Finally took the time to test the new interactive music/Live learning platform Ableton has been building at https://learn.ableton.com and it's a beauty with screen readers. Everything is explained clearly and there's really good use of keyboard shortcuts.
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Pitermach
@pitermach@dragonscave.space
mastodon 4.7.2+glitchI'm just a blind geek who's main hobbies include sound design, accessibility especially of games, podcasting, books and movies/TV (mainly SCI-Fi and lit RPG), and programming. Regularly do let's plays with @talon@dragonscave.space as @pg13lp@dragonscave.space. Game database editor and newsposter on audiogames.net. Most of my sound design work can be found on currentlyuntitled.design and various games.
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Joined August 21, 2018
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Reading about the new generation of Recaptcha requiring android phones to pass google play attestation and I'm thinking this will have accessibility implications for blind users. Beyond the point that this will lock out custom roms and mobile devices that aren't iOS or Android, at least where I live for example there's a lot of people who use Blind Shell phones (which are essentially an Android phone with a oldschool keypad to work more like a Nokia phone of the past.) And those don't have google services either which is increasingly causing more problems. How that OEM is handling the software aside, something else Google will apparently do is if you use a computer is a verification will require scanning a QRCode on a compatible phone and oh boy that's gonna be fun. Many blind people run their computer without a screen, and even if you do have one, scanning a QRCode can be a crapshoot. It might take a few seconds if it's big and you have enough lighting, or it might take a few minutes or not work at all if you don't or the code is obscured by some other window you're not aware of. And I bet the service will have a timeout so if you're not good at scanning QR codes you could just be locked out.
So yeah, things are going great. The service that used to previously be the most accessible might be far less so going forward. That then leaves cloudflare turnstyle, which is also very accessible but can really screw you over if you use a VPN and isn't liked by privacy concious website operators for very valid reasons. I hope this doesn't push more companies to adopt HCaptcha which advertises itself as the most privacy friendly ReCaptcha alternative... Unless you're blind in which case if you're lucky you might get a text challenge which has to be enabled by the website, otherwise you have to give them your Email address, send a text to a US phone number to request a cross-site accessibility cookie which now doesn't work in most web browsers. Things are going great!
RE: https://mastodon.social/@NikJov/116901666365401462
This isn't talked about much at least that I've seen, but I feel like this single feature, if it also gets implemented on Android and starts being utilised by developers, could go a very long way in making web apps as efficient to navigate as native mobile ones. Some categories of apps could get massive productivity boosts from this.
Here's something a lot of companies could learn from Nintendo of all companies. The Switch 2 console has had a text to speech feature, but not for the first time setup. The newest firmware fixed this and now you can hold down a button to turn on speech. Except, any units in the wild won't have this for a while and be on an older version. So what'd Nintendo do? They have a gigantic article on their website detailing how to do the setup blind up to the point where the console will download the update. It even goes into details on how the language select screen looks like, or how to connect an ethernet cable or USB keyboard to enter a wifi password. https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/68477/session/L2F2LzEvdGltZS8xNzczNzM0MDQ1L2dlbi8xNzczNzM0MDQ1L3NpZC9mVUpLWHM3VlVyS1Q0QkpIVXZOMm9hSndZV05LNWslN0VmakVIcUx3MjFQYkV1bE5pUnQzVE9rTFc3a0t1QkI2azZFUWIyTTZibW9qd2UlN0VITm01NUo3UmlfNFlXVjF6QjFZYzBLblNVTkhZeklNRWptenNBUjlwcTR3JTIxJTIx
For any users of VAL, I just converted all the voices that came with the old Say the Time Windows/Android app into Val clocks. The archive also comes with all the alternate chimes and alarms if you want to swap them out before importing. Edit: Download and import again, I just fixed the 0 not being spoken.
