And another recommendation while I'm here, this one for basically every platform, I kept hearing @joplinapp brought up in discussionss of best note taking apps, and I finally sat down to try it out after they advertised accessibility improvements in the latest update and yeah I'm loving it so far. Everything has hotkeys, the controls read very well including the quick search/command palette, you have a markdown preview right next to the note you're working on, it has a spell checker, you can attach files to your notes, and everything syncs encrypted to any device using pretty much whatever you want, it supports everything from syncing through a local directory on your filesystem which is only on the desktop version, to dropbox/onedrive/webdav or their own cloud solution. It's an app with a simple and very accessible interface with a lot of features
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Ever since iStatMenus 7 came out and completely broke VoiceOver accessibility I was looking for a replacement Mac resource monitor which could quickly show me IE what app is currently eating up the CPU or ram without bringing up the activity monitor, and I think I found one that's not only better because it shows you more info, but also free and open-source. It's simply called Stats, and in the most recent version the developer has given the different menu icons clear VoiceOver labels. The only thing it doesn't currently have is the option to quickly open the different modules with hotkeys, and the menu icons only read their name and not displayed values so you need to open a module to read it, but both of these are in the works. https://github.com/exelban/stats
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And welcome to 2025! Happy new year everyone. Here's hoping whatever plans you have will work out and that it will be a good year for you. We can't forget to enjoy all the smaller cool things that happened and there sure was a lot of those last year to outway the other stuff so here's to more of that.
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Hi! Hope you've had a good christmas/December holiday season so far. I haven't posted on here lately, but with all the retro tech stuff that's made a bit of a resurgence in my corner of Masto I have to share this video where a long-time user of GameMaker tries to find the origin of a bunch of Midi files that used to come in free resource packs on the gamemaker site. You get everything from exploring vintage personal home pages, a lot of covers and some original material, and a lot of Sonic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSYSkjQI__Y
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Mac OS Pro tip that I just accidentally discovered: The different activity monitor tabs (CPU, network, etc) have shortcut keys that aren't listed anywhere. So if you're a VO user and don't want to interact with the toolbar and then the tab list, you can just press Command+Option+1 through 5 to select the tabs. 1 is CPU, 2 is Memory, 3 is Energy, 4 is Disk and 5 is network.
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[#]Linux users who have some experience with #audio and #Pipewire, a friend wants to take audio from a mic/sound card input, run it through some plugins IE through LADSPA, then route it to an application like TeamTalk. How to achieve this? Asking for @tomecki
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Blind Fedi, do you know of any accessible platform for hosting realtime trivia/quizzes? I was asked by someone who wants to organize trivia nights mainly for blind people over Zoom and have no experience with such services. The participation process is more important in terms of having to be accessible because the organizer will be sighted. Boosts appreciated #a11y #accessibility
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I’d love it if just once an app redesign didn’t absolutely fuck up #accessibility and usability. Today’s big update to CleanMyMac is not that time. Most buttons say “enabled” before their name don’t respond to VO-space and need to be physically clicked, when a checkbox is unchecked it shows up as an unlabeled button, you have no way of telling whether a specific item when reviewing results is checked or not which is the difference between having the app delete something you don’t want it to or not, and some modules had some features removed in favor of supposed simplicity, the biggest one for being the large file module, now called clutter, no longer has a view where you can see the largest files in a hierarchical directory view. Now you can either look at every large file on the system no matter what directory it’s in or file duplicates. I have no energy to write a report of all this ugh. Also really disappointing to see Macaw slipping with their accessibility which used to be really good.
