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• Post #4282558

  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.

• Post #4204910

  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...

• Post #4201833

  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...

• Post #4200033

  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.

• Post #4199199

  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...

• Post #4101875

  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.

• Post #4087907

  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...

• Post #3965188

  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...

• Post #3964613

  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

• Post #3921381

  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.

• Post #3614656

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

• Post #2684206

  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...

• Post #2567831

  @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.

• Post #2558381

  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

• Post #2016989

  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,...

• Post #1604417

  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...

• Post #1474604

  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...

• Post #1351370

  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

• Post #899351

  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...

• Post #775103

  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

• Post #648114

  @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.

• Post #645697

  @nick@hkc.social Nah, that Uncle Poser probably doesn't even have a stomach. Loser.

• Post #623184

  I got tired of how mudlet constantly skips things with the built-in screen reader output, because they're using UIA or something. So I made a thing so mudlet can do direct screen reader output the way mushclient does, probably to the horror of @matt@toot.cafe and others: github.com/fastfinge/sral-mudlet But it works. #NVDA and #jaws and probably other things (though I didn't test zdsr and narrator). It builds on Linux, but it doesn't work on Linux because I don't have a Linux ma...

• Post #552849

  @amir@dragonscave.space I hope you and your family are okay!

• Post #550861

  Thanks, AI diversity proofreader! Because yes of course that’s a thing that exists, sigh. Highlighting the word “Walkman” and suggesting “Consider a more gender neutral term, like walkperson” was sure helpful! Did one of the “anti-woke” boomer standup “comedians” train this thing?Because that sounds like something I’d hear on some cursed Netflix comedy special. Probably just before the “funny” rant on pronouns, and right after the jokes about hyphenated last names.

• Post #538175

  @midzi@101010.pl @stevenscott@tweesecake.social Yeah, that makes sense to me. Although for me personally, entire radio automation software is overkill. I'm using this to trigger sounds during interactive in-person powerpoint presentations.

• Post #530987

  @Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net Just wanted to let you know that hf.space should be listed in spammy-subdomains.txt. I'm getting a wave of spam from instances all called "Pleroma Factory" with various subdomains of hf.space. Example: ali525-q.hf.space #fediblock

• Post #530781

  @stevenscott@tweesecake.social I messed with it, and it's exactly what I want! Unfortunately I had to read the sourcecode to figure out how it works. So to save you the effort: When you run the soundboard.exe, no window opens. You need to press alt+control+something, and it will open a "browse for file" dialogue. Here you can find a sound (wav/mp3/whatever) you want to play on the hotkey you just pressed. If you have other hotkeys already registered, soundboard won't conflict...

• Post #527347

  @stevenscott@tweesecake.social Interesting! I just...kind of assumed that this must exist! Though admittedly my needs are much simpler than yours. I'm just trying to trigger five different bits of audio during a presentation, without taking my slides off screen. I do a history of accessibility presentation frequently for some of our customers, with multiple sound clips going from the Apple II to modern neural text to speech sprinkled throughout to demonstrate how far things have come, and ge...

• Post #527298

  Showerthought: I bet AI is going to absolutely decimate simpler programming languages like autoit. The kind of people who are putting stuff together in autoit will probably just ask AI, and it'll use Python.