🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
fastfinge@fed.interfree.ca
<div><span>completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those.<br>keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ</span></div>
Posts
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Clipman by @FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com is one of those things I’d had on my list to set up ever since the IOS app came out. I finally did it. Should have done ages ago. The only weirdness involves running servers in docker behind reverse proxies. If you do that, a few things to know: first, it writes files you will need access to later. So don’t use bind mounts. Second, the importable config file it writes is wrong. You have to enter it in to the apps yourself. And the format has to be clip.e...
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What have they done to the apples? Like, the food ones. That you eat. I got myself an apple for lunch, and it's huge! Like, larger than my hand. WTF? I have never seen or experienced an apple this large in my life. This can't be natural, can it? Is AI involved, somehow?
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There were ten multi-counters on the app store, all of them full of ads, all of them with accessibility errors. If all you need is a couple counters, to track a score or whatever, here you go: counter.interfree.ca
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I hated absolutely everything about the process of designing this. What I really started out wanting was an entirely seperat system of triggers for aimud, because I personally find that way, way easier to conceptualize. But that breaks the planner completely, and has a bunch of other undesirable side-effects. After five hours, I now have this, and a broken brain that is still struggling with De Morgan's laws. I'm completely sure that I've missed things that I'll only discover mon...
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Ummm. Tonight in aimud, one character stole the "ring for service" bell from inside a shop, then traded the stolen bell to another customer (who was right there and watched him take it) for mushrooms. Right after that, a different customer removed his pants and gave them to the shopkeeper in return for a waterskin. Then the shopkeeper traded the pants to the second customer to get her bell back. Why are my npcs playing like actual mud players, instead of realistic npcs?
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TIL: apparently the reason AI suggests naming so many things Ember when you ask for ideas is because Ember means Human in Hungarian. So it showed up a lot in training data as a possible human name, and a lot in translation as a meaningful word. And also from the training data, humans want to give things meaningful names that sound human. So Ember it is! Is this true, I wonder? @Tamasg@mindly.social
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Finally getting to a place where the rules my mud dynamically invents mostly make sense! rules for mine: takes: direct (touchable), instrument (carried, optional) means: get from the earth by excavation check: any tunnel it must not already be mined out everywhere it must not already be depleted everywhere you must be able to reach what you act on everywhere you must be able to act carry out: any tunnel extract ore from the tunnel walls any crawlspace mine...
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" Bladder Capacity . 30/100". Yes, thank you, AIMud. That is exactly the sort of value normal humans want on our normal human scoresheet when playing a normal human computer game.
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A guide to AI prompting from a blindness perspective This article was originally written for the Google Developer blog. However, it's been a number of months since I've heard from them, so I'm publishing it here. stuff.interfree.ca/2026/09/05/ai-prompting-from-a-blindness-perspective.html
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Does anyone else feel the urge, when you want something strange from AI, to explain and justify why you want it? Like it might judge me for wanting this answer or something.
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Subject from an email that just landed in my inbox: "All of the sweaty, moist wetness your ears can handle". What? No! Why? It's like a marketer spent months crafting a subject line to make people press delete as quickly as possible. For the curious, it's from a website called dlsite, some sort of Japanese games storefront where I purchased the simulation audiogame Dreamy Train. They also sell...I have no idea, because I didn't open that email to try and figure out what the...
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Hey #encryption experts: has anyone thought about something similar to what three words, but for key fingerprints? This would be a huge #accessibility win. Right now, we have long hex strings we have to compare by hand, and a few visual/barcode type systems. I would love to be able to just verify "Correct Horse Battery Staple" with a friend. Easier to hear with a screen reader (b and c and d and e can sound similar in noisy environments when you're in a hurry), and of course none o...
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Also @Monal@fosstodon.org I think I might have found a bug in the way you do OMEMO:2. You're doing prekey via Curve25519/Montgomery + XEdDSA. But the specification requires identity keys are encoded per RFC 8032 (Ed25519) while prekeys are RFC 7748 (X25519). I may be confused, however.
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Yay! We can now send and receive both OMEMO versions! It only took, like, three days to exchange basic text messages via #xmpp, using an already developed library. On the other hand, we now have a really solid base for...the nine billion other things we need to do. At some point I'm going to want interop testing volunteers who use conversations and gajim, because those clients aren't #accessible so I can't make sure they work. But that'll probably be in a few months. Also, TIL I...
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So because I have gone temporarily off my rocker, I'm working on an #xmpp client using #dotnet 10 and WPF, with artalk-xmpp for XMPP, libsignal for #OMEMO, and prism for screen reader output where needed. I'm only an evening into it, and I can already tell that OMEMO is going to be the source of complicated, inexplicable, and unreproducible bug reports for decades to come. It's still not as overcomplicated as #matrix, though.