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Today I heard about Altirra, a free Windows emulator of 8-bit Atari computers. In the latest version it includes an accessibility mode, turned on from the configuration dialog under the system menu. After you do the emulated screen can be reviewed just like a modern command prompt (IE with NVBDA's review commands.) It aalso supports emulating a lot of peripherals and you can have authentic floppy drive sounds and I'm a total sucker for those. It's really cool to see another vintage #retro computer platform become accessible like this. #a11y #accessibility https://www.virtualdub.org/altirra.html
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So I watched some train videos on YouTube recently and it did what YouTube does and suggested this gem which really needs more views. Why electric trains make the different sounds that they do with examples. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRJIJPTUXXE
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And if you haven't checked out the game the previously posted article is talking about you absolutely should. It's a very chill experience where you're exploring a planet with an advanced suit that can be upgraded to drive, fly and even travel underwater. What's really unique is all sound in the game is synthesized in realtime, giving it a very unique, kind of synth wavy vibe. That also means that when you do things like skip on the surface of the water or drift around in the sand in the vehicle mode it has a very organic sound, and this is coupled with very good use of vibrations if you have a gamepad connected. There's also a musical instrument included that you can play as you game. It really shows off what's possible with the WebAudio API. You can get it either on Steam or DRM free on itch:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2121790/Periphery_Synthetic/
https://shiftbacktick.itch.io/periphery-synthetic-ep
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An article just went up on Eurogamer talking about the Periphery Synthetic game and the state of game accessibility for both blind gamers and blind developers. It features comments from many respected blind consultants and developers including @talon, @shaysters and yours truely. I think it's totally worth a read because it covers the topic from multiple angles very well https://www.eurogamer.net/periphery-synthetic-is-playable-by-sound-alone-is-it-the-next-step-in-accessibility-for-the-blind-and-visually-impaired #GameAccessibility #GameDev #IndieDev
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because we don't get to talk aboutmore positive, more accessible app redesigns often, @bitwarden just released a major update to their apps which ditches the cross platform code base they were using in favor of native apps (on iOS being SwiftUI) and this update is so much more accessible and pleasant than the previous version if you use voiceover.
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Haha you thought we were done with 2024 shutdowns? AnandTech /Future Publishing management entered the chat. That’s another site that’s going to be really missed by those who wanted really in-depth, and importantly for accessibility text reviews. But I guess the majority prefer videos nowadays. At least the site will stay up for the moment and since I started this impromptu thread the situation with Applevis changed for the better so there’s that at least.
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So… It locked up but also posted… Success I guess?
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Hello world? If this works I'm going to be amazed. This is one of the most cursed things I tried to do in a while.
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From the "Well this came out of nowhere department", just got an email from setapp about their app of the week, and it's VoiceDream reader. So it's a part of the subscription now at least for the Mac version, maybe also iOS but haven't checked. What makes this all the more interesting is its biggest competitor, Speech Central, was a part of it for a while, but left some time ago. I'm guessing this was in some way related to Applause Group acquiring the Mac app Bartender (which by the way that acquisition went as well as VDR did with people only finding out when their quietly addded analytics tripped people's firewalls.) Bartender was already on setapp for years, so I guess Applause figured if they're gonna keep it on there might as well add their other apps to Setapp. I wasn't planning to subscribe to VDR, but since I'm extensively using Setapp yay for added value I guess.
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A whole bunch of narration improvements in the most recent Forza update, including reading the lap number when you finish a lap, better reading of credits earned breakdown after finishing a race and a lot more. https://support.forzamotorsport.net/hc/en-us/articles/32160540349459-Forza-Motorsport-Update-11-0-Release-Notes-August-12-2024
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Before I go to bed for the day I'm just gonna leave this here because I definitely didn't just spend an hour playing when I should probably be resting. Someone just made an accessibility mod for Balatro and now I understand why this game blew up. If you haven't heard of it, you're basically making the best poker hands possible with a standard card deck trying to reach increasingly higher score targets. For reaching them you get money which you can use in the shop to buy various upgrades and special cards that let you get even higher scores, which gives you more money... And that's how the game loop works. All this is accompanied by some very chill background music and satisfying sound effects. Another win for #GameAccessibility for sure. You can find the mod here https://forum.audiogames.net/topic/54143/balatro-accessibility-mod-available/
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Mame 0.268 came out yesterday, and it’s a really cool release for blind fans of vintage tech because it includes a fix by @datajake1999 to its emulation of the Dectalk PC Card. What this means is it’s now possible to emulate a self-contained talking IBM PC complete with an original synthesizer without having to resort to a windows only virtual serial port driver and separate apps like you have to with Dosbox. If you want to play with this there are already 2 packages that help with setup just like the community made for the Apple II a while back - one from Jake, which just includes a talking freeDOS installation and no other programs found here https://datajake.braillescreen.net/utilities/mame0268b_64bit.exe
As well as one compiled by Daniel Nash that also includes a bunch of games, including some text only classics like Eamon Deluxe as well as the first audio games from PCS Games or Jim Kitchen found here
https://nashcentral.duckdns.org/projects/pc.7z
The cool thing is even though both of these come with a Windows version of Mame this all works just as well on Mac or Linux, you just have to get the latest version of mame from homebrew or your package manager, then unzip either of these and take the startup command from the .bat file and paste it into the terminal.
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