blob/master/braille\src\main\java\com\google\android\accessibility\braille\service\translate\LouisTranslation.java#L2

This whole project was started in 2015. Of course, we then have this one:

=> https://github.com/google/talkback/blob/master/braille\src\main\java\com\google\android\accessibility\braille\service\translate\TranslateUtils.java#L2

Which shows that it is copyright 2020. The first just seems to wrap Liblouis in Java, but what about this one?

Ah, it seems to be the thing that translates the table files and such into Java things. So that's kind of where the Braille keyboard gets its backend. Now let's look at the front-end.

=> https://github.com/google/talkback/blob/master/brailleime\src\main\java\com\google\android\accessibility\brailleime\analytics\BrailleAnalytics.java#L1

So, this was made in 2019. I do like seeing that they have been working on this stuff. Now, here, we have:

/** Stub implementation of analytics used by the open source variant. */

Yeah, figured I wouldn't get much out of this file.

Now here's where we might just get something:

=> https://github.com/google/talkback/blob/master/brailleime\src\main\java\com\google\android\accessibility\brailleime\dialog\ContextMenuDialog.java#L4

This part was made in 2020. When they need to crank out a feature, they really get rolling. I just hope they give us a good few features *this* year.

Oh, now this is pretty considerate, a dialog will show if the Braille keyboard is opened and TalkBack is off:

=> https://github.com/google/talkback/blob/master/brailleime\src\main\java\com\google\android\accessibility\brailleime\dialog\TalkBackOffDialog.java#L27

And one for if a device doesn't support enough touch points (like an iPhone!):

=> https://github.com/google/talkback/blob/master/brailleime\src\main\java\com\google\android\accessibility\brailleime\dialog\TooFewTouchPointsDialog.java#L26

Okay, so this next one seems to allow the braille keyboard to grab braille from a file, then turn it into something else:

=> https://github.com/google/talkback/blob/master/brailleime\src\main\java\com\google\android\accessibility\brailleime\input\AutoPerformer.java#L51

This could lead to a sort of substitutions list, or spell checking or braille correction facility.

Ah, now this:

=> https://github.com/google/talkback/blob/master/brailleime\src\main\java\com\google\android\accessibility\brailleime\input\BrailleInputPlane.java#L53

is a good summary of the interface. Also yeah, looks like lots of geometry.

Okay, this part is rather interesting:

/** Reads saved points from SharedPreference. */

So, does that mean it can remember where I most put my fingers for typing?

And here's the jackpot:

https://github.com/google/talkback/blob/master/brailleime\src\main\java\com\google\android\accessibility\brailleime\keyboardview\KeyboardView.java#L29

Here, we learn how Google is working around explore by Touch to give a braille keyboard that bypasses TalkBack's own touch interaction model.

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<title>On recent Apple events: putting our eggs in baskets we can't see</title>
<updated>2021-10-08T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-10-08:/gemlog/2021-10-08.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># On recent Apple events: putting our eggs in baskets we can't see

A few weeks ago, Apple's app review team dropped the ball by refusing to allow an update to a Hangman game for blind people, which eventually got resolved after tech news sites posted about it. About a week ago, we learned that Apple had disabled a few Siri commands that are important for blind people, and people in general even, that prefer to use Siri for checking voicemail, email, and missed calls. That too was reversed, as once Apple said that it was to get blind people to use VoiceOver. Now they say it'll be fixed in the coming weeks and months.

=> https://www.applevis.com/forum/accessibility-advocacy/apples-app-review-team-accessible-hangman Story about the Hangman game 

=> https://www.macrumors.com/2021/09/29/siri-changes-features-removed/ Disabled Siri commands

This post isn't a hate letter to Apple, although these two events were the straw that broke, and made me decide to deal with Android if it means having something I can loosely control. This is to remind myself, and the blind community, and anyone else who cares to read it, that if we depend on Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and other big tech companies, we depend on people who, for the most part, care nothing for us.

## It's mostly our fault

As a community, we blind people seem, to me, more eager than most to lean on anything that claims to help us. Whether it be free government assistance or built-in screen readers and voice assistants from big corporations, we put our livelihoods into the hands of these people. Then stuff like this happens, or money mismanagement strikes government agencies, or good people quit, leaving us with poor replacements or unsteady leadership, or one careless ending to a feature leaves people with reduced functionality, and we're tempted to place all the blame on the people in power. And we should rightfully let them know our concerns.

When Assistive Technology instructors or service providers get calls throughout the week from elderly people, asking "What did I do wrong?" "What did I break?" Well, that's a problem. But then, we should ask ourselves: "Why did this happen? Why is it that these people rely on Siri, rely on Apple?"

We have placed all of our technical hope into a few big corporations. Of course, there's also Humanware, Freedom Scientific, and other such companies who thrive off of selling out-of-date technology at a very high price. And they're part of the problem too. But so many of us rely on Apple. So many of us use an iPhone as our *only* computer. Sighted people can get away with it because the big problems for them are usually visual issues or minor functionality problems. If we only use an iPhone for our job, though, the sometimes major issues could mean the difference between being able to confidently do a job, or finding so many workarounds that we aren't even competent at the job anymore.

So, why not just use VoiceOver? Why use Siri for all that? Because elderly people don't need all of the functionality on an iPhone, and shouldn't *have* to learn touch screen commands that, through bad memory or unsteady hands, they may not even be able to do. To ask them to use VoiceOver instead of the thing that has worked for them for years, is near the peak of privileged behavior, and should not be tolerated. But these are supposed accessibility experts, or Apple experts, representing a top tech company full of supposedly smart people. Surely they know what they're talking about, right? Right?

## A hard solution

We need to build for ourselves. No one else will do it for us. We see this in so many areas, like the lack of a great and wonderful braille experience, which for now, across all operating systems, is bland, with no spatial separation for paragraphs and headings, and no formatting. We don't even have formatting info through speech changes, something the Emacspeak audio desktop has had for decades now, although Narrator is trying, but constrained by the rigid text-to-speech engine used. I know we can't affect services like Uber, Lyft, Walmart, Amazon, and other apps and sites. But the operating system and tools we use should work with us, and for us; never should they work against us. And more and more, as these big companies realize that they have us on their hook, that they've reeled us in, they'll take away what we need, whether by accident or on purpose. They take our freedom to do what we want with our devices day by day, some companies more than others. And yes, while Apple does give us image descriptions and stuff like that, we could do the same thing with open source Python libraries and tools if we wanted. We just have to stop giving ourselves away, and either make these companies work for our money again, or make stuff ourselves, so we never are beholden, and trapped under, them again.

## What can we do?

As users, we can vote with our dollars. We can use more open platforms, like Android, Windows, and ChromeOS, and give feedback to these companies, rewarding them for giving us the option to use something other than what they allow on the device. We can give money to NV Access and other blind creators of software. We can raise awareness on social networks about how we use more open platforms, and what we can do with them. And, we can encourage the many talented blind developers by openly supporting, and funding, any of their work to create helpful, open software. If we can pay for Apple Music, Apple news, Apple Fitness Plus, and Apple Airpods Max, we can afford to give blind developers much more than what they get now. We could give NV Access enough money to hire a developer to work on a great braille experience, for example. Or a few Android developers to work on improvements to TalkBack, adding Braille support and improving its features.

Now, I know there aren't many of us, and even less blind people with money. But I'll begin doing my part, donating even more to NV Access when I have a bit more money, since I've canceled all Apple subscriptions. It's time we have a say in the technology that means the most to us. It's time we expect more from developers, from ourselves, and much less from big companies who hide in the shadows and expect us to hold them up. No more of that.

</content>
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<title>Response to "Why Linux Is More Accessible Than Windows and MacOS"</title>
<updated>2021-09-16T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-09-16:/gemlog/2021-09-16.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Response to "Why Linux Is More Accessible Than Windows and MacOS"

Today, I came across an article called "Why Linux Is More Accessible Than Windows and macOS". Here, I will give responses to each point of the article. While I applaud the author's wish to promote Linux, I think the points given are rather shallow and very general in nature, and could be given about any computing operating system comparison.

=> https://www.makeuseof.com/why-linux-is-more-accessible-than-windows-macos/ (http): Article: Why Linux Is More Accessible Than Windows and macOS

## 1. The Power of Customization

In this section, the author argues that, while closed source systems do have accessibility options, people with disabilities, (who the author calls "differently abled, which some people with disabilities would consider ableism due to the fact of differently abled feeling more like inspiration porn), have to compromise on what modifications they can make to their closed source operating systems. This can be true, but from my experience using MacOS, Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux, closed source systems have a wider community of people with disabilities using them, thus have addons and extensions to allow for as few compromises to the user's experience as possible.

Another point that must be kept in mind is that Linux is not the most user-friendly OS yet. The modifications that can be made with Linux are more than in MacOS and Windows, yes. But I, for example, want to hold down the Space bar and have that register as holding the Control key. I probably cannot do that in Windows and MacOS. I surely can do it in Linux, but it would take a lot of learning about key codes and how to change keyboard maps throughout the console and X/Wayland sessions. The GUI will not provide this ability. The best I can do with the GUI is change Capslock to Control.

Also, let's say a new user installs a distribution like Fedora Linux, and needs a screen reader, or any accessibility service. The user has done a little homework, so knows to turn on Orca with Alt + Super + S. The user then launches firefox from the "run application" dialog. And it doesn't work. Nothing reads. Or the user runs a media player, and gets the same result. Why is this? I'll spare you the arduous digging needed to find the answer. In the personalization menu of a desktop's system menu, or in the Assistive Technologies dialog, there is a checkbox which needs to be checked in order to even enablethe assistive technology to work correctly with the rest of the system. The user has to know that it's there, how to get to it in the chosen desktop environment, and has to know how to check the box and close the dialog. This, before even doing anything else with their system.

This means that, out of the box, on almost all Linux distributions, this one key shows that the Linux GUI, by nature of needing this box to be checked, is hostile to people with disabilities. Can distribution maintainers check this box by default? Yes. Do they? No. Does this box even need to be there? No. Assistive Technologies could be enabled by default, with advanced users, after receiving warning in comments of a configuration file, able to disable it, only via changing the configuration file.

## 2. Linux Is Stable and Reliable

About fifteen minutes ago, I was using Gmail within the latest Google Chrome on Fedora Linux. Suddenly, the screen reader, Orca, stopped responding as I tried to move to the next heading in an email. I switched windows, and nothing happened. I got speech back in a good 20 seconds, but that shows that Linux isn't quite as stable as the author may believe. At least, not every distribution.

My experience is my own; I do not claim to be an expert in Linux usage or administration. But this is still my experience; while Linux is stable, and I can use it for work purposes, it is not as stable, especially in the accessibility department, as Windows or MacOS. I would say, though, that it is more usable than MacOS, where just about anything in Safari, the web browser, results in Safari going unresponsive for a good five seconds or more.

Another important point is that while many developers hammer away at the core of Linux, how many people maintain ATSPI, the Linux bridge between programs and accessibility services? How many people make sure the screen reader is as lean and performant as possible? How many people make sure that GTK is as quick to give information on accessibility as it is to draw an image? How many people make sure that when a user starts a desktop, that focus is set somewhere sensible so that a screen reader reads something besides "window"? My point is, open source is full of people that work on what they want to work on. If a developer isn't personally impacted by accessibility needs, that developer is much less likely to code with accessibility in mind. So let's stop kidding ourselves into thinking that overall work on Linux includes even half the needed work on accessibility specifically.

While Linux's accessibility crawls towards betterment at about one fix per month or two, Windows and MacOS have actual teams of people working specifically on accessibility, and a community of disabled developers working on third-party solutions to any remaining problems. Do all the problems get fixed? No, especially not in MacOS. But the fact that the more eyes on a problem there are, the more things get noticed applies significantly to accessibility.

## 3. Linux Runs on Older Hardware

This section is one I can agree with completely. Linux running on old hardware is what will drive further adoption when Windows 11 begins getting more features than Windows 10. This is even more important for people with disabilities, who usually have much less money than people without disabilities, so cannot upgrade computers every year, or even every three or five years.

## 4. Linux Offers Complete Control to the Users

This is true if the user is an advanced Linux user. If the user is just starting out with Linux, or even just starting out with computers in general, it is very false. How would it feel to be trapped in a place without a gate, without walls, without doors, without windows? That's how a new computer user would feel when dealing with Linux, especially if the person is blind, and thus needs to know how to use the keyboard, what the words the speech is saying mean, what all the terminology means, but not even knowing where the Space bar is, or even how to turn the computer on.

This is a huge issue for every operating system, but was somewhat solved by MacOS by adding a wonderful tutorial for VoiceOver, its screen reader, and guiding the user to turn it on when the computer starts, without the user having to touch a single key.

As for this piece:

> On the other hand, Linux shares every line of code with the user, providing complete control and ownership over the platform. You can always try new technologies on Linux, given its inherent nature, compatibility, and unending support for each of its distros.

This is practically wrong. First, new Linux users won't understand the code that Linux "shares" with them. New Linux users will not know where to look to find this code. So, this really doesn't help them. Open source or closed, the OS is going to be a black box to any new user. And new users are what count. If new users do not want to stay on Linux, they will not spend the time to become old users, who can then teach newer users. Also, good luck trying new technologies on Debian.

## Accessibility Comparison Between Linux and Windows

Here, the author compares a few access methods. A thing the author calls "screen reader" on Linux, which I hope they know is called Orca, versus Windows Narrator, the worst option, but built in.

The author doesn't mention NVDA on Windows, which is far more powerful than Narrator, and has several addons to enhance its functionality even further. One can add many different "voice modules" to Windows, and NVDA has plenty of addon voice modules as well, many of which are not a part of Linux, like DecTalk, Softvoice, and Acapela TTS.

## Accessible-Coconut: An Accessible Linux Distribution

I'm going to be blunt here: this distribution is daded off of an old, LTS version of Ubuntu, will lack the latest version of Orca, ATSPI, GTK, and everything else. If you want something approaching good, try Slint Linux. That's about the most user-friendly distribution for the blind out there right now. Fedora's Mate spin is what I use, but Orca doesn't come on at startup, and neither is assistive technology support enabled. 

## Linux Distros Cater to Every User Type

This summary continues the points expressed in the article, and ends with the author inviting "you" to try Linux if "you" want your computer to be more accessible. I suppose the author is pointing people to try Accessible Coconut. At this point, I would rather users do a ton of reading about Linux, the command line, Orca, all the accessibility documentation they can find, try Windows Subsystem for Linux, and then, if they want more, put Linux on a separate hard drive and try it that way. I would definitely start with Slint, or Fedora, but never with a lackluster distro like Accessible Coconut.</content>
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<title>Searching for a Safe Space</title>
<updated>2021-08-31T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-08-31:/gemlog/2021-08-31.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Searching for a Safe Space

Content: personal

At least one person has wanted me to go more into detail about why I've left a simple, mainly left-leaning Mastodon instance, and gone over to a free-for-all free speech instance, where I've actually seen a pedophilia status. I hope it was a joke. Good thing there's a block functions. So, here, I'll explain it, as best I can.

I am not always a happy person. Sometimes, I'm a very depressed person. Sometimes, I even dance around thoughts of suicide. It doesn't last forever. But one thing that always helps is human interaction, like that on Mastodon. All the wonderful people I've met there and interacted with, all those wonderful, beautiful people. The people I felt safe with. The people that made me smile and laugh. And now...

## A few months ago

Mayana (@mayana@dragonscave.space) is the instance moderator (one of them at least) who runs dragonscave.space, the instance I was on. (just setting things up) and a few months ago, work became a lot more hectic than usual. I've gotten more used to it now, so things are better, slightly. I was quite depressed during this time, so posted about it. I didn't care really if anyone replied or opened the content warning or not. All I cared about was that I was reading things from people I cared about, and communicating. Getting myself out of my head for once.

Mayana, seriously thinking she was helping, told me to see a therapist, privately. This made me feel as though I shouldn't talk about my feelings, coming from an instance moderator especially. I still did, sometimes, kinda forgetting what happened because lovely people and safe feelings. Mayana did apologize for this yesterday, but by that time, it barely meant anything. I still accept it, though.

## Yesterday (the breaking point)

Now, we come to yesterday, when I woke up to a message from Mayana stating that I shouldn't publically talk about my sexual kinks. I won't list them here, because I plan on posting this to my old instance to settle things and move on. But they're pretty out there as far as Southern United States standards are concerned. And, aparently, for others too. I don't know if my kink posts were actually seen as disturbing for others on the instance, or if that was a worry of the moderators. But that's the reason they gave. It wasn't in their rules, because they thought they wouldn't need it. I'm glad at least that no future occupant of the instance will come in expecting to be able to show their complete self.

And this is where the cold, empty void of displaced feeling and betrayal and hurt happens. Imagine a place where you felt like you've finally found home. Imagine somewhere that, for the first time in your life, you may have found people who could stomach the sight of you; actually enjoying your company. Imagine settling in and getting familiar with the place. Then, well, some one gently lets you know that you cannot show your entire self here anymore. To enter this place again, you'll have to leave parts of yourself at the door.

Because only the clean or interesting parts of me are worthy, I suppose. The blind person, the accessibility advocate, maybe even the food lover. But the darkness and the sexuality, well, no. That must stay out in the wild, in the untamed parts of the federation where the undesirables to.

## Extreme free speech

So, that morning, a friend recommended a free speech instance. I had reservations at first, because I'm sure few instances federate with it. By the afternoon, though, I was wondering "why not? If the 'civilized' world doesn't want me, why not go there. After all, if I don't go to a free speech instance, if I just switch to another one, what else will people have a problem with? My 'radical' accessibility advocacy? My kinks? The fact that I don't have a profile picture?" So, I decided to go with it. Who knows, though. Maybe I'll just quit the federation altogether and just post here every once in a while. It would probably result in the same amount of human interaction anyway. Thankfully, I'm on a few Telegram groups with other blind people that actually enjoy talking about just about anything, so maybe my human interaction can come from there. But all the people I've met on the feddiverse... I'll miss them deeply. All the wonderful people. But I must move on. If I am not wanted in all of myself, why should I stay and be hurt further?</content>
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<title>Analyzing the Windows 11 Accessibility Announcement</title>
<updated>2021-07-08T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-07-08:/gemlog/2021-07-08.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Analyzing the Windows 11 Accessibility Announcement

Microsoft announced Windows 11 a few weeks ago, and, from my searches at least, *still* doesn't have an audio described version of the announcement. Update: there's one now. Anyways, they also released a post on their Windows blog about how Windows 11 was going to be the most accessible, inclusive, amazing, delightful thing ever! So, I thought I'd analyze it heading by heading to try to figure out what's fluff and what's actual new stuff worthy of announcement.

=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoYjMG5_UrA Youtube link to the described version of the announcement
=> https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/07/01/whats-coming-in-windows-11-accessibility/ What's Coming in Windows 11 Accessibility

## Beyond possible, efficient and yes, delightful

So, they're trying to reach what the CEO in his book "hit refresh," called the "delightful" experience he wanted to work towards. His gist was that Windows was pretty much required now, but he wanted to make it delightful. Well, the only user interface that is delightful to me is Emacspeak. MacOS and iOS come close. What makes them delightful are a few things: sound and quality speech and parameter changes. I won't go over all that here, my site has plenty on all that already. But it's safe to say that Microsoft isn't going near that anytime soon.

Instead of trying to offload cognitive strain from parsing speech all day, they put even more on it. Microsoft Edge has "page loading. Loading complete." Teams has similar textual descriptions of what's going on. And while I appreciate knowing what's going on, speech takes a second to happen, be heard, and be processed. Sound happens a lot quicker, and over time, a blind user can get pretty good at recognizing what's going on. But whenever I brought this up to the VS Code team, they said something about not having the ability to add sounds, so they'd have to drag in some other dependency, so they'd have to bring that up with the team and all that. Well, they won't become the most delightful editor for the blind any time soon. Just the most easy to use.