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Time for a #fedidreams after the weirdness of last night. I dreamed that I was attending an emergency church meeting to deal with the fact that after a sudden flash, every single bible in the entire world had been updated with a new page. The page was an angry rant from God, complaining that heaven had run out of meth, and telling humanity they'd better send God some more drugs or "I'm going to do a flood or something; you guys had better not think I forgot how!" The church mee...
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Super quick micro-review of StartTesting.net from @@mikedoise@@techopolis.social. Note that I've only spent maybe an hour with it, so I may have missed features. The Good: * I love the "accessibility issue" type, complete with WCAG sections right there, easy to search and attach * Has Jira fields like projects, milestones, features, etc. and is much more accessible and easier to use than Jira * creating pages/views, complete with associated URL, is really handy * Tailor (@tayarndt...
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Angry hot take: If you are an expensive "accessibility professional", and the reports you're generating and sending to your clients are inaccessible, you should just get a new job. There is no hope for you. I've encountered that three times, from three different people, this month. WTF? #a11y #accessibility
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I would love a native, screenreader #accessible, fast, #matrix app for Windows. I would also like not to create it, because Matrix is even more vast, complex, and incomprehensible than #XMPP and #IRC. Anyone? No? Didn't think so. Sigh.
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This feels related to your interests @FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com @arfy@dragonscave.space github.com/akustikrausch/yamaha-smaf-player
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This was invented for #AI. However, I'm finding it really nice for screen readers: RTK rewrites output from chatty terminal commands that produce a lot of output, often in complex tables, in order to make the output 80 to 90 percent shorter. Just put rtk in front of the command you want to compress. So "rtk git status" instead of "git status". And you can be sure the compacted output is correct because it's just using regular expressions and deterministic rules under...
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@jscholes@dragonscave.space @andrew@social.hodgson.io No. That's the TOTP setting I mentioned. Turn that off, and now they work directly with the passcode API on windows/mac/android.
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YubiKey And Screen Readers: I couldn't find any real information about how Yubikeys work with screen readers. So I decided to publish some. stuff.interfree.ca/2026/05/13/yubikey-with-screenreaders.html #a11y #screenreader #accessibility
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The problem with AI is that it makes us too productive. It just generates so much, so quickly, that even if a human reviews it, we're going to miss things. A project at work resulted in generation of code that did exactly what I wanted, as well as generation of documentation. Because the code all functioned perfectly and was correct when I reviewed it, I was tempted to just skim the documentation. Good thing I didn't! It mentioned in multiple places how to send me bug reports over slack,...
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Someone in #Denver is absolutely convinced their email address is samuel.proulx@gmail.com. Nope! It’s one of my email addresses! Last year I got their license to sell weed in the state of #Colorado, complete with a nice PDF card for me to print out and put in my wallet. Today, I’m getting multiple emails from Best Western that they need to complete their employee onboarding. When I let HR know about the problem, they emailed me back requiring that I provide the correct email address. WTF? How sh...
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Say what you will about AI. But if it wasn't for AI and my phone camera, I would be spending the next two days completely reinstalling a server. I just don't have sighted help that's techy enough to read me enormously long lines of console output accurately or usefully. Whereas with repeated photos of the monitor, AI was able to clearly explain to me what was happening, provide a solution, and get the thing booting again, all while keeping in mind that I'm blind. Here's the f...
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This is an omnivoice tts extension for #sillytavern that I hacked together. If you don't know what any of those things mean, you don't need it. If you do, here you go: github.com/fastfinge/omnivoice-sillytavern-extension #AI #tts
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Overheard yesterday on the airplane from Italy to Berlin, said emphatically by a tween boy with a thick Eastern European accent to his elderly female British seat mate: “the purpose of roblox is mostly to play chess. Before this, one could not play chess on the internet.” He then spent several minutes in discussion of his least favourite #chess opening. The Sicilian defence, if you were wondering, because it’s annoying and overplayed apparently. Then he spent a few minutes complaining that too m...
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The State of Modern AI Text To Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users: The past year has seen an explosion in new text to speech engines based on neural networks, large language models, and machine learning. But has any of this advancement offered anything to those using screen readers? stuff.interfree.ca/2026/01/05/ai-tts-for-screenreaders.html #ai #tts #llm #accessibility #a11y #screenreaders
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@rommix0@mindly.social So I do actually talk in my sleep, even when not recording. Yeah, sometimes it makes sleepovers interesting. Like the time as a teenager I shouted in my sleep "Your fuzzy socks are disturbing me!" while in a camp cabin full of guys. They wouldn't let me live it down for the entire week at camp, and I spent the entire week finding random socks left in my space where I would be sure and find them.