https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0f6bN-IVmsfVQ3VP0Jkawlp9Q#say_the_time_voices
Hello from the other side of the 64-bit NVDA migration, which honestly turned out way better than expected. Kinda feels like Y2k where because there was so much chatter about it both NVDA and addon developers reacted very quickly. The synthesizer situation also ended up being a nothing burger and I say this in a good way. We went from older SAPI 4 and 5 voices just quietly getting dropped from the compatibility layer being ready on-time, so credit where credit's due to NVAccess for that. The only 3 addons that straight up don't work right now for me is the clock, which I kind of replaced with VAL on the phone/Mac, as well as audio manager and xinyi OCR which call into 32-bit libraries so those would a bit more work to update. Not all of the older synths were officially upgraded either but that's probably a matter of time more than anything
Thread: For the past 4 years, I have been posting monthly roundups to audiogames.net talking about any new interesting blind friendly games or accessibility mods coming out. If you're looking for something to play or are curious what's going on, I'm going to be posting them in this thread.
To start, here is the last digest of 2025, which covers all blind friendly game releases I heard about both on the audiogames.net forum and off throughout December and even into the new year and boy there was a lot to cover. A lot of games got modded to be accessible, including both entries in the hand of fate series as well as the Phoenix Wright trilogy and that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's also rhythm games, some christmas vibes, a bunch of games for iOS and so much more. https://forum.audiogames.net/post/942425/#p942425
RE: https://mastodon.social/@daringfireball/116874136968141533
That's a real shame. My thoughts basically echo the author. I don't use Dropbox other than for shared folders I occasionally need to interact with and a large part of that is how unwieldy the official client has gotten and doesn't count to the frankly rediculous 3 device limit. Maestral is tiny in comparison. And whenever I do need to do something in the mobile apps on the website the amount of popups telling me to upgrade, or try features I'll never use is just sad. And then there was that one time I did briefly sign up because I needed to temporarily expand my dropbox for a month, after I payed for the extra space they immediately gave me another popup to go to a higher storage tier and that really doesn't make me want to support Dropbox as a company.
Haven't streamed in a while with @talon@dragonscave.space so let's fix that. Let's play some games from the games for blind gamers 5 jam! https://twitch.tv/pg13lp
Replying to
@greem Wouldn't be the first time execs were in a reality distortion field... Your post reminded me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50KBNQe5hTM
Blizzard Diablo team "booed" at Blizzcon 2018 - Diablo Immortal
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@alexchapman@tweesecake.social @NikJov@mastodon.social All the addon would need to do is ship a tiny .exe file called narrator.exe which would just do nothing when running, except maybe checking if nvda is running so that the process won't hang out if NVDA is quit. That's probably how I'd do it, there might be a better way but I don't have a lenovo computer so yeah.
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@NikJov@mastodon.social Huh. Wonder what they're checking for, like whether it's a case of looking whether narrator.exe is running or something else. The next logical steps would be either figuring out what process is doing this and how, then making an app to spoof it, or contacting Lenovo to have them check for other screen readers.
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@simon @accessibleandroid Maybe that would be a good way to go. I don't currently use Android, but totally get your concerns given CF's track record. At the same time, I have read a lot of posts saying how developing for modern Android, and specifically how Google wants developers to keep their apps updated and built against the latest SDK's to avoid getting booted, I think I understand why they chose this monetisation path. I just hope, given there was a lot of hostility to this even before launch, that if everyone does jump on a cracked version if one gets released we won't end up with a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy where cf decides to stop supporting the app because noone was buying it, and no one was buying it because of the sub and CF's track record. So yeah, maybe a lifetime option isn't a horrible idea even if they price it high for a a lot of people.
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@cartertemm@az.social @simon@procrastodon.net Ha, I wish I had that cookie setting thing as a user lol. Regarding text captchas did they seriously remove them? If so that would be even worse. The last time I heard the text captchas were an opt-in for the website owners and not an opt out which in practice meant they were available basically nowhere. The one place I saw them implemented was Discord and that's about it.