And, while this *is* partly the fault of screen reader developers who just won't focus on sound or speech parameter changes for text formatting and such like that, Microsoft could be leading the way in that with Narrator. And yeah, they've got a few sounds, and their voices can change a *little* for text formatting, but their TTS is just too limited to make it really flexible and enjoyable. Instead of changing pitch, rate, and entonation, they change pitch, rate, and volume, and sometimes it's jarring, like the volume changes. But there's not really much else they can do with their current technology. I guess they'll have to maybe change the speech synthesis engine a bit, if they're even able to. In the past six years, I've not seen any new, or better, first-party voices for US English for Windows. Sure, they have their online voices, which are rather good, but they haven't shown any inclination to bring that quality to Windows OneCore Voices.

People fall asleep listening to Microsoft David. He's boring and should *not* be the default voice. While this is anecdotal, I've heard quite a few complaints about it, and if you listen to him for a long time, you'd probably get bored too. This is seriously not a good look, or rather, sound, for people who are newly blind and learning to use a computer without sight, or someone who doesn't know that there are other voices, or even if Microsoft wants to demonstrate Narrator to people who haven't used it before. And while NVDA users can use a few other voices, the defaults should really be good enough. Apple has had the Alex voice for years. Over *ten* years, in fact. He's articulate, can parse sentences and clauses at a time, allowing him to intone very close to the way humans speak, with context. He's also not the most lively voice, but he sounds professional. And, Alex is the default voice on MacOS. David, on Windows, just sounds bored. And so blind people, particularly those used to Siri and VoiceOver from iOS, just plain fall asleep. It's nowhere *near* delightful.

## Windows 11 is the most inclusively designed version of Windows

Okay, sure. Even though from what I've heard from everyone else, it's just the next release of Windows 10. But sure, hype it up, Microsoft, and watch the users be disappointed when they figure out that, yeah, it's the same old bullcrap. Bullcrap that works okay, yeah, but still bullcrap.

> People who are blind, and everyone, can enjoy new sound schemes. Windows 11 includes delightful Windows start-up and other sounds, including different sounds for more accessible Light and Dark Themes. People with light sensitivity and people working for extended periods of time can enjoy beautiful color themes, including new Dark themes and reimagined High Contrast Themes. The new Contrast Themes include aesthetically pleasing, customizable color combinations that make apps and content easier to see.

Okay, cool, new sounds. But are there more sounds? Are there sounds for animations? Are there sounds for when copying or other processes complete? Are there sounds that VS Code and other editors can use? Are there sounds for when auto-correct or completion suggestions appear? Are their sounds for when an app launches in the background, or a system dialog appears? Are there sounds for when windows flash to get users' attention?

> And, multiple sets of users can enjoy Windows Voice Typing, which uses state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to recognize speech, transcribe and automatically punctuate text. People with severe arthritis, repetitive stress injuries, cerebral palsy and other mobility related disabilities, learning differences including with severe spelling disabilities, language learners and people that prefer to write with their voice can all enjoy Voice Typing.

Um, yeah, this has been on Windows for years. Windows + H. I know. I get it.

> Ultimately, everyone can enjoy Windows’ simplified design and user experience. It is modern, fresh, clean and beautiful.

Okay, but is it fresh, clean and beautiful for screen readers? Are there background sounds to help us focus, or maybe support for making graphs audible for blind people, or support for describing images offline? Oh wait, wrong OS, haha. Funny how Apple's OS' are more modern when it comes to accessibility than Microsoft.

## Windows accessibility features are easier to find and use

Okay, this whole section has been talked about before, because it's no different than the latest Windows Insiders' build. Always note that if companies have to fill blog posts with stuff that they've had for like months or a year now, it means they really, really don't have anything new to show, or say. They just talk because not doing so would hurt them even more. Contrast this with Apple's blog post on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, where *everything* they talked about was new or majorly improved. And all Microsoft did that day was "listen". There's a point where listening has gathered enough data, and its time to act! Microsoft passed that point long ago.

> Importantly, more than improving existing accessibility features, introducing new features and making users’ preferred assistive technology compatible with Windows 11, we are making accessibility features easier to find and use. You gave us feedback that the purpose of the “Ease of Access” Settings and icon was unclear. And you said that you expected to find “Accessibility” settings. We listened and we changed Windows. We rebranded Ease of Access Settings to Accessibility and introduced a new accessibility “human” icon. We redesigned the Accessibility Settings to make them easier to use. And of course, Accessibility features are available in the out of box experience and on the Log on and Lock screens so that users can independently setup and use their devices, e.g., with Narrator.

So, the most important thing they've done this year is what they've already done. Got it. Oh and they changed Windows. Just for us guys. They did all that hard word of changing a name and redoing an icon, just for us! Oh so cringeworthy. This "courage" thing is getting out of hand. Also, if changing Windows is so hard, maybe it's time to talk to the manager. Seriously. If it's so hard to do your job that changing a label and icon is hard work, there's something seriously wrong, and I almost feel bad for the Windows Accessibility team now.

## Windows accessibility just works in more scenarios

> Windows 11 is a significant step towards a future in which accessibility “just works,” without costly plug-ins or time-consuming work by Information Technology administrators. With Windows 10, we made it possible for assistive technologies to work with secure applications, like Word, in Windows Defender Application Guard (WDAG). With Windows 11, we made it possible for both Microsoft and partner assistive technologies to work with applications like Outlook hosted in the cloud...

Okay so, from Twitter, Joseph Lee has complained that the Windows UI team isn't writing proper code to let screen readers read and interact with apps in Windows 11's Insider builds. So right there, we're going to *still* need Windows App Essentials, an NVDA add-on that makes Windows 11 a lot easier to use. This add-on is mostly for the first-party apps, like weather and calculator. So, um, what's all this about again? So, nothing seems to be new. We *will* still need "costly" addons and plugins and junk. Because I don't see Microsoft fixing those UI issues by release. System admins, keep that list of NVDA addons around, because they'll still be needed in Windows 11.

=> https://twitter.com/joslee/status/1412046145673515010?s=20 One of Joseph's posts on the matter

> . For example, with Windows 11, Office is accessible as a Remote Application Integrated Locally (RAIL) using Narrator. While that may sound like a lot of jargon to most people, the impact is significant. People who are blind will have access to applications like Office hosted in Azure when they need it.

Yeah because people with disabilities are dumb and can't understand tech speak. Sure. Okay. Keep dumbing us down, Microsoft. We really enjoy the slap in the face. Just explain the terms, like RAIL. With a quick Google search, it looks like Azure supports Ruby on Rails, so, I guess that's what it is. Which doesn't make much sense because Rails makes web apps, from what I understand. Ah well. Keep lording your tech knowledge over us, oh great Elites at Microsoft.

What I want to see is Electron apps getting OS-level support in accessibility, so that VS-code doesn't have to *feel* like a web app, because it *shouldn't* feel like that on Microsoft's own OS.

Now, being able to host Office on a server and have Narrator, and hopefully other screen readers (because Narrator is still not good enough), support it, is nice. But that's not really a user-facing feature. Users probably won't know Word is hosted on a server.

> Windows 11 will also support Linux GUI apps like gedit through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on devices that meet the app system requirements. And, we enabled these experiences to be accessible. For example, people who are blind can use Windows with supported screen readers within WSL. In some cases, the assistive technology experience is seamless. For example, Color Filters, “just work.” Importantly, the WSL team prioritized accessibility from the start and committed to enable accessible experiences at launch. They are excited to share more with Insiders and to get feedback to continue to refine the usability of their experiences.

In some cases... Wanna elaborate a bit, Microsoft? Will I be able to use Gedit with a screen reader? Or Kate? Or Emacs? I have gotten Emacs with Emacspeak working on WSLG in Windows Insider builds. But it's too sluggish to be used productively. So yeah, if that's the same experience as using a screen reader with it, I don't see myself using it much, if at all.

> We look forward to sharing more about other new experiences we introduced last week like our partnership with Amazon to bring Android apps to Windows in the coming months.

Okay, well I'm waiting. I suspect they'll use something similar to what they did with the Your Phone app, just pipe accessibility events to the screen reader through, the title bar I think? That'll be okay I guess, but no sound feedback would mean that the experience isn't quite to TalkBack standards, as low as that is.

## Modern accessibility platform is great for the assistive technology ecosystem

> Finally, I am happy to share that we have been working closely with assistive technology industry leaders to co-engineer what we call the “modern accessibility platform.” Windows 11 delivers a platform that enables more responsive experiences and more agile development, including access to application data without requiring changes to Windows.

I'm not going to pretend to understand that last bit, but if the UI problems found by Joseph Lee are any indication, a lot more has been broken than fixed or new. Also, which Assistive Technology industry leaders? And what biases do they have?

> We embraced feedback from industry partners that we need to make assistive technology more responsive by design. We embraced the design constraints of making local assistive technology like Narrator “just work” with cloud hosted apps over a network. We invented and co-engineered new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to do both; to improve the communication between assistive technologies like Narrator and applications like Outlook that significantly improve Narrator responsiveness in some scenarios. The result is that Narrator feels more responsive and works over a network with cloud-hosted apps.

I, as a user, don't care about cloud-hosted apps. Office may at some point become a cloud-hosted app, and that's what they may be preparing for, but I don't care about that. Responsiveness is cool and good, but NVDA is very responsive, and some people still fall asleep using it. Why? Because it *sounds* boring! The voices in Windows suck. No audible animations or anything to make Windows delightful.

> We also embraced feedback from industry partners that we need to increase assistive technology and application developer agility to increase the pace of innovation and user experience improvements. We made it possible for application developers, like Microsoft Office, to expose data programmatically without requiring Windows updates. With Windows 11, application developers will be able to implement UI Automation custom extensions, including custom properties, patterns and annotations that can be consumed by assistive technologies. For users, this means we can develop usability and other improvements at the speed of apps.

At the speed of apps. That's pure marketing crap. A lot is said in this article that is pure marketing, and not measurable fact. I want real, factual updates, not this. And the fact that they don't provide that is a hint that they have nothing to provide. Now, having "custom" rolls and states and such things is nice for developers who have to reinvent the wheel and the atoms that make up that wheel, so maybe *new* applications have a chance of being accessible. But accessibility won't happen with developers unless its in their face. They probably won't know about these abilities, or even care in many cases.

## Try Windows 11 and give us feedback

I've read feedback from those who have tried Windows 11 Preview. I myself can't try it because no TPM chip and I don't feel like being rolled back to Windows 10 when 11 is released. The feedback I've gotten so far from others is, well, very little, actually. From what I've heard, it's still just Windows 10.

## Conclusion

So, why should I even care about Windows 11? Not much is new or changed or fixed for accessibility, as this article full of many empty words shows. Six years of development, and the Mail app still has that annoying bug of expanding threads whenever keyboard focus lands on them, instead of waiting for the user to manually expand them. The Reply box still doesn't alert screen readers that it's opened, so it thinks its still in the message pane being replied to, and not the reply edit field. The Microsoft voices still sound pretty bad, even worse than Google's offline TTS now, and that's pretty bad.

Will any of this change? I doubt it. I've lost a lot of confidence in Microsoft, first because of their do-nothing stance on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, then their event without audio description, which Apple did perfectly, and now this article which tells us very little, and is almost a slap in the face when it talks about Windows being "delightful" because really, it's not, and it won't change substantially enough before release to be so.</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/2021-07-08.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>Surround sound in Linux</title>
<updated>2021-04-16T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-04-16:/gemlog/blindness/2021-04-16.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Surround sound in Linux

Linux audio hasn't always been so great. From ALSA issues to Pulseaudio's early days, to now Pipewire, Linux audio has had it rough.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2021-04-16.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>At the Helm</title>
<updated>2021-03-18T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-03-18:/gemlog/blindness/2021-03-18.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># At the Helm

Today, I began trying to make the most of Emacs. Mainly, this just means activating the packages that I’ve already installed. I’ve noticed that, even when using the Emacs package manager, with Melpa added, packages don’t always get “enabled” and configured to work. Some of them require that you do (require package-name) in your .emacs.el file. So, I went through the list of packages, and one by one read their Github page to see how to configure them. It’s slightly annoying, yes, but I’ve gotten a bit out of it.

First, I found out a lot more about the extra Org-mode blocks and links added with a package. I don’t remember the name now. And then, I found a few packages that I didn’t need upon further inspection, so I got rid of those. And then, I started hitting some big gold mines.

## LSP Mode

LSP (Language Server Protocol), is basically an IDE-like bundle of code checkers, refactoring mechanisms, and documentation things that brings IDE’s to your text editor. Or something. All I really care about is that it brings VS Code like functionality to Emacs. And, there’s a Grammarly extension! The only problem is that when I load LSP mode, afterwards, Emacspeak reads a little extra info each time I switch buffers, like there’s still another frame there or something.

So, I plan on using that mainly with Markdown files, although Grammarly doesn’t seem to like filled paragraphs, and I hate unfilled paragraphs, although I can deal with it when working with Gemini. Ah well, maybe I’ll just turn on visual-line-mode everywhere. I don’t know. At least it’s not like VS Code, where the screen reader *cannot* read visual lines and only reads logical lines. Emacspeak handles visual lines by playing a sound when the next logical line is reached, but speaks each visual line as I arrow or use C-n or C-p.

## Helm

Helm is a completion package. It’s really great how Emacspeak works with it, and I can just type to narrow things down, and not needing to type, then tab, then type, all that. And, unlike the mini-buffer, I can perform many actions on the thing at point, not just pressing Enter to activate. It’s really great, and I’ll definitely incorporate this into my workflow.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2021-03-18.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>Accessibility Switches</title>
<updated>2021-03-16T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-03-16:/gemlog/blindness/2021-03-16.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Accessibility Switches

I tried to write this on Mastodon, but 1000 characters just isn’t enough. Since I am blind, and do not have any other visible disability, I don’t know what it’s like the not have the use of my legs. Therefore, if I’ve misrepresented anything in the following section, let me know.

----------------

You've always hated your legs. They flop uselessly at the end of your body; there, but just to show off that you're different. That you can't actually use them. Like a blind person's eyes, just rolling around in the head, without use. You particularly hate your legs today, as you sit in front of a set of stairs with a helpful "accessibility controller." At the top of the stairs. You could pull the lever on the controller box, and a ramp is lowered to the ground. If only your legs worked.

You remember when these things were invented. It was a bill at first, made after a video of a person in a wheelchair suffered severe brain trauma after falling down stairs when attempting to get medical help. The media ran the videos nonstop until the people boiled with anger, and so the government did as little as possible, as usual. So now these things exist. After another video was made of a person falling down stairs trying to activate it, stairs leading to public buildings were altered so that, if a wheelchair is pushed up them backwards at a certain angle, then they can reach the top, and the lever. Hopefully.

So, you take a deep breath, turn the wheelchair around, and prepare to try to reach your appointment.

----------------

The moral of the story: accessibility switches are bad. The UI of software or anything really, should be accessible from the beginning, and if a user has to go in and manually put in accessibility enablement statements in .xinitrc and .profile, your crap is broken.

When I have to go into the Mate desktop’s menu, then “system”, then “Personal” then “assistive Technology” and “enable” the use of assistive technologies,” then that tells me that if I didn’t, Linux would be far, far less accessible without this. And what if a user doesn’t know about this “trick” to enable a user to use their system? Well, they’d think Linux was far less accessible than what it is, and even with full accessibility settings on, I can barely use Zoom, which is a pretty important program these days. Google Docs is another thing I struggle with in Firefox, and Chromium. And yes, Google Docs is *another* piece of junk that requires an accessibility switch. Even with all this in my .xinitrc and .profile:

``` sh
export GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge
export GNOME_ACCESSIBILITY=1
export QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1
export QT_LINUX_ACCESSIBILITY_ALWAYS_ON=1

exec mate-session
```

stuff still is hard to use, like Zoom, and Google Docs. And just how much of this is even still needed? Do we still need “export QT_LINUX_ACCESSIBILITY_ALWAYS_ON=1” when we have “export QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1”? Am I missing yet another flag that has to be enabled?

Meanwhile, Mac and Windows are accessible by default. No need to turn on any flags or check a box that tells the system, and probably all apps, that hey, this guy is blind~ Funny how privacy goes out the window when you’re freaking disabled, huh? Funny how closed source, proprietary systems are more accessible, and privacy friendly in that regard, than a system made by the people, for the 95%. But that’s what I get for being a nerd.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2021-03-16.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>Elaho, an iOS Gemini Client</title>
<updated>2021-03-15T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-03-15:/gemlog/blindness/2021-03-15.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Elaho, an iOS Gemini Client

So, I’ve been looking for more Gemini clients. Not that Elpher is bad, but because I’m not always on my computer, as much as I’d love to just be able to sit at the computer, or more specifically, on my bed with my USB keyboard in front of me, plugged into my laptop, twenty-four seven. Unfortunately, there are times when I need to just suck it up and use my phone. For example, when I’m outside sitting on the porch during a warm day or evening, or when I’m on the way to or from work, or when I’m in my rocking chair.

So, I looked through the list of clients on Gemini’s circumlunar site, and found Elaho, a client for iOS. I liked it. It was simple, and displayed things fine. After a slightly long discussion on the Gemini mailing list, however, it got even better!

Today, I got an update on it that basically put preformatted blocks into an image item type, with the Alt-text as the image name. Something like that. And VoiceOver works amazingly well with that! So, now, I don’t even have to deal with most ASCII art! So, I can just relax and read Gemlogs with my braille display, and everything be simple, luscious, plain text! Well, plain as in readable, with headings and links and such.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2021-03-15.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>Making a better startup environment</title>
<updated>2021-02-20T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-02-20:/gemlog/blindness/2021-02-20.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Making a better startup environment


So, I just got this all figured out, so I thought I’d write it down here before I forget. This is about me tweaking my Arch Linux setup to be a bit more productive a little faster.

## The non-problem

So, I use Arch (BTW), so I naturally have full control of what my computer does. Well besides the firmware, the loose ports, and all the software I have no idea how to work or use (yet). But I’m getting there. I still need to figure out how to make this Ladspa sync in Pulse go to whatever card is plugged in, not just the Intel built-in Speakers/headphone-jack thing.

Anyways, I had ESpeakup (Speakup screen reader speaking through ESpeak), starting at startup, giving me a good indication that the system is ready. I could then type in my username and password, and then raced to type `startx` before the network manager connected to Wi-fi, because it was kinda fun getting that notification that I’m connected to Wi-fi.

Then, I needed to type my password again because so log-in key ring wasn’t authenticated via a mere shell login. Ah well. But that wasn’t all very productive. For one thing, I almost never used the console for anything. So, why log in using it? I just used it as a jumping off point for startx and mate-session.

So, I tried a few display managers. My first choice was lightdm, as I wasn’t sure the GDM one would allow me to start Mate, or if it was tied to Gnome. Well, that one didn’t seem to have Orca support. Or, if it did, it was more work than I was willing to expend to get that working. So, I went back to no DM and just using startx.

So, then, I tried GDM, the Gnome display manager. This worked well, I was able to start Orca within it. The settings were just the default Orca settings, with slow speech and such, but I could deal with that. I just needed to hit Enter, type in my password, and hit Enter again. But then, I started Emacs. The environment variable to set DTK_Program wasn’t set anymore to “outloud,” so it used ESpeak, which doesn’t have great support in Emacspeak. So, I tried other programs, some QT apps weren’t accessible, and neither was Chromium. So, my environment variables weren’t being loaded. So, I went back to no DM and just using startx.

So, today, I can’t remember why I wanted to try this again. Ah yes, it was .bash_profile verses .bashrc. Also, I need to find new Aspell dictionary with more computer/Linux terms and such. But anyway, I wanted to see if .bashrc worked to get environment vars loaded when using GDM. So, I enabled GDM, but found that Emacs (with Emacspeak) still loaded ESpeak. That was kind of disappointing.

So, after a few restarts, I determined that it wasn’t me, that the .bash_profile was made right, and that when loading GDM, that simply wasn’t being taken into account. So, I looked it up, and found that most modern Linux distros load from .profile, not .bashrc or .bash_profile. Well, that makes sense.

