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  My Siri AI review: I asked it to set the value of a time picker that isn't accessible to VoiceOver, but it can't interact with elements on the screen. I asked it to locate a book on the StoryGraph that I was reading about on Wikipedia in Safari, but apparently the StoryGraph app doesn't support a search function. I suggested it use a web search instead, but there were no results. I asked it to find and activate the link in the current Wikipedia article pointing to the second book...

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  In November 2022, following the discontinuation of the HearthstoneAccess project by its initial developer, Blizzard announced that they would be quote "exploring what it will take to implement native accessibility features that allow for our #blind and #lowVision community to get back into the game" unquote. This was shortly followed by an update to implement separate volume levels for music, dialog, ambient sounds, and sound effects, as well as for the game overall. A very welcome #...

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  Another appliance search blighted by the existence of touch screens and the fundamentally exclusionary practice of cramming them into everything regardless of suitability. Want the best feature set? It's on the unusable model. Need accessibility? You'll need to sacrifice useful features, some of which would make the device more friendly to disabled people. I'm struggling to come up with fresh ways of articulating how mentally draining this is. To occasionally want to spend a bit o...

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  I'm so glad the basics of email, like people's names, are all completely solved problems. According to iOS Mail, this thread is between "Kelly, 'Paul, Paul & 'Kelly". There are two people in the conversation. What do the apostrophes mean, and why is the recipient summariser keying off of name rather than email address? No idea.

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  If they could somehow solve every single bad thing connected to large language models, both perceived and demonstrable, I still wouldn't want to talk to one by voice.

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  I just went to an author's website, found the audiobook I wanted, pressed the "Apple Pay" button, and got a DRM-free download link without typing in a single field. It took less than two minutes to go from deciding to check out the book to having it loaded into BookPlayer. This is how things can be. It's a marker of how rare this sort of experience is that it felt like magic.

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  Come for a football match between European and South American teams, both from Spanish-speaking countries. Get a performance of the US national anthem, a display of US military strength, and a monologue in English from an American actor who couldn't correctly identify the two main groups of fans. Yawn.

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  Oh no our IPv6 is broken again whatever shall we do without this critical piece of network infrastructure

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  @draeand@social.the-gdn.net @alexhall@mastodon.social To be clear: it knows what category of meat you cook because you choose it in the app, not because it's spying on you. You choose it in the app so it can advise when it's done. The app notifications and emails are annoying; there are better ways to determine the accuracy of their recipes over time. And for all I know, they're handing over info about the popularity of different cuts of meat to supermarkets and whomever else. But...

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  "Starting on 1 September 2026, you’ll no longer be able to log in with your username. Verify your email to make sure you can always access your account." Okay, and how do I do that? The options with a screen reader are "primaryCta," "secondaryCta," and "tertiaryCtaDismiss." I hope I choose the right one, otherwise I might have to "uiFormBtn" my account in September.

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  @FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com Right. I've pointed to your work more than once in conversations about AI's ability to produce real apps with meat on their bones. So it's important to me that you know my problem is not with you or the software you're producing. @mew@fwoof.space @daygar@tweesecake.social

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  In order to use Kagi as the default extension in iOS Safari, you install their app and it then redirects requests to one of the search engines Safari does actually support. In other words: you keep your default search engine set as Google or whichever. When you perform a search, the Google page appears for a fraction of a second before you're redirected to Kagi. As well as being wasteful in terms of resources, this breaks the back button in the browser. If you want to return to the page...

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  ITV have offered audio description on their free streaming services for years. Sky can afford to buy ITV. Sky have never offered audio description on any of their paid streaming services and still don't to this day. Interesting that.

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  Today we had the rather dubious honour of dining at a restaurant while one table away, a crew of influencers loudly recorded, and re-recorded, and then re-recorded a few more times just for good measure a video for their "experience" channel. Including about seven takes of a short interview with the chef who presumably agreed to give them a free meal—I didn't witness them paying—in exchange for publicity. He shouldn't have bothered; they only have 2,800 followers. There are ca...

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  There seems to be reasonable consensus that for #languageLearning, putting images on the front of flashcards is a decent idea for increased memorisation and reduced reliance on translation. Obviously this doesn't work at all for #blind people. Does anyone have any resources on the efficacy of an audio-based alternative? For example, if I'm trying to acquire the Spanish term for "washing machine," is it at all useful to have the front of the card play a short sound from a spi...

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  @FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com Someone should recommend a similar approach to Apple for their useless nutrition label system in the App Store.

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  Almost every time I background Mona on iOS these days, the operating system kills it (i.e. it's still in the app switcher but not in an active state). Is it or something else using more RAM than it used to? Is there something wrong with my phone? Nobody can say because Apple don't offer even the most basic of diagnostic tools.

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  Do Adobe employees receive specific training on how to make user-hostile design decisions in their software? Why on earth would Acrobat automatically open a PDF just because I downloaded one from a Slack message? How does it even know that?

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  @pneumasolutions FYI: in the "Please verify your email address" message sent by Scribe, the "Click here to verify your email address and begin using Scribe" link goes through AWS campaign tracking. So my browser initially blocked it, which I found quite unexpected for a purely transactional link.

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  As password field error messages go, this has to be one of the worst I've ever encountered: "Please remove the symbol you entered and try a different one."

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  An article has been published[1] explaining how to prevent #Chrome from downloading the #Gemini Nano model on #Windows via a Registry change. But it seems to me that such a method is only effective for as long as Google respects that policy in the Registry, doesn't change its name/path, etc. Instead, has anybody tried creating an empty weights.bin file in the relevant location[2], and then removing all permissions from that file so that Chrome can't read, write, replace, or do anything...

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  The word "modern" in #Django package descriptions increasingly seems to mean: discarding as many Django conventions as possible and building a new, FastAPI/Pydantic-inspired framework on top of it.

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  According to NVDA, there is no update available from the 2026.1 RC to 2026.1 proper. So, that all seems to be working fine.

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  I'm looking for a hook, or set of hooks, that I can clamp to the edge of a desk similar to how many microphone boom arms can be mounted without drilling or screwing anything. Mostly to hang headphones and cables on. Does anyone know of something like that?

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  I'd never used Apple News before this morning and it's an intriguing mix of rich text and custom accessibility semantics: The rotors for moving by heading, link and image are specific to News, ignoring the users rotor ordering setup and duplicating the built-in headings rotor. Heading levels are conveyed within the accessible name rather than programmatically. Lists are rendered as a single VoiceOver swipe instead of the user being able to read items one by one. Links are likewise re...

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  Does anyone know of anywhere I can direct people to read about the various #accessibility problems with a #screenReader in Windows 11? Informal is fine, e.g. Reddit/social media threads, as long as there's a reasonable amount of factual information to be had.

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  @ChanceyFleet Wrist trapped in white cane elastic skin tone 17.

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  Are there stores selling JAWS Home subscriptions globally without payment method/residency/other country-based restrictions? I don't live in the US, nor a country with a distributor offering online orders.

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  Initial thoughts on the #ProjectHailMary film: The karaoke scenes were weird. The audio describer repeatedly referring to Rocky's "screen reader" was cool. Ray Porter having a small voice part was a lovely callback to the audiobook.

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  UK trip,day six: visited a relative who's in hospital following a fall that damaged their knee. Upon emerging from the building, I proceeded to fall and hurt my knee.