Second, when I did see that captcha it was seriously one of the trickiest things to parse. Their first version used to ask some nonsensical questions like "is the whale sitting on the toilet?" or something more or less like that. Then the one I got when verifying on Discord was something like "enter the word Captcha, but replace the letter in position 2 with I, change the 4th letter to be W, and in position 6 enter an H. This took me way too long to parse with speech. After I solved it, it gave me a second similar challenge which timed out shortly later probably because the first one took me so long. I seriously hope that if the text captchas are still available they're not this wordy. It felt like something designed more to confuse an LLM model than to verify if I was human.
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@jaybird110127@dragonscave.space @FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com @batworx@mastodon.africa Oh man it's trying to do those arps soooo hard except everything is at half speed and not quite in tempo. It's like you went to a friend's house who had a c64, heard the kind of music and composition style people did back in the day at least in Europe, but then your mom says but we have a sid chip at home. This is the SID chip at home.
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@jscholes@dragonscave.space Yeah, totally all this. Thanks for reminding me I need to try explorer patcher on my win 11 box to get first letter navigation back in the system tray.
As an aside I keep seeing people say Windows is more efficient to navigate than MacOS because of not requiring interaction and having more keyboard shortcuts. Which I think is true... In older Windows apps, back when MS and other developers cared about this more. Having a menu bar with shortcuts which gave apps a good hierarchy, and having working first letter nav does a lot. But then you have all the modern apps, where you have none of this. So your only option is to tab, maybe 10, 20 times to find the thing you need. Good example of this is the Windows 11 settings app which also has collapsable section buttons that you have to expand for added keystrokes. Because VoiceOver was designed for an OS that really sucked at keyboard navigation, it has tools to deal with shit like this. Windows screen readers are way nmore passive about navigation because Windows was historically way better at this, maybe with the exception of Narrator which borrows a lot from VOiceOver. I'd kill for a screen search or a browser style nav mode for NVDA that worked everywhere and not just on the web.
Oh and this is not to say modern MacOS doesn't have its own papercuts. Any app built with catalyst feels super janky with focus management and text fields sometimes read very weird. Not to mention all the other little VO things.
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@x0@dragonscave.space @FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com @kaveinthran@disabled.social @JustinMac84@mastodon.social @stevenscott@tweesecake.social Yeah, Acapella pulled out of most consumer TTS. They made the mac version of infovox in colaboration with assistiveware who decided to focus on their alternative communication apps. They killed Infovox for Mac when Apple silicon came out, and then the Windows version not long after. Now the only products they maintain I'm aware of are their Android voices, and the NVDA addon which to my pleasant surprise has just received a 64-bit update. Ironically maintaining an Apple driver would now be way easier and could support both iOS and Mac, and in fact their "My own Voice" service has an iOS app which can be used like this, but I guess they're just not interested in making their general voices available like that.
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@ToniBarth@troet.cafe Worked beautifully on Mac here, though in my case all it did was update OSARA and install Reakontrol which I meant to do for ages so can't comment on SWS or reapack. It did detect them and added your reapack repo no problem though.
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@QUinton1110@tweesecake.social I do not sadly. I could never get that app to work reliably so never bought the addon clocks for it. That being said I have a cuckoo clock I want to make in the pipeline that I think people will enjoy.
Oh and while I have you, when you have time could you add a new method for talking clocks that's combines methods 4 and 5, so basically lets you have two variants for each number for hours and minutes that goes above 12? I'd like to add a clock that speaks Polish, and we use different words for the hours and minutes.
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@QUinton1110@tweesecake.social Nice. Yeah concatonative methods might be tricky for other languages. In Polish 11 through 19 use the same last syllable, but then 20 is completely different, 30 and 40 are different from 20 but the share the last sylable, and then 50 is different again. So yeah that's why method 4 is by far the quickest way to do it lol.
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@HarmonicaPlayer@tweesecake.social Oops. Look at the post again, the link that's there now should work.
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Replying to
@HarmonicaPlayer@tweesecake.social Please use the link I just sent in my previous reply, I think you're clicking on the wrong one still.
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@HarmonicaPlayer@tweesecake.social OK that's weird. When I click it just gives me a download button.