So, I found that, yes, I do have a .profile, and that it’s practically empty. I filled in everything that I had from my .xinitrc, .bashrc, and .bash_profile that I’ve added over the months that I’ve used Linux, and restarted. And it works! Emacs loads with Outloud, Chromium is accessible, and all it better, needing one login, not basically two with the authentication key ring login. So, here is my .profile:

``` sh
export DTK_PROGRAM=outloud
export LADSPA_PATH=/usr/lib/ladspa
export ACCESSIBILITY_ENABLED=1 
export PATH="$HOME/.gem/ruby/2.7.0/bin:$PATH"
export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk3 GTK_MODULES="gail:atk-bridge"
export GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge
export GNOME_ACCESSIBILITY=1
export QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1
export QT_LINUX_ACCESSIBILITY_ALWAYS_ON=1
export EDITOR="emacsclient"

alias git=git-smb
```

Yeah, it could use with a little cleaning, but the extra stuff about GTK3 was for LibreOffice, and I ain’t messing with that.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2021-02-20.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>Linux Games: my process of searching through games and contacting developers</title>
<updated>2021-02-14T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-02-14:/gemlog/blindness/2021-02-14.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Linux Games: my process of searching through games and contacting developers


This log will detail my search throughout Linux for accessible games, besides the audio game manager, and my reaching out to developers, and their responses. Hopefully, this will motivate me to keep going in the face of, undoubtedly, much failure.

## Why?

Because I’m weird. I can’t just start with any old app category, oh no. ToDo managers? Pomodoro timers? Text editors? No, I choose to bang my head against games. And because I want new blind Linux users, when they join Linux, to have some games outside the Windows audio games, to play. Because it’s like... a sighted person coming to Linux and finding out that all there is to play is Windows games. And yeah there are a good many games made for Linux. So why not? Hopefully I can get at least one game made accessible, or find that one already is accessible. If I can do at least that, then that’s one more success story of the open source community actually giving a crap.

## Testing the games

I test each game using the Orca screen reader, version 3.38.2. I run the Mate desktop (version 1.24.1) on Arch Linux. My PC has an Intel Core i7-6500U CPU at 2.50GHz and 8 GB of RAM and a Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520] graphics card. At least, I think that’s the graphics card. 😊

## Game list

I am getting the list of games from the Arch Linux Wiki. It’s separated into game genre headings, so that’s great. At a fellow Mastodon user’s suggestion, I’m going to go with casual games first.
=> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_games Arch Wiki List of Games

So, from here, I’ll have the game category, then the games, their accessibility, and contact with the developer.

## Casual Games

### Aisleriot (version 3.22.12)

Upon starting the game, I hear “Klondike, drawing area.” The “Drawing area” is what the Screen Savers use as a “frame” to show the picture. But in this case, I assume a game has started, so this should be filled with cards. Whenever I press Tab, I hear “new game, button, start a new game”, and when pressing it, the drawing area stays the same, so that’s why I assume a game has already started.

When pressing Tab after the “new game” button, I’m placed back onto the drawing area. If I use the Right Arrow while on the “new game” button, I find the other buttons on what I assume is a toolbar: “Select game,” “Deal” and “hint”. If I press Enter on “select game,” I am able to choose another game type to play. Even so, the Drawing Area is still there. If I press the “Hint” button, I am given an accessible dialog with a hint on what to do next, like “Move the ten of hearts onto the ten of clubs.” I can dismiss the hint with the Enter key. If I press the “Deal” button, back in Klondike mode, nothing is reported, but two new buttons, “undo move” and “restart” appear.

When I press F10, to open the menu bar, that part is accessible. Pressing “New game,” “restart,” entering the “recent games” menu, and closing work, in that I can perform those functions. The statistics screen was much more accessible than I expected, with textual labels for each field, along with the number associated with them. There is also a button to reset the statistics, and one to close the window. None of the items in the “view” menu affect accessibility, although the removal of the “tool bar” hides the buttons “above” the drawing area. Nothing within the Controls menu affects accessibility, neither does anything in the Klondike menu. In the help menu, there are keyboard shortcuts, but none regarding accessibility.

In short, everything is accessible except the cards and ways of moving and controlling them. I don’t know much about Solitaire, but I do know there are supposed to be cards, and from the hints, they can be moved.
=> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/aisleriot/-/issues/54 Gitlab Issue (HTTP)

</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2021-02-14.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>Falling into Linux</title>
<updated>2021-02-13T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-02-13:/gemlog/blindness/2021-02-13.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Falling into Linux


During the month of... November? December? Something like that... I found myself being called by Linux again. I just can’t stay away. I go to Windows for a while, and then something happens. VS Code became sluggish and unreliable, and I just... just couldn’t deal with crap anymore. Sure everything else worked well enough. I could play my audio games and Slay the Spire (using Say the Spire), but gosh darn it I missed freedom.

So, I thought about it. People on the Linux-a11y IRC use Arch. Because they’re all pretty much advanced users. Other blind people use Ubuntu Mate, or Debian. I tried Fedora, and found that I couldn’t even run Orca, the Linux graphical screen reader, within the Fedora installer. I tried Debian in a virtual machine, but the resulting system, after installation, didn’t speak. I tried Slint Linux, a Slackware based distribution, but there were sound issues, and they weren’t something I could deal with.
=> irc.linux-a11y.org Linux-a11y IRC
=> https://slint.fr/wiki/doku.php?id=en:start Slint Linux

## The Need for Speed

So, I thought about different Linux distros. There priorities, their values, and their priority of keeping packages up-to-date or not. I like distros that keep packages up-to-date. Not doing so, to me, feels like a slap in the face of developers, the distro maintainer saying: “We don’t trust that you can write good enough software, so we’re going to leave your software at this version for >= 6 months. And then, when we release a new version of our distro, we’ll go into your code and “backport” things into your old version.”

Another issue is that older software isn’t necessarily better. It definitely isn’t necessarily more accessible, and that is my main concern, and is, I suspect, why most “power user” blind Linux folks go with arch. They already have GTK4 in their repository. Can Ubuntu, or even worse, Debian, say the same?

Now, I know that there is Flatpak, Snap, and probably a lot of lesser-known protocols. But I see them as add-on package managers, supplementing the system package manager. Also, they wouldn’t be necessary if Ubuntu and Debian would package up-to-date software. Snap and Flatpak are solving a problem that Ubuntu themselves created. Isn’t that nice?

## Choosing Arch

So, I looked around. Ubuntu, Debian, all the main distros were all fixed releases, all stale, and I like to explore. I use my computer more than just for simple stuff. I mean, I can’t have old, out-dated packages. And it’s so sad that Youtube-dl, and even Mycroft, have to explain to users how to install from Pip, or from a git repo, just to keep the package up-to-date. But enough about that. A person on the IRC channel suggested Anarchy, which is an “easy installer ISO” of arch. So, I took a look.
=> https://anarchyinstaller.org/ Anarchy Installer (HTTP)

Since late last year, the base Arch Linux distro has come prebuilt with accessibility stuff. Just press Down Arrow once while booting, then Enter, and the Arch Linux ISO will come up talking. So, maybe Anarchy would do the same.

I got the ISO, flashed it to a flash drive, and booted it, doing the steps to boot in accessible mode. And it worked. The command line interface was pretty easy to use, and left me with a system that, while inaccessible (there were no settings in the installer to configure that,) I was able to chroot in, from the command line of the ISO, and set things up.

### Setting up my New System

First, I enabled espeakup.service. This runs the Speakup screen reader with the ESpeak synthesizer. That was enough to give me speech at the console. Then I installed Yay, the AUR package manager thing. I later switched to Paru. Then, I installed the Mate Desktop, as they’re currently the only ones that have accessibility well enough for easy usage for now. Hopefully Gnome gets back into the game with Gnome 40, but I’m not holding my breath.

Then, I added these lines to my .xinitrc:

``` shell
export GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge
export GNOME_ACCESSIBILITY=1
export QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1
export QT_LINUX_ACCESSIBILITY_ALWAYS_ON=1

exec mate-session
```

And so then I could get going. I started the X-session (startx), and ran Orca from the run dialog (Alt + F2). But still, some programs weren’t accessible. So, I went to the System menu, down to Preferences, then Personal, then “Assistive Technology”, and checked that box, and things were pretty smooth after that.

## My Experiences so far

I don’t think I’ll be going back to Windows any time soon. While there are problems: Alsa sends ESpeakup through my speakers even if headphones are plugged in, I need to learn more about Pulse so that I can add more than one Ladspa effect at a time, and add them to whatever sound card I’m using, not just making a new sound card, and I do miss the sound packs created for MUD’s that only run on Mush-client. But there are things about Linux that I do love:

* Emacspeak: The more I use it, the more I love it.
* GPodder: A Podcasting client that not only is accessible, it even allows me to get Youtube channels as podcasts! I mean, that’s amazing!
* Mutt: I’m really starting to like this simple Email client. Sure, the hotkey list bar at the top is a little annoying and I wish I could just make that go away and just reference keyboard commands when I need them, but overall I love it and wish I could use it with more accounts.
* Audio Game Manager: I probably wouldn’t be on Linux for this long without this tool. It brings audio games from Windows to Linux with Wine and preconfigured settings.
* Retroarch: Now that it’s accessible, I love playing Dissidia Final Fantasy on it. Although, trying to “record a movie” on it really slows things down. I wonder if streaming would do the same.
* BRLTTY: This has saved my butt on multiple occasions when Alsa couldn’t find any audio devices or something and I had to fiddle with Pulseaudio to fix it. I don’t know much about audio on Linux really, I just revert any change I made on behalf of something like Mycroft or whatever. Oh, BRLTTY is basically a screen reader for braille displays, meaning I don’t need audio to use it.
* Emacs: What can I say? Most of my work is done inside Emacs. Most of my play is done inside Emacs. Nearly all of my writing and reading is done inside Emacs. I’m considering having my window manager inside Emacs. One day, my brain will be inside Emacs. No Microsoft text editor can compare with Emacs and Emacspeak’s ability to give as much information as possible, even syntax highlighting, bold, italics, just everything!
* The command line: Sure, we have this in Windows, but it’s more of an afterthought, and a bolted on feature at this point. In Linux, it’s a first-class citizen. I’m not a power user in any stretch of the imagination, but I can navigate the file system, run commands with arguments, all the basic stuff. I can do this in audio and braille. I can use nano a bit to edit files, and know the general layout of config files, and am not as scared of them as I used to be, although I need to learn to read the manual before I dive into them.

Also, in my experience, Linux breeds creativity. You could use it as a regular desktop user, but if you dig just a tad, you see the building blocks. And it makes you want to learn about them, to play with them, to maybe break them a bit but then try to fix them. And some things you can’t make work: like the fact that my laptop, having just a USB C port, can’t display video over Thunderbolt. (I have a Thunderbolt dock at work connected through Display port to a monitor.) But some things you *can* do. You can script things using Python, then put them in your bin folder to run from anywhere. You can make your own programs! You can turn your Linux machine into a Bluetooth speaker to listen to books from your iPhone on your laptop! There is just so much possible with Linux, and even more possible with coding knowledge.

## Flaws in the Utopia

This isn’t to say that Linux is perfect. It is made by people, and mostly hobbyists at that. This isn’t to say their code is sloppy, or that they don’t care. It does mean that they aren’t held to any kind of company standard, especially regarding accessibility. Linux is more of a community effort, so users will *need* (me included) to interact with the community to get things fixed, or even just to remind them that blind users actually do exist. We do have our own IRC server, a little corner of the Internet, but we won’t get anywhere by just staying in that corner.

* The graphical interface can be tricky to use, like remembering that you have to press Control + Tab to reach some parts of the fractal program, and there are still unlabeled buttons in official Gnome apps, like Fractal. But there will be a complete rewrite of the interface, so hopefully accessibility is considered in the process.
* There are less games, and much less accessible games, on Linux. I’ll begin to reach out to developers of games to see if anything can be done about this. In the meantime, there is the Audio Game Manager for playing Windows accessible games.
* You’ll have to Google things, a lot: There aren’t many blind people who use Linux. That number grows by one or two per year, and the Audio Games forum has a few members who use Linux, but there aren’t many outside that.
* Sound isn’t as convenient as on Windows, where you have enhancements, bit rate and format control, all that in one place. And the Pulse-effects package makes things very laggy, whereas loading a Ladspa module directly produces no lag.
* Sound can be slightly rough when first booting up the computer.

## Looking Forward

I’ll probably stick with Linux, as long as this laptop survives. I’ve had it for about five years, and it’s still pretty well up to the task. It performs well, has a good enough keyboard with a number pad, but a first ports, especially the headphone jack, are becoming loose. I’ll have to see about getting a USB sound card or something, unless ports can be tightened. And a new battery would be good too. I ordered one, so we’ll see if it can be replaced.

I’ll still reach out to developers, to see if accessibility of apps can be improved. Hopefully, indie game developers will be more receptive as well. Eventually, I’d love to have more blind people come to Linux, and not just then jump into the blindness servers and moan and grown, but continue to push for greater accessibility, on Matrix, on IRC, on Forums of desktop environments and graphical toolkits like GTK. Linux makes me feel passionate about technology, about open source, about what’s possible, whereas Windows just felt contrived, the accessibility team preaching and preaching on their Twitter account, saying *all* the right things. Saying all the right words. But when it comes time to deliver, well, they fall short. Windows 10’s Mail app still is a pain to use with screen readers, still having the issue of when I put keyboard focus on a thread, it automatically expands, and then I have to close it just to quickly move down to another message or thread, and when I press Control + R to reply, nothing is spoken to let me know the command succeeded. Not even Thunderbird, even though it locks up every few minutes, has those kinds of problems. And the only other good email client is Mutt.

So, Linux feels more “real” to me. It doesn’t try to hide its accessibility issues with worm words and “we hear you!” tweets. It could do better. Earlier today I suggested to people involved with the Pine Phone that accessibility could be a greater focus, and essentially got back “maybe you can focus on Linux desktop accessibility first.” I guess I’ll have to. I’m not a developer, but if that’s what people want, sure. Why not. Maybe I’ll even learn to enjoy it. But I’m more of a writer, for now, not a programmer. I’ve made a script, one script that is used in “production”, and find it easier to learn and enjoy now, but it’ll be some time, a lot of time, before I’m able to deal with low-level stuff in Linux.

But, until then, I’ll keep exploring, learning, and trying my best to get the word out, to keep people cognizant that accessibility is an issue, and that they don’t have to be an expert to help.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2021-02-13.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>Random happenings</title>
<updated>2021-02-10T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2021-02-10:/gemlog/blindness/2021-02-10.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Random happenings



It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post. But, my entry into Gemini space prompts me to finally write about what’s been going on with me. The simplicity of writing in Gemini, and the “cool new thing” feel is quite inviting. And, because the people at tilde.pink have given me a space to serve this, I have direct access to the files, processes that go into how things look, everything.

## Static Site Generators and my disillusionment from them

I like Hugo, I really do. But a theme problem got in the way, leaving me unable to actually build the site. So, I looked for another one, finding

=> https://getnikola.com/ Nikola

It worked well, but I couldn’t customize it that much. It had a great plugin that took the text of an article and made the whole blog into a podcast using ESpeak to speak the articles, but I had no idea how to customize the theme, put in my usual “reading time” functionality, or any of that.

So, I just left the blog as it is, a basic Nikola site on Github Pages. I didn’t want to mess with it anymore. I didn’t want to have to deal with config files, running scripts, all that. Besides that, I’ve been very busy with work-related stuff.

## Python for lunch!

For a while now, I’ve wanted to write a script that grabs the lunch menu from the Moodle page, gets the menu for today, and shows it, or speaks it, to the user. A few weeks ago, I completed it. What I’ve learned:

* Python is easier for me when I have a project to work on. I’ll start using the Automate the Boring Stuff book more for this.
* I learned about the “try” and “except” functionality easily, lending credit to my idea that I learn best with projects.
* Emacs’ Python mode is pretty great, and voice-lock-mode of Emacspeak has gotten me out of a few situations I wouldn’t have found easily otherwise.

So, below is a link to:

=> ~/src/lunch.py the Python source of the Lunch program

## Entry into Gemini space

So, Gemini is this cool new thing that is like the web, but with simple “Gemini files” instead of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. There are only headings, lists, links, paragraphs, and preformatted blocks in Gemini, and no CSS and JavaScript. It’s basically just the information of the web; no web apps, no need to control looks and reactions, just sweet, simple, plain text.

At first, I was afraid that there would be lots of ASCII graphics. These never are understandable to screen readers. And there are some, but not as much as I’d feared. Then I found a Gemini browser for Emacs, called

=> gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/1/projects/elpher/ Elpher (Gopher)

which is pretty good. It isn’t optomized for Emacspeak use, and it doesn’t show the Alt text of preformatted blocks, but it’s good enough for my use.

So, I jumped at the chance to host my blog in Gemini space. Plain text, no *need* for a static site generator, since *everything* is in plain text, human-readable text, no JavaScript or CSS required. Everything is in directories, and the Index file is plain, with links to whatever you want to show. And for drafts, I’ll just work on them, and when they’re ready, link to them from the Gemlog index. I think, finally, that I’ve found my home.

## Switching *back* to Emacs

A while back, I wrote an article about

=> switching-tools.gmi Switching tools

where I talked about switching from Mac and Emacspeak to Windows and VS Code. Well, turns out that VS Code being a memory-hogging Electron app, and it really just being another edit field, made that kinda fall through. Now, I’m on Linux (I’ll write about that, I promise), and use Emacspeak again. Reasons include:

* VS Code on my laptop was quite unresponsive. Emacspeak on my (now Linux) laptop is snappy.
* It looks like VS Code won’t be using sounds for events, like reaching a line with an error, any time soon.

=> https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/109219 Source (HTTP)

So, since I had nothing more to lose, and because Linux was calling my name, I switched, and I’m pretty happy with it now, actually. I don’t know if it’s my continuing maturation, or Linux accessibility improvements, but I’m finding that I’m mostly able to do anything from Linux, and even more, since there is an actually good podcast client for Linux, GPodder.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2021-02-10.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>VoiceOver Recognition</title>
<updated>2020-08-16T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2020-08-16:/gemlog/blindness/2020-08-16.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># VoiceOver Recognition

description: "VoiceOver makes the theoretical possible, again!"

## Introduction

At the launch of the iPhone 3GS, Apple unveiled VoiceOver on the iPhone. Blind users and accessibility experts had been used to screen readers on computers, and even rudimentary screen readers for smart phones that used a keyboard, trackball, or quadrants of a touch screen for navigation and usage. But here was a screen reader that not only came prepackaged on a modern, relatively inexpensive to the competition, and off-the-shelf device, but it also allowed the user to use the touch screen as it is, a touch device.

This year, VoiceOver added a feature called "VoiceOver recognition." This feature allows VoiceOver to utilize the machine learning coprocessor in newer iPhone models to describe images with near-human quality, make apps more accessible using ML models, and read the text in images.

This article will explore these new features, go into their benefits, compare VoiceOver Recognition to other options, and discuss the history of these features, and what's next.

## VoiceOver Recognition, the features

VoiceOver Recognition, as discussed before, contains three separate features: Image Recognition, Screen Recognition, and Text recognition. All three work together to bring the best experience. In accessible apps and sites, though, Image and Text recognition do the job fine. All three features must be downloaded and turned on in VoiceOver settings. Image recognition acts upon images automatically, employing Text recognition when text is found in an image.

Screen recognition makes inaccessible apps as good as currently possible with the ML (Machine Learning) model. It is still great, though. It allows me to play Final Fantasy Record Keeper quite easily. It is not perfect, but it is only the beginning!

## Benefits of VoiceOver Recognition

Imagine, if you are sighted, that you have never seen a picture before, or if you have, that you've never seen a picture you've taken yourself. Imagine that all the pictures you have viewed on social media have been blurry and vague. Sure, you can see some movies, but they are far and few between. And apps? You can only access a few, relative to the number of total apps. And games are laughably simple and forgettable.

That is how digital life is for blind people. Now, however, we have a tool that helps with that immensely. VoiceOver Recognition gives amazing descriptions for photos. Not perfect, and sometimes when playing a game, I just get "A photo of a video game" as a description, but again, this is the first version. And photos in news articles and on websites, and in apps, are amazingly accurate. If I didn't know better, I would think someone at Apple is busy describing all the images I come across. While Screen Recognition can fail spectacularly sometimes, especially with apps that do not look native to iOS, it has allowed me to get out of sticky situations in some apps and has allowed me to press the occasional button that VoiceOver can't press due to poor app coding and such. And I can play a few text-heavy games with it, like Game of Thrones, a tale of crows.

