🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

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.

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 the hood to rewrite output from the tools it knows about. If it doesn't know about a particular command, it just passes the output on unchanged. github.com/rtk-ai/rtk Now I've got to figure out how to wire this up in #bash so it'll just happen without me typing rtk all the time. #a11y #screenreader #accessibility #commandline

@jscholes@dragonscave.space Also, enjoy the fact that IOS Mail now randomly decides to put emails back in your inbox if they think they need a follow-up. Who decides if an email needs a follow-up? Me? No! It does!

@plzupgrademe@fedi.txw.ca @miki@dragonscave.space I'll share code when I have anything worth sharing. But I'm a screen reader user. So expect fully functional rather than beautiful.

@SRAZKVT@tech.lgbt Right. And nobody with a disability is going to work in the accessibility industry. Why would we be interested in doing something like that? :-(

@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.

@ppatel@mstdn.social Good luck, and keep me posted! It's really something the community needs; we have good clients for XMPP, IRC, and the deltachat and signal clients are fine. But the accessibility ecosystem around Matrix is still quite bad. I'm glad you're brave enough to tackle it.

@miki@dragonscave.space I could. But then I'm trusting myself to write a secure abstraction layer. And I do not.

@Quentin@theres.life If you do answer every question five out of five stars, it means the company is probably spending too much money on customer service. Now they know they're doing so well they can afford to fire a few minimum wage employees. This is the purpose of surveys: they justify whatever the leadership already wanted to do.

@quanin@allovertheplace.ca @Tamasg@mindly.social What I'm doing is in docs/basic-principles.md if it helps you decide. You're also welcome to just build your thing on my thing if I get the OLC going and that's a thing you want.

OMG what am I even doing This is a huge project it's going to need Jingle and that needs WebRTC and then file transfers and voice messages and oh also localization and sounds and hotkeys and settings and multi-account support and Oh God. even with AI this will take fifteen years why did I get out of bed today and choose this for myself

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 of the visual systems are really workable. Does the thing I want already exist somewhere? #a11y

@Quentin@theres.life But remember that if you don't answer every question with five out of five stars, the executives use it as an excuse to fire minimum wage employees, and make sure living wage employees don't get bonuses this year. Of course the executives get million dollar bonuses; they thought up the power outage survey that uncovered all those slackers and saved the company literally thousands of dollars by firing them!

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@techopolis.social) is super quick finding and fixing issues; she fixed my problem within like 10 minutes

The bad:

• I can't attach images; especially when doing accessibility reporting and testing, screenshots are a huge part of what clients expect in results
• Similarly I can't attach log files or other traces to issues
• no "blocks" or "is blocked by" to help link bugs/issues together; this is one of two things missing to make this a complete project management solution
• no "due date", unless I missed it: this would be the other feature that completes start testing for project management

The nice to have:

• report templates: I'd like to be able to set up a template, then export a project based on that template. This would make Start Testing a full solution for report generation
• default issue type: It would be nice to change this. In some projects I would want "bug", but I'd rather "accessibility" in others

With a few months more work, and just a couple more features, I could easily see myself paying for this. Especially if I could export based on templates.

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.

" 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.

@Tamasg@mindly.social @quanin@allovertheplace.ca In theory? Maybe. But only in theory. It's deeply under development, and totally undocumented by anything other than Claude gibberings. The basic idea is to create a mud where things can be built using older AI techniques like conceptnet and wordnet, and where when models are used, they're deeply constrained by rules of grammar, reality, and history. Also npcs can make decisions using state machines and other non-LLM planners. The model-building tools exist, and the basic infrastructure is all in place. But the player creation tools need to be expanded, protocol support for stuff like gmcp needs to get in, and documentation needs to actually exist as more than an AI fever dream. But to play, run it via uv, create your account, use apikey set to set an openrouter API key, type commonsense fetch to get the wordnet/conceptnet data, models to pick a default model, then worldgen and fill out the wizard to make a world. github.com/fastfinge/aimud

@plzupgrademe@fedi.txw.ca Personally, I'm using Snikket for end to end testing. If the Snikket server doesn't support it, or the Snikket client (just rebranded Monal) can't deal with it, it's not high on my list of priorities. Yes, I know that's a terrible way to implement an open standard. But Snikket is the server I use, and Monal is the client I and everyone I know uses on IOS. So a desktop app needs to work with them to be useful to me. And features they don't support are features I'll never be able to use.