Even my ability to take pictures is greatly enhanced with image recognition. With this feature, I can open the Camera app, put VoiceOver focus on the "view finder," and it will describe what is in the camera view! When it changes, I must move focus away and back to the View Finder, but that's a small price to pay for a "talking camera" that is actually accurate.

## Comparing VO Recognition to Other Options

Blind people may then say "Okay, what about Narrator on Windows? It does the same thing, right?" No. First, the photo is sent to a server owned by Microsoft. On iOS, the photo is captioned using the ML Coprocessor. What Microsoft needs and Internet connection and remote server to do, Apple does far better with the chip on your device!

You may then say "Well, how does it give better results?" First, it's automatic. Land on an image, and it works! Second, it is not shy about what it thinks it sees. If it is confident in its description, it will simply describe it. Narrator, and Seeing AI, always say "Image may contain: " before giving a guess. And, with more complex images, Narrator fails, and so does Seeing AI. I have read that this is set to improve, but I've not seen the improvements yet. Only when VoiceOver Recognition isn't confident in what it sees, it says, "Photo contains," and then gives a list of objects that it is surer of. This does not happen nearly as frequently as Narrator/Seeing AI, though.

You may also say "Okay, so how is this better than NVDA's OCR? You can use it to click on items in an app." Yes, and that is great, it really is, and I thank the NVDA developers every time I use VMWare with Linux because there always seems to be something going on with it. But with VoiceOver Recognition, you get an actual natively "accessible," app. You don't have to click on anything, and you know what VoiceOver thinks the item type of something is: a button, text field, ETC., and can interact with the item accordingly. With NVDA, you have a sort of mouse. With VO Recognition, you have an entire app experience.

## The history of these features

Using AI to bolster the accessibility of user Interfaces is not a new idea. It has been floating around the blind community for a while now. I remember discussing it on an APH (American Printing House for the Blind) mailing list around a decade ago. Back then, however, it was just a toy idea. No one thought it could be done with current, at the time, Android 2.3 era hardware or software. It continued to be brought up by blind people who dreamed bigger than I, but never really went anywhere.

Starting with the iPhone X R, Apple began shipping a machine learning Coprocessor within their iPhones. Then n iOS 13, VoiceOver gained the ability to describe images. This was not using the ML chip, however, since older phones could take advantage of it. I thought they may improve this, but I had no idea they would do as great a job as they are doing with iOS 14.

### What's Next?

As I've said a few times now, this is only version one. I suspect Apple will continue building on their huge success this year, fleshing out Screen recognition, and perhaps having VoiceOver automatically speak what's in the camera view when preparing to take a picture, and perhaps adding even more than I cannot imagine now. I suspect, however, that this is leading to an even larger reveal for accessibility in the next few years, Augmented and Virtual reality. Apple Glasses, after all, would be very useful if they could describe what's around a blind person.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2020-08-16.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>Switching Tools</title>
<updated>2020-08-07T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2020-08-07:/gemlog/blindness/2020-08-07.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Switching Tools

This is basically a test post. I've switched from Emacs to VS Code, and I'll detail why below. The gist is that Emacs is unhelpful, only easy to set up on Mac and Linux, and Emacs packages are not standard, and Emacspeak, the speech extension for Emacs, just can't keep up with extensions like LanguageTool, and probably won't because coding is Emacs' main use case, not writing.

## Why I used Emacs

Emacs has been my work tool for about a year now. I went along with its strange commands, and even got to liking them. I memorized strange terminology in order to get the most of the editor. Don't get me wrong, Emacs is a wonderful tool, and Emacspeak allows me to use it with confidence and even enjoyment.

Before the end, I was writing blog posts, both here and on a Wordpress blog, using Git and GitHub, and even reading EBooks. I also adore Org-mode, which I still find superior to anything else for note taking, compiling quick reports, and just about anything writing-related. Seriously, being able to export just one part of a file, instead of the whole large file containing every bit of work-related notes, is huge, and I'll now have to use folders, subfolders, and folders under those to come close to achieving that level of productivity. And no, the Org-mode extension for VS Code doesn't have a third of the ability of the native Emacs Org-mode.

But, Emacs was founded on the do-it-yourself mentality, and it'll stay that way. If you don't know what to look for, Emacs will just sit there, without any guidance for you. I'll get more into that as I compare it with VS Code.

## Making Good out of Bad

One day, my MacBook, which is what I run Emacs on, ran very low on battery. It was in the morning that day, and I have a Windows computer also, so I decided to see if I could get things done on it. I'd tried writing on it before, using Markdown in Word, or even VS Code before. But my screen reader, NVDA, wouldn't read indentation like Emacspeak did, or pause between reading formatting symbols in Markdown like Emacspeak did, play sounds for quick alerts of action like Emacspeak did, or even have a settings interface like Emacs did, and definitely didn't have a voice like Alex on the Mac. Those were my thoughts when I'd tried it before. I'll tackle them all, now that I've used VS Code for almost a week.

So, I managed to get Markdown support close to how I used it in Emacs, minus the quick jumping between headings with a single keyboard command. I still miss that. The LanguageTool extension works perfectly, although I had to learn that to access the corrections it gave I have to press **Control + . (period)**. Every extension I've installed so far has worked with NVDA. I cannot say that for Emacs with Emacspeak. Since the web is so standardized, there isn't too much an extension could do to not be accessible. Sometimes I wish the suggestions didn't pop up all the time in some language modes, but I'll take that any day over inaccessibility.

So, on with debunking the problems I had at first. Hopefully this will help newcomers to VS Code, or those who are cynical that basically a web app can do what they need:

### NVDA doesn't read indentation!

Yes, it can. It can either speak the indentation, or beep, starting at, I believe, low C for the baseline and moving up tones. Sometimes I have to pay a bit of attention to notice the difference between no space and one space, but that's what having it speak is for.

### NVDA doesn't pause between formatting symbols!

This is true, and unavoidable for now. But, unlike Emacspeak, NVDA has the ability to use a braille display, which makes reading, digesting information, and learning a lot easier for those whose mind, like mine, is more like a train than a race car. In the future, NVDA's speech refactoring may make pausing, or changing pitch for syntax highlighting, a reality.

### VS Code doesn't play sounds!

This is true too, and I've not found a setting or extension to make this happen. Maybe one day...

### VS Code doesn't even have a settings interface!

Before, I thought one had to edit the JSON file for settings to change them. It turns out that if you press **Control + , (comma)**, you get a simple, easy, Windows interface. This is a bit rough around the edges, because you have to Tab twice from one setting to the next, and you could roam from one section of settings to another, but it's easier than Emacs.

### But what about the awful Windows voices!

Yes, Windows voices still are dry and boring, or sound fuzzy, but NVDA has many options for speech now. I've settled on one that I can live with. No, it doesn't have the seeming contextual awareness of paragraphs like Alex, but it's Windows. I can't expect *too* much.

## Bonus points for VS Code

### Git

I'm only now starting to get Git. It's a program that allows you to keep multiple versions of things, so you can roll back your work, or even work on separate parts of your work in separate branches of the project. Emacs just... sits there as usual, assuming you have any idea of what you're doing. VS Code, though, actively tries to help. If you have Git, it offers an extension for that. If you open a Git repository, it asks if you'd like it to fetch changes every once in a while to make sure things are up-to-date when you commit your changes. I was able to commit a pull request in VS Code easily and with minimal fuss. In Emacs, I didn't even know where to begin. And any program that takes guessing and meaningless work off my shoulders is a program I'll keep.

### Suggestions while typing

VS Code is pretty good at this. If I'm writing code, it will offer suggestions as I type. Sometimes they're helpful, sometimes they aren't. In text modes, this doesn't happen; it appears that this only happens in programming modes. Emacs would just let you type and type and type, and then browsing Reddit you'd find out about snippet packages that may or may not work with Emacspeak.

### Standardized

As mentioned before, VS Code is basically a web app. Emacs is a program written in mostly Emacs Lisp, and a bit written in C. Extensions in VS Code are written in JavaScript, whereas extensions in Emacs are written in its Lisp dialect. Since Emacs is completely text based, any kind of fancy interface must be made manually, which usually means that Emacspeak will not work with it, unless the author, or a community member, massages the data enough to make it work. This is a constant battle, and it won't get easier for anyone involved.

VS Code is a graphical tool that has plenty of keyboard commands, and screen reader support. Its completion, correction, and terminal processes have already been created, so all extensions have to do is hook into that. This means that a lot of extensions are accessible, without even knowing it.

## So, any downsides to VS Code?

VS Code is not perfect by any stretch. When screen reader support is enabled, a few features are actually disabled because Microsoft doesn't know how to convey them to the user without using sound. Code folding is disabled, which would make navigating markdown a lot simpler. Word wrapping is disabled, meaning that a paragraph is on one very long line. I've found Rewrap, a third-party extension that I can use, so that's fixed. There are no sounds, so the only way I know there are problems is by going to the next problem, or opening the issues panel.

Overall though, VS Code has impressed me, and I continuously find wonderful, time-saving, mind-clearing moments where I breathe a sigh of relief that to create a list in markdown, I can just select lines of text, and choose “toggle list” from the commands panel, whereas with Emacs I had to mark the list of lines and remember some strange command like “string-insert-rectangle” and type “*” to make all of those list items. These kinds of time-savers make me more productive, offsetting slightly the lack of features akin to those in Org-mode.

## Conclusion

I didn't expect this post to be so long, but it will be a good test to see if VS Code's Hugo support is enough to replace Easy-Hugo on Emacs. While VS Code doesn't have a book reader, at least, not one I think I'd like, or a media player with Tune-In Radio support made for the blind, and many other packages, it is a great editor, and does have tools like Hugo extensions that make it slightly more that an editor. I should branch out more and see what tools Windows now has for these functions anyways. I already use Foobar2000 for media, I just have to find a good book reader that doesn't get rid of formatting info.

So, I hope you all have enjoyed reading this long test of VS Code, and an update on what I've been doing lately when not playing video games and other things.

In other news, I've been using the iOS 14 and macOS 11 public betas. I'll report on my findings on those when the systems are released this fall.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2020-08-07.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>A new beginning</title>
<updated>2020-06-16T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2020-06-16:/gemlog/blindness/2020-06-16.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># A new beginning

So, I'm writing this from a Windows computer, using Notepad, with WinSCP providing SFTP access to the server. This won't come as a surprise for those who follow me on Mastodon and such, but I want to put this in the blog, so everything is complete.

About half a year ago, I installed Linux. Sometimes, I get curious as to if anything has changed in Linux, or if it's any better than it once was. And I want to know if I can tackle it, or if it's even worth it. Half a year ago, I installed Arch using the Anarchy installer, got accessibility switches turned on, and got to work trying to use it.

Throughout my journey with Linux, I found myself having to forego things that Windows users took for granted. Stuff like instant access to all audio games for computers, regular video games which, even being accessible, used only Windows screen readers for speech. And all the tools that made life a little easier for blind people, like built-in OCR for all screen readers on the platform, different choices in Email clients and web browsers, and even stuff like RSS and Podcatcher clients made by blind people themselves, not to mention Twitter clients. Now, there is OCR Desktop, but it doesn't come with Orca, and you must set up a keyboard command for it.

But I had Emacs, GPodder for podcasts, Firefox, Chromium when I wanted to deal with that, and Thunderbird for lagging my system every time it checked for email. It was usable, and a few blind people do make use of it as their daily driver. But I just couldn't. I need something that's easy to setup and use, otherwise my stress levels just keep going up as I not only have to fight with config files and all that, but accessibility issues as well.

# The breaking point

A few days ago, I wanted to get my Android phone talking with my Linux computer, so that I could text, get notifications, and make calls. KDE Connect wasn't accessible, so I tried Device Connect. I couldn�t get anything out of that, so I tried GSConnect. In order to use that Gnome extension, I needed to start Gnome. I have Gnome 40, since I'm on Arch, so I logged in using that session, and got started. Except, Gnome had become much less accessible since the last time I'd tried it. The Dash was barely usable, the top panels trapped me in them until I opened a dialog from them, and I was soon just too frustrated to go much further. And then I finally opened the Gnome Extensions app, only to find that it's not accessible at all.

There's only so much I can take until I just give up and go back to Windows, and that was it. It doesn't matter how powerful a thing is if one cannot use it, and while Linux is good for simple, everyday tasks, when you really start digging in, when you really start trying to make Linux your ecosystem, you start finding barriers all over the place.

Now, I'm using Windows, have Steam installed with a few accessible video games, Google Chrome, NVDA with plenty of addons, and the "Your Phone" app on Windows and Android works great, except for calls. But it still works much better than any Linux integration I could do. Also, with Windows and Android, I can open the Android phone screen in Windows, and, with NVDA or other screen readers, control the phone from the keyboard using Talkback keyboard commands. That's definitely not something Linux developers would have thought of.

</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2020-06-16.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>What I want to see at WWDC</title>
<updated>2020-06-01T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2020-06-01:/gemlog/blindness/2020-06-01.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># What I want to see at WWDC

description: With WWDC just around the corner, here's what I want to see at Apple's developer conference

WWDC is Apple's "World Wide Developer Conference." It's where developers come to learn about what will be new in Apple's operating systems (iOS, iPad OS, MacOS, ETC.), and learn how to make the best of Apple's walled garden of tools to program apps. Tech reporters also come to the event, to gather all the news and distill it into the expected bite-sized, simple pieces. Be assured, my readers, that I will not hold anything back from you in my analysis of the event.

WWDC is not here just yet. I know, many news sites are predicting and yammering and getting all giddy with "what if" excitement. I won't bore you with such useless speculation just to fill the headlines and homepages. I fear that I lack the imagination and incentive to create such pieces. Besides, I'm more interested in what a device can *do*, and less about how it looks or feels.

However, I am Invested in Apple's operating systems. I do want to see Apple succeed in accessibility and think that, if they put enough work into it, and gave the accessibility team more freedom and staff, that accessibility would greatly improve. It is in that spirit that I give you my hopes, not predictions, for WWDC 2020. This "wishlist" will be separated into headings based on the operating system, and further divided into subsections of that operating system. After WWDC, I will revisit this post, and updated it with notes on WWDC if things change on the wishlist, and then do a post containing more notes and findings from the event.

## MacOS

MacOS is Apple's general computer (desktop/laptop) operating system. With much tried and true frameworks and programs, it is a reliable system for most people. It even has functions that Windows doesn't, like the ability to select text anywhere and have that text spoken immediately, no screen reader needed, and remap keyboard modifier keys, and system wide spell checking. These help me greatly in all of my work.

Its screen reader is VoiceOver. It's like VoiceOver on the iPhone, but made for a complex operating system, and has some complex keyboard commands. Accessibility, like anywhere else, is not perfect on the Mac. There are bugs that have stood for a long time, and new bugs that I fear will hang around. There are also features that I'd love to see added, to make the Mac even better.

In short, MacOS accessibility isn't a toy. I want the Mac to be treated like it's worth something . From the many bugs, to missing features, the Mac really needs some love accessibility-wise. Many tech "reporters" say that the Mac is a grown and stable operating system. For blind people, though, the Mac is shriveled and stale.

### Catalyst needs an accessibility boost

"Catalyst" is Apple's bridge between iPad apps and Mac apps. It allows developers, Apple included, to bring iPad apps to the Mac. Started in MacOS Mojave with Apple's own apps, Catalyst accessibility was... serviceable. It wasn't great, but there wasn't anything we couldn't do with the apps. It just wasn't the best experience. The apps were very flat, and one needed to use the VoiceOver custom actions menu, without the ability to use letter navigation, to select actions like one would using the "actions" rotor on the iPad.

Now, in Catalina, the Catalyst technology is available for third-party developers, but accessibility issues still remain. The apps don't feel like Mac apps at all, not even Apple's own apps. So, in MacOS 10.16, I hope to see at least Apple's own apps be much more accessible, especially if the Messages app will be an iPad catalyst app.

### VoiceOver needs a queue

Screen readers convey information through speech, usually. This isn't new for people who are blind, but what may be new is that they manage what is spoken using a queue. This means that when you're playing a game and new text appears, the screen reader doesn't interrupt itself from speaking the important description of the environment just to speak that an unimportant NPC just came into the area.

VoiceOver, sadly, does not have this feature, or if it does, it hardly ever uses it. Now, it looks like the speech synthesis architecture has

=> https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/avspeechsynthesizer a queue built in (HTTP)

so VoiceOver should be using this to great effect. But it isn't. This means that doing anything complex in the Terminal app is unproductive. Even using web apps, which have VoiceOver speak events, can be frustrating when VoiceOver interrupts itself to say "loading new tweets" and such. It was so bad that the VoiceOver team had to give the option for a sound to play instead of the "one row added" notification for the mail app.

This is a large oversight, and it has gone on long enough. So, in MacOS 10.16, I desperately hope that VoiceOver can finally manage speech like a true screen reader, with a speech queue.

### Insertion point at... null

Long time Apple fans may know what the insertion point is. For Windows, Android, and Linux users, it is the cursor, or Point. It is where you insert text. On Mac and iOS, VoiceOver calls this the insertion point, and it appears in text fields. The only problem is, VoiceOver says it appears on read‐only places, like websites in earlier versions of MacOS 10.15, and emails to this day.

VoiceOver believes that there is an insertion point in the email somewhere, but says that it is at "null", meaning that it is at 0, or doesn't exist. That's because there isn't one. This only appears when you are reading by element, **VO + Right or Left arrow**, and not when you are reading by line with just the up and down arrows, where there is a sort of cursor to keep track of where you are. But this cursor is, most likely, a VoiceOver construct, so it should know that when moving by element, there practically isn't one besides VoiceOver's own "cursor" that is focusing on things.

This bug is embarrassing. I wouldn't want my supervisor seeing this kind of bug in the technology that I use to do professional work. I stress again that the Mac is *not* a toy. Yes, it has "novelty" voices, and yes, some blind people talk like them for fun, or use them in daily work to be silly. I don't, though, because the Mac is my **work** machine. What's a computer, Apple asks? A Mac, that's what! I rely on this computer for my job, and if things don't improve, I'll probably move to Linux, which is the next best option for my workflow. Of course, things there don't improve much either, but at least the screen reader is actually used by its creator and testers, so silly bugs like that don't appear in a **pro** device. So, in MacOS 10.16, I hope that the accessibility team took a long vacation from adding stuff and spent a lot of time on fixing MacOS' VoiceOver so that I can be proud to own a Mac again.

### I need more fingers

The Mac has so many keyboard commands, and letter navigation in all menus and lists make navigating the Mac a breeze. But some of the keyboard commands were clearly made for a desktop machine. I have a MacBook Pro, late 2019 with four Thunderbolt ports, but still the same Function, Control (remapped to escape), Option, Command, Space, Command, Option, Capslock (remapped to control because Emacs), keyboard layout. In order to lock the screen, then, with the normal keyboard layout (without remapping due to the touch bar and Emacs), I'd have to lock the screen by holding the command key with my right thumb, hold control with my left pinkie, and... and... how do I reach the Q? Ah, found it! I think. That may be A, or 1, though.

My point is, we blind people pretty much **always** use the keyboard. sure, we can use the track pad on a Mac, but that's an option, not a requirement like the touch screen of an iPhone. Keyboard commands should be ergonomic, for every Mac model, not just the iMac. So, in Mac OS 10.16, I hope to see more ergonomic keyboard commands for MacBooks. I hope VoiceOver commands become more ergonomic as well, as pressing **Control + Option + Command + 2** or even **Capslock + Command + 2** gets pretty cramped. I know, the Touchbar means less keys, but my goodness I hate using those commands when I need to. And no, having us use the VoiceOver menu isn't a fix. It's a workaround. And no, having us use letter navigation to lock the screen or do any number of hard keyboard commands is not a fix, it's a workaround.

### Find and replace Touchbar with Function keys

I've talked about the Touchbar in earlier articles, so I'll just give an overview here. The Mac does not have a Touchscreen. The Touchscreen is slower for blind people to use, and so is the Touchbar. We can't even customize it, as that part of system preferences is seemingly inaccessible to us. One Mac user said he has answers on how to use it well, but I asked him about it, and haven't seen a reply to my query. For now, then, the Touchbar is useless to me, and blind people who, like me, use their Macs to get work done.

Now, one place it could be good at is in Pages. While in Pages, the Touchbar acts like a row of formatting buttons. But there are keyboard commands for almost all of them, except for adding a heading. If the Touchbar were that useful everywhere else, it may have a place in my workflow. But I write all of my documents, when I can help it, in Markdown or Org-mode, inside Emacs or another text editor. So the Touchbar would be better gone from my MacBook, and replaced by the much more useful function keys, with tactile buttons that do one thing when pressed in each context, and I know what they'll do when pressed.

So, in a new model of the MacBook, I want the **option** to use regular function keys, even if it costs $20 more. Either that, or give me a reason to use this useless touch strip that only acts to eliminate keys that VoiceOver can use and make keyboarding that much more limited. And no, an external keyboard is not a fix. It's a workaround.

### Text formatting with VoiceOver

This applies to both MacOS and iOS, but it'd be more useful on the Mac, so I'm putting it here. As I wrote in my *Writing Richly* post, formatting is important for both reading and writing. I did send Apple feedback based on this, so I hope that in 10.16, I, and all other blind people, are able to read and write with as much access to formatting as sighted people.

### What's that window say?

In MacOS Catalina, Apple added a little‐known feature to VoiceOver: the ability to get a "caption" from any element, or "control", on the screen.

## iOS

### There's nothing on the screen

There are many iOS apps that are very accessible. They work well with VoiceOver, and can be used fine by blind people. However, there are also many which appear blank to VoiceOver, so cannot easily be used. VoiceOver could use its already‐good text recognition technology to scan the entire screen if an element cannot be found with an accessible label, other than the app title. Then, it could get the location of the scanned text and items, and allow a user to feel around the screen to find them.

This could dramatically improve access to everything from games, to utility apps written in an inaccessible framework, like QT. May QT be forgotten, forever. So, in iOS 14, I hope that Apple majorly ramps up its use of AI in VoiceOver. Besides, that would put Google, the AI company, even further to shame, since they don't use AI at all in TalkBack to recognize inaccessible items or images.

## Services

### Apple Arcade for *everyone*

Apple Arcade came out some time last year. 100 games were promised around launch time, and at $5 per month, it is an amazing deal, as you can play these games forever; there is no rotation like in XBox Game Pass. For now, though, there have been no games that blind people can play, so I just canceled my subscription, my hope in Apple dwindling further. So, in this year's WWDC, I hope that Apple not only adds accessible games to Apple Arcade, or even makes a few of their own, but shows them off. People should *know* that Apple truly cares, as much as a 1.5 trillion dollar corporation can, about accessibility and people who are blind, who *cannot* play regular, inaccessible games.

## Conclusion

I hope this article has enlivened your imagination a bit regarding the soon‐to‐be WWDC 2020. I've detailed what I want to see in MacOS, my most often used Apple system, iOS, and Apple's services. Now, what do you want to see? Please, let me know by commenting wherever this article is shared.

Thanks so much for reading my articles. If you have any suggestions, corrections, or other comments, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. I eagerly await your comments.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2020-06-01.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>A Brighter Apple</title>
<updated>2020-04-21T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2020-04-21:/gemlog/blindness/2020-04-21.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># A Brighter Apple



Coding has always been hard for me. I've never been able to get my mind around loops, if and else, for and while, and break almost breaks me instead of the code. However, many people make it look easy, and for them, it probably is. In iOS 14, Apple may loosen their chains upon their technology enough for developers to explore the boundaries of what a pocket computer can do.

Apple is very controlling. All of its operating systems can only run on its own hardware. Its hardware can only be used to practically run officially sanctioned operating systems, unless a Linux user can get passed the security on the Mac. And, for a long time, notwithstanding workarounds that have never been so easy, apps on iOS have only been usable if they were downloaded through Apple's own App Store. In iOS 14, however, things may change for the better.

Earlier this year, Applevis released a blog post about iOS 14 possibly gaining:

=> https://www.applevis.com/blog/apple-reported-be-exploring-ways-let-developers-provide-custom-text-speech-synthesizers-ios Custom Text to Speech engine support (HTTP)

While I won't write about it here, as it seems a minor topic to me, I will say that this is something that the community of blind people have been asking for since VoiceOver revolutionized our lives. Furthermore, though, it is greater evidence that Apple is beginning to open up, just a tad. it isn't, however, the first time we've seen Apple open up, a bit, for accessibility reasons. Apple allows us, in iOS 13, to change VoiceOver commands, and it uses the

=> http://liblouis.org Liblouis braille tables (HTTP)

to display languages in Braille that weren't available before.

In this article, I will discuss and theorize about the availability of

=> https://www.macrumors.com/2020/04/21/rumor-mobile-version-of-xcode-for-ipad/ XCode on iOS (HTTP)

which is supposedly going to be released this year, and how it can help people learn to code, bring

=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideloading sideloading (HTTP)

to many more people, and how it can bring emulation in full force to iOS.

## Learning to code on iOS

As I've said before, coding has never been easy for me. My skills are still very much at the beginner level. I can write "print" statements in Python, and maybe in Swift, but languages like Quorum, Java, and C++ are so verbose and require much more forethought than Python. Swift seems a bit like Python, although just as complex as Java and more verbose languages when one becomes more advanced.

With XCode on the Mac, accessibility isn't great. Editing text is okay, but even viewing output seems impossible on first look, and I'm still not sure if it can even be done. This means that the

=> https://books.apple.com/book/id1118575552 Intro to App development with Swift (HTTP)

Playground materials are inaccessible. This has been verified today with the XCode 10 version. Sure, we can read the source code, but cannot directly activate the "next" link to move to the next page. And no, workarounds are not equal access. Furthermore, neither teachers nor students should have to look for workarounds to use a course created by Apple, one of the richest companies in the world, whose accessibility team is great, for iOS.

Because of this, I expect XCode for iOS will be a new beginning, of sorts, for all teams who work on it, not just the accessibility team. It will be a way for new, young developers to come to coding on their phone, or more probably, their iPad, without the history of workarounds that many developers on the Mac who are blind know today. It will also allow blind developers to create powerful, accessible apps. If it is true that Macs will run Apple's own "A" processor someday, then perhaps this XCode for iOS will move to the Mac, as Apple TV is attempting to do. Hopefully, by then, iOS apps on the Mac will actually be usable, instead of messes, accessibility-wise.

Windows users also cannot currently officially code for iOS. Most blind users have a Windows computer and an iPhone. Having XCode on iOS will allow more blind people, who are good at coding, to try their hand at developing iOS apps. This could also bring more powerful apps, as blind Windows users are used to the power of programs like Foobar2000, NVDA addons, and lots of choice.

Another benefit of having XCode on iOS is that, because of the number of users, there will be even more people working on open source projects, which they could easily download and import into XCode. For example, perhaps

=> https://github.com/hrydgard/ppsspp/issues/11696 PPSSPP User Interface accessibility (HTTP)

could be improved, or the Delta emulator could become

=> https://github.com/rileytestut/DeltaCore/issues/13 completely accessible and groundbreaking (HTTP)

Of course, closed source app development could be aided by this as well, but it is harder to join, or make, a closed source development team than it is to contribute to an open source one.

## Sideloading with XCode

Sideloading is the process of running apps on iOS which are not accepted by the iOS App Store. These include video game console emulators, torrent downloaders, and apps which allow users to watch "free" movies and TV shows. The last set of apps, I agree, shouldn't be on the app store, but the first two are not illegal, but simply could facilitate illegal operations; pun intended.

Sideloading can be done in many ways. You can load the XCode project into XCode for Mac, build it, and send it to your own device. This must be renewed every seven days, but is the most difficult technically to do. You can sign up for a third-party app store, which allows you to download apps which are hosted elsewhere and may not be the latest version, but there is a good chance that the certificate which they use to sign the app will be revoked by Apple. Finally, there are a few apps which automate the signing of apps, and pushes the app to the device.

Two of these methods, however, require a Mac computer. Many people, especially blind people, only use a Windows computer and an iPhone. This usually isn't a problem, as most blind people either use their phone for much of what they do, or use their computer for much of what they do. However, this means that people who have Windows, but not a Mac, cannot sideload apps using all three methods. So, if a blind person creates an extension to alert you that your screen curtain isn't on, which means that a VoiceOver user doesn't have a feature enabled so that the screen is blank, that app cannot be distributed on the App Store, and cannot be sideloaded by Windows users. And I highly doubt a third-party app store would host such a niche app.

## Emulating with XCode

Emulators were once a legal gray area. They allow gamers to play video games, from game consoles like the Playstation Portable, on computers, tablets, or phones. They have become legal, however, due to Sony's

=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_Inc._v._Connectix_Corp. lawsuits of emulator developers (HTTP)

While emulation is legal, however, downloading games from the Internet, unless, some say, you own the game, is not. Steve Jobs himself, at the 1999 MacWorld conference,

=> https://youtu.be/vN2vxYnAZf0?t=5038 showed off an emulator (HTTP)

one for playing Playstation games. Now, emulators are not allowed onto the iOS App Store, unless they have been made by the developers of the games which are being emulated.

XCode on iOS would also help in emulator use. The more people use emulators, the more their use will spread. iPhones are also definitely powerful enough to run emulators; the newer the iPhone, the faster the emulation. An iPhone X R, for example, is powerful enough to run a Playstation Portable game at full speed, even while not being optimized for the hardware, and being interpreted. It's like running nearly a PS3 game using Python.

=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVkYhCmq-dI A video I made (HTTP)

demonstrates this. The game, Dissidia DuoDecim, isn't as accessible as its predecessor. However, it runs, as far as I could tell, at full speed. This spectacularly shows that the computers in our pockets, the ones we use to drone over Facebook, be riled up by news sites, or play Pokemon Go, are much more powerful, and are capable of far more than what we use of them.

Also, since blind people will have access to the code ran with XCode, fixes to sound, the user interface, and even enhancements to both, are possible. PSP games could be enhanced using Apple's

=> https://developer.apple.com/audio/ 3D audio effects (HTTP)

Games could be described using Apple's

=> https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision Machine Learning Vision (HTTP)

technology. This applies to even more than accessibility, however. Since more users will be learning to code, or finally have the ability to code for iOS, bugs in iOS ports of open source software can more quickly be resolved.

## Conclusion

In this article, I have discussed the possibility of XCode for iOS, and how it could improve learning to code, sideloading apps, and emulation of video games. I hope that this information has been informative, and has enlivened the imaginations of my readers.

Now, what do you all think? Are you a blind person who wants to learn to code in an accessible environment? Are you a sighted person who wants to play Final Fantasy VII on your phone? Or are you one who wants to help fix accessibility issues in apps? Discussion is very welcome, anywhere this post is shared to. I welcome any feedback, input, or corrections. And, as always, thank you so much for reading this article.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2020-04-21.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>Writing Richly</title>
<updated>2020-04-16T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2020-04-16:/gemlog/blindness/2020-04-16.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Writing Richly


description: Why Markdown system wide can improve writing and reading

Whenever you read a text message, forum post, Tweet, or Facebook status, have you ever seen some one surround a word with stars, like *this*? Have you noticed some one surround a phrase with two stars? This is Markdown, a form of formatting text for web usage.

I believe, however, that Markdown deserves more than just web usage. I can write in Markdown in this blog, I can use it on Github, and even in a few social networks. But wouldn’t it be even more useful everywhere? If we could write in Markdown throughout the whole operating system, couldn’t we be more expressive? And for accessibility issues, Markdown is great because a blind person can just write to format, instead of having to deal with clunky, slow interfaces.

So, in this article, I will discuss the importance of rich text, how Markdown could empower people with disabilities, and how it could work system-wide throughout all computers, even the ones in our pockets.

## What’s this rich text and who needs all that?

Have you ever written in Notepad? It’s pretty plain, isn’t it? That is plain text. No bold, no italics, no underline, nothing. Just, if you like that, plain, simple text. If you don’t like plain text, you find yourself wanting more power, more ability to link things together, more ways to describe your text and make the medium, in some ways, a way to get the message across.

Because of this need, rich text was created. One can use this in Word Pad, Microsoft Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice, or any other word processor worth something. When I speak of rich text, to make things simple, I mean anything that is not plain text, including HTML, as it describes rich text. Rich text is in a lot of places now, yes, but it is not everywhere, and is not the same in the places that it is in.

So, who needs all that? Why not just stick with plain text? I mean come on man, you’re blind! You can’t see the rich text. In a way, this is true. I cannot see the richness of text, but in a moment, we’ll get to how that can be done. But for sighted people, which text message is better?

Okay, but how’s your day going?

Okay, but how’s *your* day going? (original post had “your” in actual italics, with the third line showing the italics stars)

	Okay, but how’s *your* day going?

For blind people, the second message has the word “your” italicized. Sure, we may have gotten used to stars surrounding words meaning something, but that is a workaround, and not nearly the optimal outcome of rich text.

So what can you do with Markdown? You can do plenty of stuff. You could use it for simply using one blank line between blocks of text to show paragraphs in your journal. You could use it to create headings for chapters in your book. You could use it to make links to websites in your email. You could even simply use it to italicize an emphasized word in a text. Markdown can be as little or as much as you need it to. And if you don’t add any stars, hashes, dashes, brackets, or HTML markup, it’s just as it is, plain text.

Also, it doesn’t have to be hard. Even Emacs, an advanced text editor, gives you questions when you add a link, like “Link text,” “Link address,” and so on. Questions like that can be asked of you, and you simply fill in the information, and the Markdown is created for you.

## Okay but what about us blind people?

To put it simply, Markdown shows us rich text. In the next section, I’ll talk about how, but for now, let’s focus on why. With nearly all screen readers, text formatting is not shown to us. Only Narrator on Windows 10 shows formatting with minimal configuration, and JAWS can be used to show formatting using much configuration of speech and sound schemes.

But, do we want that kind of information? I think so. Why wouldn’t we want to know exactly what a sighted person sees, in a way that we can easily, and quickly, understand? Why would we not want to know what an author intended us to know in a book? We accept formatting symbols in Braille, and even expect it. So, why not in digital form?

NVDA on Windows can be set to speak formatting information as we read, but it can be bold on quite arduous to hear italics on all this italics off as we read what we write bold off. Orca can speak formatting like NVDA, as well. VoiceOver on the Mac can be set to speak formatting, like NVDA, and also has the ability to make a small sound when it encounters formatting. This is better, but how would one distinguish bold, italics, or underline from a simple color change?

Even VoiceOver on iOS, which arguably gets much more attention than its Mac sibling, cannot read formatting information. The closest we get is the phrase separated from the rest of the paragraph into its own item, showing that it’s different, in Safari and other web apps. But how is it different? What formatting was applied to this “different” text? Otherwise, text is plain, so no blind people even know that there is a possibility of formatting, let alone that that formatting isn’t made known to us by the program tasked with giving us this information. In some apps, like notes, one can get some formatting information by reading line by line in the Note text field, but what if one simply wants to read the whole thing?

Okay but what about writing rich text? I mean, you just hit a hotkey and it works, so what could be better than that? First, when you press Control + I to italicize, there is no guarantee that “italics on” will be spoken. In fact, that is the case in LibreOffice for Windows: you do not know if the toggle key toggled the formatting on or off. You could write some text, select it, then format it, but again, you don’t know if you just italicized that text, or removed the italics. You may be able to check formatting with your screen reader’s command, but that’s slow, and you would hate to do that all throughout the document. Furthermore, dealing with spoken formatting as it is, it takes some time to read your formatted text. Hearing descriptions of formatting changes tires the mind, as it must interpret the fast-paced speech, get a sense of formatting flipped from off to on, and quickly return to interpreting text instead of text formatting instruction. Also, because all text formatting changes are spoken like the text surrounding it, you may have to slow down your speech just to get somewhat ahead of things enough to not grow tired from the relentless text streaming through your mind. This could be the case with star star bold or italics star star, and if screen readers would use more fine control of the pauses of a speech synthesizer, a lot of the exhausting sifting through of information which is rapidly fired at us would be lessened, but I don’t see much of that happening any time soon.

Even on iOS, where things are simpler, one must deal with the same problems as on other systems, except knowing if formatting is turned on or off before writing. There is also the problem of using the touch screen, using menus just to select to format a heading. This can be worked around using a Bluetooth keyboard, if the program you’re working in even has a keyboard command to make a heading, but not everyone has, or wants, one of those.

Markdown fixes, at least, most of this. We can *write* in Markdown, controlling our formatting exactly, and *read* in Markdown, getting much more information than we ever have before, while also getting less excessive textual information, hearing “star” instead of “italics on” and “italics off” does make a difference. “Star” is not usually read surrounding words, and has already become, in a sense, a formatting term. “Italics on” sounds like plain text, is not a symbol, and while it is a formatting term, has many syllables, and just takes time to say. Coupled with the helpfulness of Markdown for people without disabilities, adding it across an entire operating system would be useful for *everyone*; not just the few people with disabilities, and not just for the majority without.

## So, how could this work?

Operating systems, the programs which sit between you and the programs you run, has many layers and parts working together to make the experience as smooth as the programmers know how. In order for Markdown to be understood, there must be a part of the operating system that translates it into something that the thing that displays text understands. Furthermore, this thing must be able to display the resulting rich text, or Markdown interpretation, throughout the whole system, not just in Google Docs, not just in Pages, not just in Word, but in Note Pad, in Messages, in Notes, in a search box.

With that implemented, though, how should it be used? I think that there should be options. It’s about time some companies released their customers from the “one size fits all” mentality anyway. There should be an option to replace formatting done with Markdown with rich text unless the line the formatting is on has input focus, a mode for simply showing the Markdown only and no rich text, and an option for showing both.

For sighted people, I imagine seeing Markdown would be distracting. They want to see a heading, not the hash mark that makes the line a heading. So, hide Markdown unless that heading line is navigated to.

For blind people, or for people who find plain text easier to work with, and for whom the display of text in different sizes and font faces is jarring or distracting, having Markdown only would be great, while being translated for others to see as rich text. Blind people could write in Markdown, and others can see it as rich text, while the blind person sees simply what they wrote, in Markdown.

For some people, being able to see both would be great. Being able to see the Markdown they write, along with the text that it produces, could be a great way for users to become more comfortable with Markdown. It could be used for beginners to rich text editing, as well.

### But, which version of Markdown should be used?

As with every open source, or heatedly debated, thing in this world, there are many ways of doing things. Markdown is no different. There is:

=> https://github.com/mmark-md/mmark strict Markdown (HTTP)
=> https://commonmark.org Common Mark (HTTP)
=> https://github.github.com/gfm/ Github Flavored Markdown (HTTP)
=> https://nshipster.com/swift-documentation/ Swift Markdown (HTTP)
=> https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html Pandoc Markdown (HTTP)

and probably many others. I think that Pandoc’s Markdown would be the best, most extended variant to use, but I know that most operating system developers will stick with their own. Apple will stick with Swift Markdown, Microsoft may stick with Github Markdown, and the Linux developers may use Pandoc, if Pandoc is available as a package on the user’s architecture, and if not, then it’s some one else’s issue.

## Conclusion

In this article, I have attempted to communicate the importance of rich text, why Markdown would make editing rich text easy for everyone, including people with disabilities, and how it could be implemented. So now, what do you all think? Would Markdown be helpful for you? Would writing blog posts, term papers, journal entries, text messages, notes, or Facebook posts be enhanced by Markdown rich text? For blind people, would reading books, articles, or other text, and hearing the Markdown for bold, italics, and other such formatting make the text stand out more, make it more beautiful to you, or just get in your way? For developers, what would it take to add Markdown support to an operating system, or even your writing app? How hard will it be?