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 learned that there's really no good C# library to do #PGP. So I'm not.

@quanin@allovertheplace.ca @Tamasg@mindly.social But humans are going to be even better than this than AI is. So once I actually build interfaces for humans, I now have a system where people can build mud worlds without writing any actual code, where npcs can actually do things, and the world can have complex custom effects and behaviors. And it's secure because all people are doing is launching menus and filling in values. No random users entering code into the server.

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?

@martin I had heard that this was discouraged by the XMPP foundation for...unclear reasons?

@miki@dragonscave.space Yup. Though in this particular case I can't be cross platform, because I need to use windows encryption primitives to safely store OMEMO keys and usernames and passwords and things.

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

@andrew@social.hodgson.io @jscholes@dragonscave.space NFC is a critical feature for me. I do testing across android, IOS, mac, and Windows, and need my secure accounts available in all the places.

@jscholes@dragonscave.space The problem is that I want this to exist, and nobody else is doing it. And I'm tired of the many broken things about Miranda's XMPP support.

@plzupgrademe@fedi.txw.ca I think this library has everything I need for Jingle. The same way you did for mac, I'm doing for Windows. So that makes it simpler because I want to just be Windows native whenever possible. So no cross platform worries. github.com/sipsorcery-org/sipsorcery

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 the rubble for valuable materials everywhere the source becomes depleted of its materials

@plzupgrademe@fedi.txw.ca @miki@dragonscave.space Maybe someday. But there are good clients on Mac and Linux already. So Windows is my priority number 1.

I would also appreciate it if you were less surprised when the person consuming your report turns out to be a person with a disability. Thanks!

@Rosalyn@mindly.social Mostly because it had major downtime multiple times a month, for the last three months. And Microsoft keeps adding copilot to it, that nobody really wants. So everyone is afraid they're doing the typical "embrace and extend" that Microsoft is famous for, while also enshitifying it.

@plzupgrademe@fedi.txw.ca The server is just Prosody IM with all of the useful plugins and settings pre-configured out of the box for people like me who want to host our own server, but are too lazy to set it up all by ourselves haha.

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 heck they were trying to advertise with that subject line. Headphones? Pornography? Headphones for listening to pornography? Some sort of juice for cleaning earwax? The world's worst headband?

@plzupgrademe@fedi.txw.ca snikket (snikket.org)

@andrew@social.hodgson.io @jscholes@dragonscave.space I'd say that the default SSH key workflow is fine, unless you need keys on multiple machines. Yubikey for SSH is way more convenient than a jumpbox, or making dozens of keys and keeping track of them all.

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 months later, even with the dozens of things rubber ducking the design with Claude helped me catch. github.com/fastfinge/aimud/blob/master/docs/becoming-and-time.md

@andrew@social.hodgson.io Yeah, that's why I said "similar to". Honestly it should probably just output strings easily pronounceable by humans. No need to privilege English here. "foit zoobar hang gubble" is still easier to compare than a long string of letters and numbers where five of the characters (b, c, d, e) all sound similar.

@quanin@allovertheplace.ca @Tamasg@mindly.social You're more than welcome to join into the fun and submit pull requests! docs/future-plans.md is where my mind is at right now. All over the place, in other words.

@jwcph@helvede.net Fear, probably. If there's an open edge onto, say, train tracks or similar, the accessibility feature will generally be placed much farther from the edge than people would normally walk, because the designers worry that blind people might step off by mistake.

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?

This feels related to your interests @FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com @arfy@dragonscave.space github.com/akustikrausch/yamaha-smaf-player

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

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

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.example.com. If you use clipman:// examples like in the manual, it will try to use plain text and fail. When saving settings on IOS,you have to specify the port, even if it’s the default, because it requires a specified port or the settings won’t save. Lastly, it’s one server, one database. I thought I could add tokens for family members, but no. They need there own clipman server on there own host.

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.

@plzupgrademe@fedi.txw.ca One thing that bit me is the way the Snikkit server works to register accounts. You have to support XEP-0401 and XEP-0445. In-band registration is not enough.