Please, let me know your thoughts, using the contact info, or replying to the posts on social media made about this article. And, as always, thank you so much for reading this post.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2020-04-16.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>Apple’s Ecosystem and Accessibility</title>
<updated>2020-03-27T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2020-03-27:/gemlog/blindness/2020-03-27.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># Apple’s Ecosystem and Accessibility

Earlier this year, my Airpods Pro began making a clicking sound, when in Noise Cancellation or transparency mode. I didn’t think much of it, and just used them regularly, until sound began distorting after a while of listening. I’ve simply stopped using them, as I shudder to think how much a cab ride to the nearest Apple Store, potentially an hour away, would cost. This is only one problem with the Apple ecosystem: being locked into Apple’s wireless headphones, other Bluetooth headphones, or other workarounds, and Apple Stores being far away, which is what I’ll be focusing on in this article. I will show, in the following paragraphs, how Apple’s handling of its ecosystem effects the hardware and software regarding accessibility matters. These matters may effect some in the general population, but people with disabilities are effected much more acutely.

## Hardware

Apple’s hardware has usually been very well built. Reviewers often talk about nothing else. From the iPhone’s camera, iPad’s screen, Mac’s CPU and RAM, to the Watch’s health sensors, and the Airpod’s H1 chip, hardware, for Apple, is a big part of their products, and reviewers focus on that. But how does that help or hinder accessibility?

### The TouchBar on the Mac

In late 2016, Apple’s

=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro MacBook Pro (HTTP)

gained the

=> https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/touch-bar-mchlbfd5b039/mac Touch Bar (HTTP)

a touch strip across the top of the keyboard, replacing the function keys. The reason was to add variable icons which could visibly change functions across the operating system. Many people may have liked this change, as they could use hand-eye coordination to perform functions they otherwise would have used the trackpad and menus for. These type of users would not have known about keyboard shortcuts, using the function keys, and other easy ways of getting the same functions done without needing yet another touch input.

Blind people, however, are a bit different. We usually know many keyboard shortcuts, use the function keys without a problem, and do not always need a touch screen. The Touch Bar can be used, but it is much slower, as we have no tactile way of finding just one distinct item on the touch bar, like the play/pause button, or the volume slider. Once we have found the function we want, we must tap it twice to activate, like a sighted person must left click twice, once to focus the item, the next to activate it. In fact, VoiceOver, the screen reader for the Mac, had to adopt a command to raise or lower the volume via keyboard, since it is slower to do so on the Touch Bar. On the other hand, most operating system and application features can be accessed via keyboard commands, so I only need to use the Touch Bar for system functions like volume, brightness of the screen, and media playback when I’m not in the media player.

If a blind person wants to use their Mac as a Windows machine also, through Bootcamp, they must attach an external keyboard, or simply not use the function keys, as Windows screen readers have no such notion of a Touch Bar function key row, thus will not read what a user is selecting, and will also not let a user explore the touch bar to find a function before activating them, so one touch activates an item, even if it isn’t the one a user wants. See

=> https://www.applevis.com/forum/macbook-pro-touch-bar-windows-10 this Applevis forum post (HTTP)

for more information on this.

I feel that Apple should have made this change on the MacBook Air, for regular consumers, and left the Pro machines alone. Yes, they could have made the power button into the Touch ID button on the pro machines, and I hope that, just as they revived the scissor-switch keyboards, they revive the Function keys as well. It would help me greatly in doing even simple tasks easier, like pausing, skipping, and rewinding audio, and handling volume and brightness more quickly.

There is still hope, however. This year, Apple released the MacBook Air refresh with the new keyboard. It has an Escape key, at least. Now, they just need to add back the other twelve keys on that row, and things will be back to normal.

## The headphone jack

In 2016’s iPhone 7 and 7+, Apple removed the headphone jack, replacing it with their own Airpods, other Bluetooth headphones, and Lightning audio. They did not add another Lightning port onto the phone so that one could listen to wired headphones and charge the phone at the same time, or, as they did with the TouchBar on the MacBook, but left people to choose between wireless options if one wanted to be able to listen and charge the phone.

For most people, this isn’t an issue. They don’t usually need
headphones, only using them when listening to music or movies, or
playing games. Even then, some people just listen on speakers built
into their phone, or use external speakers, like the HomePod. They
also do not have to worry about latency. Music is not effected by it,
and videos are usually delayed, so that the picture synchronizes with
the audio.

For blind people, however, headphones are important. In order to use
an iPhone, most blind people use a screen reader, which speaks
information out loud using a voice like the one Siri uses. Using a
screen reader without headphones means that anyone nearby can hear
what the user’s phone is saying, which can reveal sensitive
information like the phone numbers of people who call or text the
person, user passwords, and even the pass code to their phone. This
means that headphones are quite necessary. Some blind people own
Braille displays, which gets output from a screen reader and displays
it in braille, but these devices are expensive, starting at $600, up
to near $6000, so are out of most blind people’s price ranges.

Wireless headphones, using Bluetooth, often have large lags when being
used. If you play a game using them, you’ll surely notice it. A blind
person who uses Bluetooth headphones must deal with that for all
interactions with the phone. Imagine having to deal with a phone with
a screen that lags behind what you’re doing on the phone, even by 300
Milliseconds. Some Bluetooth headphones are better, but none can match
wired ones. Apple’s Airpods 2 and Airpods Pro come closer, but have
their own problems: they still must be charged, have lesser battery
life, and cost much for the sound quality they come with.

To solve all of these problems, I have bought a $10 Lightning to 3.5
Millimeter Headphone adapter, and use that with the headphones that I
already have. Sure, I have to take my iPhone with me in my pocket
wherever I go, but I usually do that anyways now that my Apple Watch
is broken also. Sure, I don’t have my Lightning connector free, but I
have a charging mat that I use to charge the phone. There is no lag
when using VoiceOver, the sound quality is very good, and I don’t have
to charge my headphones.

Hope is not lost, however. There is a

=> https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-iphone-13-rumor-wireless-no-lightning-charging-port-2019-12 rumor (HTTP)

that iPhones could be completely wireless. Of course, one still must plug the iPhone into a computer, so it could be like the older MacBook products with a magnetic spot to plug dongles into. In this case, a third-party dongle could add the Lightning and headphone jack back to the iPhone.

## The Home button and TouchID

In 2017, Apple shipped the iPhone X, the first iPhone without a home button. This was meant to extend the iPhone’s screen completely across the bottom of the screen, even though they had to notch the screen at the top. Along with the removal of the home button, they added FaceID. This replaced TouchID as the authentication method for unlocking the device in general usage of the phone.

Most users do not have a problem with FaceID. They raise the phone to look at it, and as they look at the camera, the phone unlocks. They can then swipe the lock screen away from the bottom, revealing the home screen. For sighted users, this is a quick, easy, and intuitive motion.

For blind people, it isn’t so simple. We do not have to look at our phones in order to use them. In fact, users with braille displays or hardware, Bluetooth keyboards, do not have to touch their phone. These users can easily and quickly enter their pass codes, however, so they usually are not effected by this. Most users must pick up the phone, wait for the unlock sound from the screen reader, then put it back down on the surface they were using it on before. If FaceID doesn’t work, they must angle the phone away and back again for another try. if it fails a few more times, they must enter their pass code, with headphones in, if they seek to preserve their privacy around others.

Hope is not lost, however. There is a

=> https://www.imore.com/iphone-9 rumor (HTTP)

that a new iPhone SE type device, the iPhone 9, could be released this year with a home button, TouchID, and still sport the A13 CPU. This would be something that I myself may purchase, as I doubt there will be much greater features in the iPhone 12, released later this year.

## Software

Apple’s software usually comes last in reviews. Reviewers may talk about the smooth animations, camera machine learning effects, or updates to apps. For users of Apple’s accessibility services, however, software is the core experience of a device, and what sets MacOS apart from Windows and Linux, and iOS apart from Android. I have covered Apple’s accessibility options extensively

=> accessibility-consistency elsewhere

so I will use this section to highlight parts of software which effect accessibility indirectly.

### Gatekeeper on MacOS

For a pro machine, the Mac lately has become a mess of confirmation dialog boxes and hindrances to opening software not blessed by Apple or its notarization process. For most users, even most blind users, this won’t be much of an issue. If you use Apple’s apps, or apps from the App Store, you’ll be fine. But what happens when you want to use, say, Emacs for editing text, or Retroarch for playing video games?

Blind people sometimes use specialized software to complete tasks. We use apps on our phones for recognizing pictures, money, and images of text, since these are not usually accessible to us. On the Mac, I use

=> https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ Emacs (HTTP)

for editing text, using the

https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak Emacspeak (HTTP)

extension, because I find it much easier and more enjoyable than Text Edit, Pages, and other alternatives. In fact, I am using Emacs right now, to write, and publish, this blog post. However, this program is not notarized by Apple’s processes, so instead of just being able to open it, I must open it from the contextual menu, press “Cancel,” then open it again, and press “Open.” My laptop is a pro machine; I should be treated as a professional. These features, as with the Touch Bar, should be left to MacBook Air users, or left for iPad users, when, or if, the iPad becomes a general-purpose computer.

## Conclusion

In this article, I’ve explored how some of Apple’s decisions across its ecosystem have effected accessibility. Hardware has changed much, with software mainly being usable besides accessibility bugs and overbearing security. More about direct accessibility in software and services can be found in other articles. Other, smaller issues include the lack of Apple Stores is smaller cities, turning on iPhone not producing a vibration, sound, or other way for a blind person to immediately know when it has turned on, and the Mac’s startup chime disabled by default.

Now, what do you think, readers? I’d love to have your feedback, and thank you for reading.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2020-03-27.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>[title: open source news...]</title>
<updated>2020-03-07T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2020-03-07:/gemlog/blindness/2020-03-07.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain">title: open source news


This article will be something rather different from my normal postings. I’ve decided to begin doing news posts, rather than just my ramblings. Oh, there will still be rambles, as I have an opinion on everything, and readers might as well know the person I am, to understand more about my viewpoint, to gauge the content relative to the content writer.

The scope of the news will vary, but I expect it to be mostly open source technology, relevant to the blind community. This may change, as readers may always contact me requesting that I write articles or news items about subjects. I will let the folks at

=> https://www.blindbargains.com Blind Bargains (HTTP)

chase after Humanware, Vispero, HIMS, and other such “big names” in the Assistive Technology world. I seek for my content to be different, meaningful, and lacking the comedic nature of Podcasts for the blind. Yes, I do have a slight grudge against larger sites who can dictate, pretty well without fail, what readers know about. After all, if a blind person only listens to the Blind Bargains podcast, or even reads their news posts, will they know about these advancements, like retroarch accessibility, Stormux, and so on? In any case, with that out of the way, let’s be on with the news.

## Retroarch is accessible

Retroarch, the program that brings many video game emulators together into one unified interface, was made accessible in December 2019. Along with its ability to grab text from the screen of games and speak it, this brings accessibility to many games, on all 3 major operating systems for desktop and laptop computers. No, Android and iOS cannot benefit from this yet. Also, there is more to come.

For a detailed page on using Retroarch for the blind, see

https://docs.libretro.com/guides/retroarch-accessibility-guide/ this guide (HTTP)

## GTK 4 could be more accessible

This year, folks from GTK met with some accessibility advocates. They came up with

=> https://blog.gtk.org/2020/02/17/gtk-hackfest-2020-roadmap-and-accessibility/ this roadmap (HTTP)

for better accessibility. GTK is the way some Linux apps are given graphical representations, like buttons, check boxes, and so on. As I always say, the operating system is the root of accessibility, and the stronger that root is, the more enjoyable it will be for blind people to use Linux.

I hope that this will bring much more accessibility to GTK programs, and get rid of a lot of reasons to stick with Mac or Windows for many more technically inclined blind people, like myself. Yes, even I have reservations about using it. Will it be good enough? Will I be able to get work done? Will I be able to play the game I like most? Will it require a lot of work? At least with better GTK accessibility, a few of those questions will be better answered affirmatively.

## Mate 1.24 brings greater accessibility

Last month, Mate released

=> https://mate-desktop.org/blog/2020-02-10-mate-1-24-released/ version 1.24 (HTTP)

of its desktop environment, which is basically like a version of the Windows desktop, handling the start menu, task bar, and other such aspects of a graphical interface. Mate uses a system more like Windows XP, while other desktops, like Gnome, are more new in their approaches.

Just search for “accessibility” on the linked page, and you’ll find quite a few improvements. This is a great sign; I really like it when organizations, or companies, display their accessibility commitment proudly in updates, and not just the bland “bug fixes and performance improvements” mantra tiredly used in most change logs today.

## Stormux: a distribution which might stick around

After the quiet death of

=> https://f123.org/en/ F123

a contributor to the blind Linux community, Storm, created a fork of F123, calling it

https://stormux.org/welcome-to-stormux/ Stormux (HTTP)

The project is new, and still has a few problems, but is designed to be a jumping off point into Arch Linux, which is a more advanced, but very up-to-date, variant of Linux. It is only available for the Raspberry Pi 4 computer for now, and I will have a chance to test it soon. The website is as new as the software, so the

=> https://stormux.org/downloads/ downloads section (HTTP)

is not linked to the main page, neither is much else. In the coming months, both the website and operating system should see some development.

## Conclusion

This has been my first news article on this blog. I hope to write more of these, along with my normal posts, as new developments occur. However, I cannot know about everything, so if one of my readers finds or creates something new, and wishes for it to be written about and possibly read, please let me know. I will not turn away anyone because of obscurity or lack of general perceived interest.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2020-03-07.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>quick apple update</title>
<updated>2020-03-03T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2020-03-03:/gemlog/blindness/2020-03-03.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># quick apple update


In a

=> accessibility-consistency.gmi previous blog post

I talked about Apple having a few problems to fix. Last month, they fixed one of them, being Apple Research. The hearing study now will have accessible hearing tests and questions. Focus is still a little jumpy in the Heart and Movement study questions, and my watch screen has become a moving part so I can’t participate in that study completely, or track my sleep accurately, but getting transportation to the Apple Store is something I’ve covered well on Twitter already.

So, thanks so much to the people at Apple who handled the Research accessibility to this point, and may it become even better, reversing the trend started with the inaccessibility of Apple Arcade.
</content>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2020-03-03.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title></title>
<updated>2020-02-23T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2020-02-23:/gemlog/blindness/2020-02-23.gmi</id>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2020-02-23.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title></title>
<updated>2020-02-20T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2020-02-20:/gemlog/blindness/2020-02-20.gmi</id>
<link href="//devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/blindness/2020-02-20.gmi" rel="alternate"></link>
<summary type="text/plain"></summary>
<title>open source blindness</title>
<updated>2020-02-16T00:00:00Z</updated>
<id>tag:devinprater.flounder.online,2020-02-16:/gemlog/blindness/2020-02-16.gmi</id>
<content type="text/plain"># open source blindness


What if all of your software were free, like NVDA? What if the only thing asked of you by software makers was to donate or contribute? How would this effect your life, and the lives of developers? In this article, I will explain what open source is, what it is currently used for, my experiences with it, and how you can make it better.

## What is Open Source?

Open source is a splinter of the

=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement Free Software movement (HTTP)

The Free Software movement believes that everyone should be able to view a program's code, and modify it if needed. The thing which sets open source apart is that it doesn't mind working with companies which create closed source, or proprietary, software which cannot be modified or have its source code seen by the user.

When free and open source spokespeople talk about freedom, they mean free as in free speech, not as in free things. This talk of freedom upsets business, so the term "open source" is used instead. Much open source software is free of cost, with the developers asking for donation instead of demanding payment.

## What is Open Source used for?

Open source software is just about everywhere, and often comes with a tightly knit community of users. Examples of open source in the blind community include:

=> https://www.nvaccess.org/about-nvda/ NVDA (HTTP)
=> https://www.libreoffice.org LibreOffice (HTTP)
=> https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca Orca Screen Reader (HTTP)
=> https://brailleblaster.org BrailleBlaster (HTTP)
=> http://liblouis.org LibLouis (HTTP)
=> https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak Emacspeak (HTTP)

Examples of closed source include:

=> https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/ JAWS (HTTP)
=> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17173/windows-10-hear-text-read-aloud Narrator (HTTP)
=> https://www.apple.com/accessibility/iphone/vision/ VoiceOver (HTTP)
=> https://support.google.com/accessibility/android/answer/6283677?hl=en TalkBack (HTTP)
=> https://duxburysystems.com Duxberry Braille Translator (HTTP)

iOS, Windows, and plenty of apps you may have on your iPhone or Android phone.

Interestingly, some projects are a mixture of both. JAWS incorporates Liblouis for braille translation, and so do Narrator and VoiceOver. Apple uses plenty of open source tools: Python, command line shells, and many command line tools on MacOS. Microsoft makes BRLTTY and Liblouis available for download to interface with Narrator.

Linux, which founded many offshoots, is an entire operating system built on open source ideals. Blind people began customizing Linux for use with speech, and work is ongoing to make Linux an accessible operating system. This began with

=> https://wiki.vinuxproject.org Vinux (HTTP)

It started up talking, something no other system had done before. One could use it with speech or braille, and used the eSpeak voices.

That operating system, or distribution of Linux as they are called, is now abandoned, not having been updated in years. Another project

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=sonar Sonar Gnu Linux (HTTP)

also came and went. It was based on Arch Linux, and was my favorite distribution. People now use

https://talkingarch.info/download.html Talking Arch (HTTP)

or

https://tarch.org Tarch (HTTP)

if they are adventurous and

https://slint.fr/wiki/doku.php?id=en:installation Slint Linux (HTTP)

if they aren't. These are the most popular Linux distributions for those who are blind. If I've missed anything, let me know. Some distributions which were not made for the blind are also accessible.

=> https://getfedora.org Fedora (HTTP)
=> https://trisquel.info Trisquel (HTTP)
=> https://www.debian.org Debian (HTTP)
=> https://ubuntu.com Ubuntu (HTTP)

are also able to be installed, but the user must know the correct keyboard command to turn on the screen reader.

Most open source software can be found on

=> https://github.com Github (HTTP)

That's where NVDA, Orca, and many other tools, even for the blind, are. But how reliable are these tools? What about the operating system? Could one get rid of Windows with this software founded on ideals?

## My experiences with Open Source

### Linux

Accessibility is a software issue, so the root of software, the operating system, will make or break any accessibility. My experiences with Linux began, mainly, with an old operating system called Vinux. I didn't stick with it for long, and soon forgot about it, and it is now abandoned. Linux can run many different desktops, which give users the major system functions of accessing apps and system utilities. Gnome and Mate are accessible, just about everything else, for now, including KDE, isn't. Vinux used Gnome 2, which is basically what Mate is now.

I came back to Linux for a short while with Sonar. I really liked it, but missed the games and speech options Windows had. I liked all the software that we have access to on Windows, and browsing the Internet with Linux wasn't that good back then. I soon got into the Apple ecosystem with an iPhone and such, and already had a Mac for quite a while. Still, Linux called to me.

I'm never satisfied with the workflow I have. I always want to be more efficient, more quick, more capable in what I do. I always want better sound, even if 3D effects and virtual surround sound aren't actually necessary or real. Like a sighted person wants great graphics, I want great sound. On Linux, there is a way to enable virtual surround sound, but it offers little reward, and much configuration, crackling in audio, and doesn't augment stereo audio as options on other systems does. The Mac has a third-party option,

=> https://www.globaldelight.com/boom/ Boom 3D (HTTP)

and Windows has

=> https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-windows-sonic-windows-10-creators-update Windows Sonic for Headphones (HTTP)

Both of these require nearly no configuration, augments much more audio, and only Boom 3D causes a bit of sluggishness.

I also want a faster way of doing things. Many keyboard shortcuts, letter navigation of items in lists and menus, and ways of only getting the information I want. I have much of this on the Mac, with the Mail app allowing me, through table navigation, to speed through subjects instead of having to hear the row titles and contents and all before what I really want to hear, and being able to go to the previous or next message in a thread without needing to close the window. Linux has some of this, but many times things are unclear, with Orca, the Linux screen reader, just speaking the items, and not what type of item it is. This is clear in the area of Audacious settings where you choose sound effects.

Even so, Linux has such an appeal to me. I have tried Fedora Linux, Slint, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, and found that there is always something missing. Accessibility isn't that good in the graphical interface, and much still takes a lot of configuring and asking the community. And I really hate asking for help.

Recently, the

=> https://mate-desktop.org Mate Desktop (HTTP)

team has released a version with accessibility fixes. This is important, as many companies, like app developers, Apple, and Google, rarely share that there are accessibility fixes in minor updates, and don't even share all the new features in major releases. This gives me some hope that the open source community at large just needs more blind people telling them about our needs. Then again, this is probably just another of my excuses to bash my head against the hardened wall of Linux, yet again. Plus, everything in the open source moves slowly, and this is doubly true for open source assistive technology.

There are, however, blind people who use Linux, just as there are some in the blind community who use Android. In fact, there is an entire

=> https://linux-a11y.org Linux Accessibility Site (HTTP)

However, the site does have links to abandoned software, and doesn't link to all accessibility initiatives, like

=> https://stormux.org Stormux (HTTP)

Both Linux-a11y and Stormux ask for donations, so there is also duplicated effort and decentralization even in the blind Linux user community.

Now, I use a Mac. It contains enough open source technology to support

=> https://brew.sh Homebrew (HTTP)

which is a

=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_manager package manager (HTTP)

I can run Emacs, with Emacspeak on it, along with just about any command line program I'd use on Linux. The Mac's graphical interface is good enough for mail and some web browsing, just not so good with Google Docs, and I can probably do anything on it that a Linux user can do.

And yet, sometimes, Linux calls to me still. VoiceOver isn't the best screen reader out there, and Linux has the appeal of being run by people, not corporations. And yet, looking at the

=> https://www.gnu.org/accessibility/accessibility.en.html GNU accessibility statement (HTTP)

you'd think it was updated in 2006 or so. It may have been, which is a slap in the face for any accessibility advocate. The GNU project, with this statement, says to us that we're only worth putting up a quick page, detailing the inaccessibility of old technologies and not maintaining it. It tells us that we're a good poster to hang up in their trophy room of "people aided by our courageous stand for the minorities who desperately need our help," but then discarded for the "community" to handle. After all, the GNU don't know anything about helping the blind, do they? Can the GNU be expected to enforce accessibility among their projects? Doesn't the government take care of the poor blind people? Blind people have their Vinux and Sonar, why not just use those? No, that is definitely not segregation, not at all!

### Open Source Programs

I began using NVDA around high school. No one had ever heard of it at that point, in a day when people called all screen readers either "JAWS" or "Microsoft." I've not stopped using it ever sense. Its features have grown, its users growing even faster. It now has a community of programmers, translators, and writers. It is, in my opinion, the most versatile Windows screen reader. JAWS still works okay for some things, like malformed spreadsheets, but for everything else on Windows, I use NVDA.

Braille Blaster is also a great project, making braille translation, embossing, and transcription free. I use it for translating EBooks into good, formatted braille files for reading on my iPhone using the BARD Mobile app. Now, I don't even use Duxberry, even though it is provided on my work computer.

I've found that open source programs, built upon closed source operating systems, are the best compromise. NVDA, BrailleBlaster, TDSR, and many other tools built for the blind community run on Windows or Mac. Having a great foundation in accessibility makes all the difference for users.

## How can You help?

Github, as stated earlier, is a hub of open source projects. One great thing about the service is that anyone can contribute. Just make an account, and you're ready to help.

If you can program, you can

=> https://help.github.com/en/github/collaborating-with-issues-and-pull-requests/creating-a-pull-request collaborate by modifying code (HTTP)

If you try the software and find accessibility problems, you can tell developers about

=> https://help.github.com/en/github/managing-your-work-on-github/creating-an-issue bugs or features (HTTP)

that need fixing or adding. If you find a project you like, they may have a Patreon to which you can donate, or you can simply spread the word.

One large project which has become accessible through efforts of the
blind reaching out is Retroarch. An issue was created asking for
accessibility, and it was released in the very next version, and even
more work is being done to make even more games accessible. Open source
collaboration is great for even more than just programming. See projects
I'm working on, all text, on

=> https://devinprater.github.io/about/ the About page of my original blog (HTTP)

Another bit of news is that GTK, a way for programs to be displayed
and written, has had a

=> https://blog.gtk.org/2020/02/17/gtk-hackfest-2020-roadmap-and-accessibility/ Hackfest (HTTP)

where accessibility was extensively discussed. It is hoped that this means that accessibility will become a larger issue in Linux, and that blind people will one day be able to use Linux as confidently as they use Windows and Mac now.

## Conclusion

As time goes by, I find myself drawn to open source. its promise of a better way of making software, the community of helpful people, and the freedom give me hope. While the Linux operating system does not come close to satisfying the hope I have for accessibility, programs and initiatives on top of Windows and Mac have thrived. While the poor accessibility statement of the GNU project shows that the community at large does not yet care much about accessibility, the community of blind people working for our own future, rather than that of a corporation, gives me hope of a bright future of digital accessibility for blind people.

What do you think, reader? Does open source call to you as well? Do you just use whatever system you're given? Have you made peace with Linux's shortcomings around accessibility? Please, let me know. I am glad to receive feedback. If you'd like, you may even suggest, via email or Twitter, articles for which you feel passionate about that need coverage. I will consider all that you send me, and thank you for reading.
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<updated>2020-02-13T00:00:00Z</updated>
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<content type="text/plain"># Apple’s accessibility consistency



This article will explore Apple’s consistent attention to accessibility, and how other tech companies with commitments to accessibility, like Microsoft and Google, compare to Apple in their accessibility efforts. It also shows where these companies can improve their consistency, and that no company is perfect at being an Assistive Technology provider yet.

## Introduction

Apple has shown a commitment to

=> https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ accessibility (HTTP)

since the early days of the iPhone, and since mac OSX Tiger. Its VoiceOver screen reader was the first built-in screen reader of any usability on a personal computer and smart phone. Now, VoiceOver is on every Apple product, even the HomePod. It is so prevalent that people I know have begun calling any screen reader “VoiceOver.” This level of consistency should be congratulated in a company of Apple’s size and wealth. But is this a continual trend, and what does this mean for competitors?

This will be an opinion piece. I will not stick only to the facts as we have them, and won’t give sources for everything which I show as fact. This article is a testament to how accessibility can be made a fundamental part of a brand’s experience for effected people, so feelings and opinions will be involved.

## The trend of accessibility

The following sections of the article will explore companies trends of accessibility so far. The focus is on Apple, but I’ll also show some of what its competitors have done over the years as well. As Apple has a greater following of blind people, and Applevis has documented so much of Apple’s progress, I can show more of it than I can its competitors, whose information written by their followers are scattered, thus harder to search for.

## Apple

Apple has a history of accessibility, shown by

=> http://maccessibility.net/2011/02/10/blind-faith-a-decade-of-apple-accessibility this article (HTTP)

Written just under a decade ago, it goes over the previous decade’s advancements. As that article has done, I will focus on little of a company’s talk of accessibility, but more so its software releases and services.

Apple is, by numbers and satisfaction, the leader in accessibility for users of its mobile operating systems, but not in general purpose computer operating systems. Microsoft’s Windows is used far more than Apple’s MacOS. Besides that, and services, Apple has made its VoiceOver screen reader on iOS much more powerful, and even flexible, than its competitor, Google’s TalkBack.

### iOS

As iPhones were released each year, so were newer versions of iOS. In

=> https://www.applevis.com/blog/whats-new-accessibility-ios-6 iOS 6 (HTTP)

accessibility settings began working together, VoiceOver’s Rotor gained a few new abilities, new braille displays worked with VoiceOver, and bugs were fixed. In

=> https://www.applevis.com/blog/whats-new-and-changed-blind-and-low-vision-users-ios-71 iOS 7 (HTTP)

we gained the ability to have more than one high quality voice, more Rotor options, and the ability to write text using handwriting.

Next,

=> https://www.applevis.com/blog/what-s-new-ios-8-accessibility-blind-low-vision-and-deaf-blind-users iOS 8 (HTTP)

was pretty special to me, personally, as it introduced the method of writing text that I almost always use now, Braille Screen Input. This lets me type on the screen of my phone in braille, making my typing exponentially faster. Along with typing, I can delete text, a word or character, and now, send messages from within the input mode. I can also change braille contraction levels, and lock orientation into one of two typing modes. Along with this, Apple added the Alex voice, its most natural yet, which was only before available on a Mac. For those who do not know braille or handwriting, a new “direct touch typing” method allows a user to type as quickly as a sighted person, if they can memorize exactly where the keys are, or have spell check and autocorrection enabled.

In

=> https://www.applevis.com/blog/what-s-new-and-changed-ios-9-accessibility-blind-and-deaf-blind-users iOS 9 (HTTP)

VoiceOver users are able to choose Siri voices to speak using VoiceOver, as an extension of the list of Vocalizer voices, and Apple’s Alex voice. One can now control speech rate more easily, and the speed of speech can be greater than previously possible. One can control the time a double tap should take, a better method of selecting text, braille screen input improvements, and braille display fixes and new commands.

Then,

=> https://www.applevis.com/blog/what-s-new-ios-10-accessibility-blind-low-vision-and-deaf-blind-users iOS 10 (HTTP)

arrived, with a new way to organize apps, a pronunciation dictionary, even more voices, reorganized settings, new sounds for actions, a way to navigate threaded email, and some braille improvements. One great thing about the pronunciation editor is that it does not only apply to the screen reader, as in many Windows screen readers, but to the entire system speech. So, if you use VoiceOver, but also Speak Screen, both will speak as you have set them to. This is a testament to Apple’s attention to detail, and control of the entire system.

With the release of

=> https://www.applevis.com/blog/whats-new-ios-11-accessibility-blind-low-vision-and-deaf-blind-users iOS 11 (HTTP)

we gained the ability to type to Siri, new Siri voices, verbosity settings, the ability to have subtitles read or brailled, and the ability to change the speaking pitch of the voice used by VoiceOver. VoiceOver can now describe some images, which will be greatly expanded later. We can now find misspelled words, which will also be expanded later. One can now add and change commands used by braille displays, which, yes, will be expanded upon later. A few things which haven’t been expanded upon yet are the ability to read formatting, however imprecise, with braille “status cells,” and the “reading” of Emoji. Word wrap and a few other braille features were also added.

Last year, in

=> https://www.applevis.com/blog/apple-releases-ios-12-bringing-new-and-enhanced-features-and-performance-improvements iOS 12 (HTTP)

Apple added commands to jump to formatted text for braille display users, new Siri voices, verbosity options, confirmation of rotor actions and sent messages, expansion of the “misspelled” rotor option for correcting the misspelled word, and the ability to send VoiceOver to an HDMI output.

Finally, In

=> https://www.applevis.com/blog/whats-new-ios-13-accessibility-individuals-who-are-blind-or-deaf-blind iOS 13 (HTTP)

Apple moved accessibility to the main settings list, out of the General section, provided even more natural Siri voices, haptics for VoiceOver, to aid alongside, or replace, the sounds already present, and the ability to modify or turn them off. A “vertical scroll bar” has also been added, as another method of scrolling content. VoiceOver can now give even greater suggestions for taking pictures, aligning the camera, and with the iPhone 11, what will be in the picture. One can also customize commands for the touch screen, braille display, and keyboard, expanding the ability braille users already had. One can even assign Siri shortcuts to a VoiceOver command, as Mac users have been able to do with Apple Script. One can now have VoiceOver interpret charts and graphs, either via explanations of data, or by an audible representation of them. This may prove extremely useful in education, and for visualizing data of any type. Speaking detected text has improved over the versions to include the detecting of text in unlabeled controls, and now can attempt to describe images as well. Braille users now have access to many new braille tables, like Esperanto and several other languages, although braille no longer switches languages along with speech.

### MacOS

MacOS has not seen so much improvement in accessibility over the years. VoiceOver isn’t a bad screen reader, though. It can be controlled using a trackpad, which no other desktop screen reader can boast. It can be used to navigate and activate items with only the four arrow keys. It uses the considerable amount of voices available on the Mac and for download. It simply isn’t updated nearly as often as VoiceOver for iOS.

OSX 10.7, 10.8, and 10.9 have seen a few new features, like more VoiceOver voices, braille improvement, and other things. I couldn’t find much before Sierra, so we’ll start there.

In Sierra, Apple added VoiceOver commands for controlling volume, to offset the absence of the physical function keys in new MacBook models. VoiceOver can also now play a sound for row changes in apps like Mail, instead of interrupting itself to announce “one row added,” because Apple’s speech synthesis server on the Mac doesn’t innately support a speech queue. This means that neither does VoiceOver, so interruptions must be worked around. Some announcements were changed, HTML content became web areas, and interaction became “in” and “out of” items. There were also bug fixes in this release.

In High Sierra, one can now type to Siri, VoiceOver can now switch languages when reading multilingual text, as VoiceOver on the iPhone has been able to do since iOS 5 at least, improved braille editing and PDF reading support, image descriptions, and improved HTML 5 support.

In

=> https://www.applevis.com/blog/new-features-changes-and-accessibility-bugs-macos-mojave-blind-and-low-vision-users MacOS Mojave (HTTP)

Apple added the beginning of new iPad apps on Mac. These apps work poorly with VoiceOver, even still in Catalina. There were no new reported VoiceOver features in this release.

This year, In

=> https://www.applevis.com/blog/new-features-changes-improvements-and-bugs-macos-catalina-blind-and-low-vision-users MacOS Catalina (HTTP)

Apple added more control of punctuation, and XCode 11’s text editor is now a little more accessible, even though the Playgrounds function isn’t, and the Books app can now, after years of being on the Mac, be used for basic reading of books. Braille tables from iOS 13 are also available in MacOS.

### The future of Apple accessibility

All of these changes, however, were discovered by users. Apple doesn’t really talk about all of its accessibility improvements, just some of the highlights. While I see great potential in accessible diagrams and graphs, Apple didn’t mention this, and users had to find this. Subsequently, there may be fixes and features that we still haven’t found, three versions of iOS 13 later. Feedback between Apple and its customers has never been great, and this is only to Apple’s detriment. Since Apple rarely responds to little feedback, users feel that their feedback doesn’t mean anything, so they stop sending it. Also of note is that on VoiceOver’s

=> https://www.apple.com/accessibility/mac/vision/ Mac accessibility page (HTTP)

the “Improved PDF, web, and messages navigation” section is from macOS 10.13, two versions behind what is currently new in VoiceOver.

Another point is that services haven’t been the most accessible. Chief among them is Apple Arcade, which

=> https://applevis.com/forum/apple-arcade-anyone has no accessible games (HTTP)

so far. Apple research, I’ve found, has some questions which have answers that are simply unlabeled buttons. While Apple TV Plus has audio description for all of their shows, this is a minor glimmer of light, shrouded by the inaccessibility of Apple Arcade, which features, now, over one hundred games, none of which I can play with any success. In all fairness, a blind person who is patient may be able to play a game like Dear Reader, which has some accessible items, but the main goal of that game is to find a word in a different color and correct it, which is completely at odds with complete blindness, but could be handled using speech parameter changes, audio cues, or other signals of font, color, or style changes.

Time will tell if this new direction, no responsibility for not only other developers’ work, but also the Mac and work done by other developers and flaunted by Apple, will become the norm. After all, Apple Arcade is an entire Tab of the App Store; inaccessibility is in plain view. As a counterpoint, the first iPhone software, and even the second version, was inaccessible to blind people, but now the iPhone is the most popular smart phone, in developed nations, for blind people.

Perhaps next year, Apple Arcade will have an accessible game or two. I can only hope that this outcome comes true, and not the steady stepping back of Apple from one of their founding blocks: accessibility. We cannot know, as no one at Apple tells us their plans. We aren’t the only ones, though, as mainstream technology media shows. We must grow accustom to waiting on Apple to show new things, and reacting accordingly, but also providing feedback, and pushing back against encroaching inaccessibility and decay of macOS.

## Apple’s competitors

In this blog post, I compare operating systems. To me, an operating system is the root of all software, and thus, the root of all digital accessibility. With this in mind, the reader may see why it is imperative that the operating system be as accessible, easy and delightful to use, and promote productivity as much as possible. Microsoft and Google are the largest competitors of Apple in the closed source operating system space, so they are what I will compare Apple to in the following sections.

## Google

Google is the main contributor to the Android and Chromium projects. While both are open source, both are simply a base to be worked from, not the end result. Not even Google’s phones run “pure” Android, but have Google services and probably other things on the phone as well. Both, though, have varying accessibility as well. While Apple pays great attention to its mobile operating system’s accessibility, Google does not seem to put many resources towards that. However, its Chrome OS, which is used much in education, is much more easily accessible, and even somewhat of an enjoyable experience for a lite operating system.

### Android

Android was released one year after iOS. TalkBack was released as part of Android 1.6. Back then, it only supported navigation via a keyboard, trackpad, or scroll ball. It wasn’t until version 4 when touch screen access was implemented into TalkBack for phones, and up to this day, only supports commands done with one finger, two finger gestures being passed through to Android as one finger commands. TalkBack has worked around this issue by recently, in Android version 8, gaining the ability to use the finger print sensor, if available, as a gesture pad for setting options, and the ability the switch spoken language, if using Google TTS, when reading text in more than one language. TalkBack uses graphical menus for setting options otherwise, or performing actions, like deleting email. It can be used with a Bluetooth keyboard. By default, it uses Google TTS, a lower quality, offline version of speech used for things like Google Translate, Google Maps, and the Google Home. TalkBack cannot use the higher quality Google TTS voices. Instead, voices from other vendors are downloaded for more natural sound.

BrailleBack, discussed

=> https://support.google.com/accessibility/android/answer/3535226 on its Google Support page (HTTP)

is an accessibility service which, when used with TalkBack running, provides rudimentary braille support to Android. Commands are rugged, meaningless, and unfamiliar to users of other screen readers, and TalkBack’s speech cannot be turned off while using Brailleback, meaning that, as one person helpfully provided, that one must plug in a pair of headphones and not wear them, or turn down the phone’s volume, to gain silent usage of one’s phone using braille. Silent reading is one of braille’s main selling points, but accessibility, if not given the resources necessary, can become a host of workarounds. Furthermore, brailleback must be installed onto the phone, providing another barrier to entry for many deaf-blind users, so some simply buy iPods for braille if they wish to use an Android phone for customization or contrarian reasons, or simply stick with the iPhone as most blind people do.

Now, though, many have moved to a new screen reader created by a Chinese developer, called Commentary. This screen reader does, however, have the ability to

=. https://www.inclusiveandroid.com/content/commentary-screen-reader-decrypts-your-phone-if-you-have-full-encryption-turned decrypt your phone

if you have encryption enabled. For braille users

=> https://brltty.app BRLTTY (HTTP)

is used for braille usage. This level of customization, offset by the level of access which apps have to do anything they wish to your phone, is an edge that some enjoy living on, and it does allow things like third-party, and perhaps better screen readers, text to speech engines, apps for blind people like

=> https://www.seeingwithsound.com The vOICe (HTTP)

which gives blind people artificial vision, and other gray area apps like emulators, which iOS will not accept on the App Store. Users who are technically inclined do tend to thrive on Android, finding workarounds a joy to find and use, whereas people who are not, or are but do not want to fiddle with apps to replace first-party apps which do not meet the needs of the user, and unoptimized settings, find themselves doing more configuring of the phone than using it.

Third party offerings, like launchers, mail apps, web browsers, file managers, all have variable accessibility, which can change from version to version. Therefore, one must navigate the shifting landscape of first party tools which may sort of be good enough, third party tools which are accessible enough but may not do everything you need, and tools which users have found workarounds for using them. Third party speech synthesizers are also hit or miss, with some not working at all, others, like Eloquence, being now unsupported, and more, like ESpeak, sounding unnatural. The only good braille keyboard which is free hasn’t been updated in years, and Google has not made one of their own.

Because of all this, it is safe to say that Android can be a powerful tool, but has not attained the focus needed to become a great accessibility tool as well. Google has begun locking down its operating system, taking away some things that apps could do before. This may come to inhibit third party tools which blind people now use to give Android better accessibility. I feel that it is better to have been on iOS, where things are locked down much, but you have, at least somewhat, a clear expectation of fairness on Apple’s part. Android is not a big income source for Google, so Google does not have to answer to app developers.

### Chrome OS

Chrome OS is Google’s desktop operating system, running Chrome as the browser, with support for running Android apps. Its accessibility has improved plenty over the years, with ChromeVox gaining many features which make it a good screen reader. You can

=> http://www.chromevox.com read more about chromeVox (HTTP)

One of the main successes to ChromeVox is its braille support. It is normal for most first-party screen readers to support braille nowadays. When one plugs in a braille display to a Chromebook with ChromeVox enabled, ChromeVox begins using that display automatically, if it is supported. The surprise here is that if one plugs it in when ChromeVox is off, ChromeVox will automatically turn on, and begin using the display. This is beyond what other screen readers can do. ChromeVox, and indeed TalkBack, do not yet support scripting, editing punctuation and pronounciation speech, and do not have “activities” as VoiceOver for iOS and Mac have, but ChromeVox feels much more polished and ready for use than TalkBack.

## The future of Google accessibility

Judging by the past, Google may add a few more features to TalkBack, but less than Apple adds to iOS. They have much to catch up on, however, as they have only two years ago added the ability for TalkBack to detect and switch languages, and use the finger print sensor like VoiceOver’s rotor. I have not seem much change over the two years since, except making a mode for tracking focus from a toggle to a mandatory feature. I suspect that, in time, they will remove the option to disable explore by touch, if they’ve not already.

With Chrome OS, and Google Chrome in general, I hope that the future brings better things, now that Microsoft is involved in Chromium development. It could become even more tied to web standards. Perhaps ChromeVox will gain better sounding offline voices than Android’s lower quality Google TTS ones, or gain sounds performed using spacial audio for deeper immersion.

## Microsoft

Microsoft makes only one overarching operating system, with changes for XBox, HoloLens, personal computers, and other types of hardware. Windows has always been the dominant operating system for general purpose computing for blind people. It hasn’t always been accessible, and it is only in recent years that Microsoft have actively turned their attention to accessibility on Windows and XBox.

Now, Windows’ accessibility increases with each update, and Narrator becomes a more useful screen reader. I feel that, in a year or so, blind people may be trained to use Narrator instead of other screen readers on Windows.

### Windows

In the early days of Windows, there were many different screen readers competing for dominance.

=> https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/ JAWS (HTTP)

Job Access with Speech, was the most dominant, with

=> https://www.gwmicro.com/Window-Eyes/ Window-Eyes (HTTP)

now abandoned, as second. They gathered information from the graphics card to describe what was on the screen. There were no accessibility interfaces back then.

Years later, when

=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Active_Accessibility MSAA (HTTP)

Microsoft Active Accessibility, was created, Window-Eyes decided to lean on that, while JAWS continued to use video intercept technology to gather information. In Windows 2000, Microsoft shipped a basic screen reader, Narrator. It wasn’t meant to be a full, useful screen reader, but one made so that a user could set up a more powerful one.

Now, we have

=> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winauto/entry-uiauto-win32 UI Automation (HTTP)

which is still not a very mature product, as screen readers are still not using it for everything, like Microsoft Office. GW Micro, makers of Window-eyes, bonded with AI Squared, producers of the ZoomText magnifier, which was bought by Freedom Scientific, whom promptly abandoned Window-eyes. These days, JAWS is being taken on by

=> https://www.nvaccess.org NVDA (HTTP)

Nonvisual Desktop Access, a free and *open source* screen reader, and Microsoft’s own Narrator screen reader.

In Windows 8, Microsoft began adding features to Narrator. Now, in Windows 10, four years later, Narrator has proven itself useful, and in some situations, helpful in ways that all other screen readers have not been. For example, one can install, setup, and begin using Windows 10 using Narrator. Narrator is the only self-described screen reader which can, with little configuration, show formatting not by describing it, but by changing its speech parameters to “show” formatting by sound. The only other access technology which does this automatically is

=> https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak Emacspeak (HTTP)

the “complete audio desktop.” Narrator’s braille support must be downloaded and installed, for now, but is still better than Android’s support. Narrator cannot, however, use a laptop’s trackpad for navigation. Instead, Microsoft decided to add such spacial navigation to touchscreens, meaning that a user must reach up and feel around a large screen, instead of using the level trackpad as a smaller, more manageable area.

Speaking of support, Microsoft’s support system is better in a few ways. First, unlike Apple, their feedback system allows more communication between the community and Microsoft developers. Users can comment on issues, and developers can ask questions, a bit like on Github. Windows Insider builds come with announcements by Microsoft with what is new, changed, fixed, and broken. If anything changes regarding accessibility, it is in the release notes. Microsoft is vocal about what is new in accessibility of Windows, in an era when many other companies seem almost ashamed to mention it in release notes. This is much better than Apple’s silence on many builds of their beta software, and no notice of accessibility improvements and features at all. Microsoft’s transparency is a breath of fresh air to me, as I am much more confident in their commitment to accessibility for it.

Their commitment, however, doesn’t seem to pervade the whole company. The Microsoft Rewards program is hard to use for me, and contains quizzes where answers must be dragged and dropped. This may be fun for sighted users, but I cannot do them with any level of success, so they aren’t fun for me at all. Another problem is the quality of speech. While Apple has superb speech options like Macintalk Alex, Vocalizer, or the Siri voices, Microsoft’s offline voices sound bored, pause for too long, and have a robotic buzzing sound as they speak. I think that a company of Microsoft’s size could invest in better speech technology, or make their online voices available for download for offline use. Feedback has been given about this issue, so perhaps the next version of Windows will have more pleasant speech.

Windows has a few downsides, though. It doesn’t support sound through its Linux subsystem, meaning I cannot use Emacs, with Emacspeak. Narrator does not yet report when a program opens, or when a new window appears, and other visual system events. Many newer Universal Windows apps can be tricky to navigate, and the Mail app still automatically expands threads as I arrow to them, which I do not want to happen, making the mail app annoying to use.

### The future of Microsoft accessibility

I think that the future of Microsoft, regarding accessibility, is very bright. They seem dedicated to the cause, seeking feedback much more aggressively than Apple or Google, and many in the blind community love giving it to them. Windows will improve further, possibly with Narrator gaining the ability to play interface sounds in immersive audio using Windows Sonic for Headphones, braille becoming a deeper, and built in part of Narrator, and higher quality speech made available for download. Since Microsoft is also a gaming company, it could work on creating sound scapes for different activities: browsing the web, writing text, coding, reading, to aid in focus or creativity. Speech synthesis could be given even more parameters for speaking even more types of formatting or interface item types. really, with Microsoft’s attention to feedback, I feel that their potential is considerable for accessibility. Then again, it is equally possible that Apple will implement these features, but they aren’t as inviting as Microsoft when it comes to sharing what I’d *love* in an operating system as Microsoft has been, so I now just report bugs, not giving Apple new ideas.

# Conclusion

It may be interesting to note the symmetry of accessibility: Apple’s phone is the dominant phone, but Microsoft’s Windows platform is the dominant laptop and desktop system among blind people. Apple’s iPhone is more accessible than Google’s Android, but Google’s Chrome OS is more polished and updated accessibility-wise than Apple’s MacOS. Personally, I use a Mac because of its integration with iOS Notes, Messages, Mail, and other services, the Mail app is a joy to breeze through email with, and open source tools like Emacs with Emacspeak do not work as well on Windows. Also, speech matters to me, and I’d probably fall asleep much more often hearing Microsoft’s buzzing voices than the somewhat energetic sound of Alex on the Mac, who speaks professionally, calmly, and never gets bored. I do, however, use Windows for heavy usage of the web, especially Google web apps and services, and gaming.

Time will tell if companies continue in their paths, Apple forging ahead, Microsoft burning bright, and Google… being Google. I hope, nevertheless, that this article has been useful for the reader, and that my opinions have been as fair as possible towards the companies. It should be noted that the accessibility teams for each company are individuals, have their own ideas of what accessibility is, means, and should be, and should be treated with care. After all, this past decade has been a long journey of, probably, most effort spent convincing managers that the features we now have are worth spending time on, and answering user complaints of “my phone is talking to me and i want it turned off right now!”.

This does not excuse them for the decay of Android and Mac accessibility, and the lack of great speech options on Windows. It does not excuse them for Apple Arcade’s lack of accessible games, or Microsoft Rewards’ inaccessible quizzes. We must give honest, complete, and critical feedback to these people. After all, they do not know what we need, what will be useful, or, if we dare tell, what will be delightful for us to use, unless we give them this feedback. This applies to all software, whether it be Apple’s silent gathering of feedback, Microsoft’s open arms and inviting offers, or open source software’s issue trackers, Discord servers, mailing lists, and Github repositories. If we want improvement, we must ask for it. If we want a better future, we must make ourselves heard in the present. Let us all remember the past, so that we can influence the future.

Now, what do you think of all this? Do you believe Apple will continue to march ahead regarding accessibility, or do you think that Microsoft, or even Google, has something bigger planned? Do you think that Apple is justified in their silence, or do you hope that they begin speaking more openly about their progress, at least in release notes? Do you like how open Microsoft is about accessibility, or do they even talk about accessibility for blind users enough to you? I’d love to know your comments, corrections, and constructive criticism, either in the comments, on Twitter, or anywhere else you can find me. Thanks so much for reading!
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<title>Advocacy of open source software</title>
<updated>2020-01-20T00:00:00Z</updated>
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<content type="text/plain"># Advocacy of open source software

In this post, I’ll detail my experiences of advocating for accessibility in open source software, why it is important, and how others can help. I’ve not been doing it for long, but at least now, I’ve done a bit. I’ll also touch upon why I think open source software, on all operating systems, is important, and what closed source and closed feedback systems cannot offer, which open source grants. On the other hand, there are things which closed source somewhat grants, but which has faltered slightly in recent days. I will attempt to denote what is fact and what is opinion, this goes for any post of a commentary of informative nature.

## The Appeal of Open Source

Open source, or free software, basically means that a person can view and change the source code of software that they download or own. While this doesn’t mean much to users, it does mean that many different people can work on a project to make it better. This has no value on its own, see the "heartbleed" SSL bug and its Aftermath, but as with SSL, things can obviously improve when given an incentive.

For now, open source technology is used in many closed source operating systems. For example, the

=> https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis Liblouis (HTTP)

braille tables are used in iOS, macOS, and most Linux distributions through BRLTTY. While the software is not perfect, it is often made for more than one operating system, has a helpful community of users, and, greatest for accessibility, developers who are more likely to consider accessibility. This is greatly improved with platforms for open source development, like Github and Gitlab, which allow users to post "issues" on projects, including accessibility ones.

## The Appeal of Closed Source

People like getting paid. I should know, as a working blind person who does love getting paid for time and effort well spent. People love keeping things hidden while being worked on. I wouldn’t want a reader reading an incomplete blog post, after all, and spreading the word that "Devin just kind of wrote a few words and that’s all I got. from the blog." People love being able to claim their work as theirs, instead of having to share the credits with other people or companies. I don’t have direct experience with this, because I need all the help I can get, but in my opinion, it is a factor in choosing to create on your own, as a user or a company. Another great thing about closed source is that your competitors can’t copy what you’re doing, as you do it, and when you’re an important company, with allegiance to your shareholders, you must do anything to keep making money. But, what about accessibility?

## Open Source Accessibility

Accessibility of open source projects vary a lot. For example, before Retroarch was made accessible, its interface was not usable by blind people. Now, though, I can use it easily. However, current versions of the KDE Plasma desktop do not work well with the Orca screen reader. The following quote is from the release notes for KDE’s latest desktop version:

> KDE is an international technology team that creates free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE's products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. KDE's full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.

=> https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17.0.php Source (HTTP)

"Modern accessibility principals," you say? In my opinion, we seem to be talking about different definitions of "accessibility." Yes, there are multiple definitions. One is accessibility in the sense of being able to be accessed, another is the ability to be found, and the ability of being easy to deal with. As stated in the About section of the site, I use accessibility to mean being able to be used *completely* by blind people. This carries with it the implication that every single function, and all needed visual information, can be conveyed to a blind person in order for it to be accessible. This rules out the "good enough" approach that so many blind people accept as the status quo. Luckily for blind people who would love to use KDE, there is

=> https://blogs.fsfe.org/gladhorn/2018/10/14/screen-reader-accessibility-for-the-plasma-desktop/ Work being done (HTTP)

on this issue. Gnu, the project behind much of Linux, also has an

=> https://www.gnu.org/accessibility/ Accessibility Statement (HTTP)

which does seem to be very out of date, as it references flash player and Silverlight, which are no longer in common use, and does not reference Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and other modern technologies which are not open source (or are, but might as well not be because of the necessity of closed-source services), but which include assistive technologies. I encourage every adventurous blind person to make themselves available for testing open source software and operating systems; user testing was mentioned by the KDE team as something blind people could do to help. Believe me, having an operating system which is a "joy to use" is a *dream* of mine.

Gnome, and Mate, accessibility are okay, but they do not come close to the accessibility of Windows and Mac systems. For a good example, if you press Alt + F1 in Gnome, and probably Mate too (tested, Mate works a lot better than Gnome), you may only hear "window." Advanced users will know to type something in Gnome, or use the Arrow Keys in Mate, but regular users should not have to learn to hunt around due to bad accessibility, and the fact that less technically inclined users use Linux is a testament to blind people’s ingenuity and ability to adapt, rather than the accessibility of the platform.

Open source accessibility is so hit and miss because there are so many standards. There is the GTK framework for building graphical apps, which does have some accessibility support, but developers must label the items in their programs with text. There is the QT framework, which seems to have more poor accessibility support. Basically, developers can do anything they want, which is good for freedom, but often is not great for accessibility. Also, much of the community has not heard of accessibility practices, do not know that blind people use computers, or think that we must use braille interfaces to interact with computers and digital devices. This is a failure on our part, as we do not "get out there" on the Internet enough. With the advent of an

=> https://www.reddit.com/r/DystopiaForReddit/ accessible Reddit client (HTTP)

this may begin to change. Further work must be done to give blind users an accessible Reddit interface on the web for users to use on computers, not iPhones. However, Github is very accessible, and there is nothing stopping one from submitting issues.

## Closed Source Accessibility

"Okay but what about Windows? And Apple? You like Apple, right?" Basically, it’s hard to tell. Software doesn’t write itself, it is written, for now, by people. People can make mistakes, ignore guidelines, or simply not care about accessibility. However, those guidelines do exist, and are usually one standard, like the iOS accessibility standard. This means that companies can develop accessible software easily, and are held accountable by managers to uphold accessibility. But, even the best of accessible companies do not always do the right thing. Apple, for example, has created two services, Apple Arcade and Apple Research. Apple Arcade contains *no* games which a blind gamer can play without expending much more effort than a sighted gamer. Apple Research contains some questions with answer buttons which are not labeled, or cannot be activated. Does Apple think that blind people do not want to game, or that we don’t care about our hearing, heart, or for women, their reproductive health? Apple has also created Swift Playgrounds, an app for children to learn to code. This is accessible. But what about adults? Shouldn’t blind adults, who are usually technically inclined enough, be given a chance to learn to code? I’ll probably rant about this in a future article.

Microsoft has been on an accessibility journey for a few years now, but even they have a few problems. First, the voices in Windows 10 are poor for screen reading tasks. They pause way too long at the end of clauses and sentences, leading me, at least, to press Down Arrow to move to the next line before the last line was actually done being spoken, all because it paused just long enough to make me think that there was no more text to speak. Microsoft’s XBox Game Pass is great, but I could not find any accessible games in the free rotations. Sure, there’s Killer Instinct that many blind people can enjoy playing, but I found it not only inaccessible, as the menus do not speak, but boring, as the characters all seemed to simply do the same thing. I know that games do not have to be accessible to be fun, but I expect companies who showcase games, like Apple with Arcade, to have at least one accessible game for blind people to enjoy. And I also know that neither Apple nor Microsoft makes these games, but they do choose to advertise them, endorse them even, and it shows that, for Apple Arcade at least, video games are not something which they expect blind people to play. Microsoft is proving them wrong, with the release of Halo with screen reader usability in menus, and the possibility that the new Halo game will be accessible.

Another problem with Microsoft is that not all of their teams are onboard. Like Apple with Arcade and Research, Microsoft has the Rewards team. Their quizzes require one to move items around to reorder answers to get the quiz correct. This may be easy, and perhaps fun, for sighted people, but are simply frustrating for blind people. Other problems include the release of the new Microsoft Edge, which, for most users of screen readers, require that the user turn off UI Automation in order to read some items on the web. Otherwise, if Microsoft’s upcoming foldable phone comes with greatly enhanced accessibility relative to pure Android, and the Narrator screen reader, optimized and made great and enjoyable for a mobile experience, I think that Microsoft could take plenty of market share back from Apple of mobile phone users. Update: It’s barely any better than any other Android phone, so Apple still wins. They already have most general purpose computer users who are blind, so taking from Apple would be a huge win for them regarding accessibility. But, on that, we’ll have to wait and see how far Microsoft takes their commitment to accessibility. The more cynical side of me says that Microsoft will simply slap Android on a folding phone and release it, because why fight Apple.

## Reporting Bugs

So, what can we do to make accessibility better? Just about all open source software, including the stuff making up this blog, is hosted on Github. Just about all companies, of closed source software, claim to want your feedback. So, I recommend giving them any feedback you have. I know that giving feedback to Apple is like throwing $100 bills into the ocean, giving your valuable time to something which may offer no results, and just gives you the robotic "thanks" message. I know that sometimes talking to Microsoft’s accessibility team may seem unproductive, because they lead you from Twitter to one of a number of feedback locations. I know that feedback to open source software projects may take a lot of time and explaining and promoting accessibility to a community which has never considered it before, but it all may help.

For a great, and successful, Github issue regarding accessibility, see

=> https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/issues/9661 this issue on accessibility of Retroarch (HTTP)

You can see that I approached the Retroarch team respectfully, with knowledge of basic accessibility and computer terminology. Note that I gave what should happen, what is happening, and what can be done to fix the problem. As the saying goes, if you do not contribute to a solution to a problem, you are a part of the problem. Blind people will need to remember to give solutions, not just whine about something not working and can’t play Poke A Man like everyone else.

Also, share links to your feedback with other blind people who can vote, thumb up, or comment on it. Remember, if you do comment, please remember that feedback does not net instant results. I’m still waiting on

=> https://github.com/webcamoid/webcamoid/issues/211 Webcamoid to have an accessible interface (HTTP)

But, at least I’ll know when something changes, and I could even Pay for features to be implemented.

This is opposed to the closed source model, where feedback is "passed on to the team," or you are thanked, by your iPhone, for your feedback, but do not hear anything back from developers, and you most definitely can not pay for specific features to be worked on, or donate to projects that you feel deserve it. You must hope and have faith that large companies with more than one billion users cares enough to hear you. For perspective, if every blind person stopped using an iPhone, Apple would not miss many lost sales, compared to the billions of sighted users. However, the engineers who work on iOS accessibility are people too, with deadlines, lives, and feelings, and we should also respect that they are probably tightly restricted in answering feedback, fixing bugs, and creating new, exciting features.

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As for me, I will continue to support open source software. I’ll keep using this mac and iPhone because they work the best for me and what I do for work and writing. But, believe me, when something better comes along, I’ll jump ship quickly. As blind people, I feel, we cannot afford to develop brand loyalty. Apple, Microsoft, or Google, I think, could drop accessibility tomorrow, and there we’d be, left in the cold. I highly doubt they will. They may let it lie stagnant, but they probably won’t remove it. I do not write this to scare you in the least, but to make you think about how much control you actually have over what you use, how companies and developers view us, and how we can improve the situation for ourselves. if sighted people notice a bug or want a feature in iOS or Windows, they can gather their tech press and pressure Apple or Microsoft. If we find an accessibility bug, do we have enough clout, or unity, to pressure these companies? Writing feedback, testing software, trying new things, writing guides and fixing documentation, or, if able, translating software into other languages are all things that *any* blind person can do. I’m not saying that I’m perfect at any of this. I just think that we as a community can grow tremendously if we strike out from our comfortable Windows PC’s, Microsoft Word, audio games, TeamTalk, and old speech synthesizers.

I’ll give some projects you could try out and give feedback on:

* https://marcozehe.de/2019/12/20/how-to-get-around-matrix-and-riot-with-a-screen-reader/ Element chatting service

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