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• Post #4242581

  Question for people who vibe-code full apps, especially blind people, as I believe that covers most of my followers who do this: What would it take for you to be comfortable coding directly in a programming language without an LLM? A high-level programming language with better tutorials and quickstart templates than are currently available, particularly for writing real apps? Or do you believe that having an LLM generate the code is the only way you could practically do what you do?

• Post #4166231

  The variety of weird states that a general-purpose computer can get into is truly out of control. My Windows PC occasionally gets into a state where opening Slack with Windows+5 (I have Slack pinned to the 5th slot on my taskbar) plays a Windows ding sound as Slack is opening, but only if I press that keystroke while an Edge browser window is focused. How does that happen? I don't know; I just reboot. But that shouldn't be necessary.

• Post #4162851

  I wish there were a way of text messaging where someone could send a message to a group but the replies would go only to the sender, not to the group. I'm glad to get my mother's announcements that she sends to multiple family members, but not everyone else's reactions.

• Post #3732969

  This is a challenge to everyone who says that generative AI is unethical, that it's an indictment of the software industry, etc. What are we going to do about the fact that at least one group, blind people, is now effectively using LLM-based coding agents to vibe-code solutions to accessibility problems? Maybe that *is* an indictment of how the software industry neglects accessibility and the needs of blind people. And of the complexity of "real programming". What will we do about...

• Post #3654212

  RE: https://caneandable.social/@EdenLinnea/116879333978518110 I broadly agree with the sentiment. But, I think there's something wrong with the fact that people think it's just normal that computers make mistakes. Aside from occasional hardware failure, a computer reliably does exactly what the running program tells it to do. So, a computer running a properly verified program shouldn't make mistakes. I think it's a problem that people just accepted that computers make mistakes,...

• Post #3098418

  RE: https://mas.to/@zekjur/116684759615780829 What I take from the linked post by Andrew Tridgell, author and maintainer of rsync, is that anger about generative AI should be directed at the people who are making it and pushing it on the world, not at individual maintainers who have given us so very much over the decades and are just trying to do what they think is right in response to what the former group have done and are doing.

• Post #2557741

  Here's an idea: someone should produce a series of ebooks that teach how to use GNOME and popular applications (e.g. Firefox and LibreOffice) with Orca, in a systematic way with activities for each concept or task, then use the proceeds from sales of those ebooks to help fund development of Orca and the free desktop accessibility stack in general, as NV Access has done with NVDA and their training ebooks. I think there would be a market for that.

• Post #2555741

  It makes me angry, perhaps unreasonably so, that teachers are now resorting to mandating the use of handwriting on exams, at least in part in response to students using LLMs to cheat. I have enough usable vision that I *can* handwrite, but it was unusually tedious for me, and I was glad to be mostly done with it when I got a laptop. I thought the days of students like me having to handwrite, and fully blind students having to do something different from their sighted peers, were over. 1/?

• Post #2394880

  Question for blind programmers: Do you think you can read or write code faster, when working in a language and library ecosystem you know well? And a follow-up question: If you use LLMs to generate code, do you feel that having to read more code, as opposed to writing the code yourself from memory, is a net productivity loss?

• Post #2327434

  Is there such a thing as a USB power bank / portable charger that has some way of finding out its current battery level that's accessible to blind people?

• Post #1857171

  RE: https://mastodon.drkirkadams.com/@drkirkadams/116499441479778993 We've kind of been here before. In the late 2000s through the mid 2010s, there was much hype about APIs, and big players like Facebook and Twitter offered feature-rich APIs that let you write a full alternate client for the service. And there were such clients specifically for blind people. Then the companies closed those APIs down. Some companies are opening up their services to AI agents, through MCP and/or command-l...

• Post #1776645

  I'm liking my new Cosori air-fryer/oven that I got for Christmas, but I wish the app could communicate directly with the device rather than going all the way out to a remote server and back.

• Post #1155286

  RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@godotengine/116380176685450213 TIL that Slay the Spire II uses the Godot engine. Godot has accessibility support via AccessKit. So I wonder if the developers of Slay the Spire II have done any work on making that game accessible to blind players. The original Slay the Spire was made accessible via a third-party mod called Say the Spire.

• Post #1155285

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@bcantrill/116393325512331807 I'm not sure I agree with the closing nod to the importance and power of LLMs. But I agree with the rest of this.

• Post #1155284

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116387853263295590 One thing that really resonated with me in that video is the importance of *non-hyperbolic* criticism. I just saw someone refer to an LLM as a random word generator. Come on, we all know that's overly simplistic. We won't have any credibility if we're not accurate in describing what the thing actually does.

• Post #1101168

  Just saw a post from an instructor who's clearly upset about how students are using LLMs to skip the hard parts of education. Not linking or boosting because I don't want people to pile on this person. I'm inclined to agree, until they end with: > Seriously, we need to go back to typewriter labs. I think that's an over-reaction. Digital text is important for accessibility, and I think it needs to remain normalized so that blind people don't feel t...

• Post #968925

  There's an article currently on Hacker News about Microsoft's lack of a coherent GUI strategy over the decades. https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/03/13/microsoft-hasnt-had-a-coherent-gui-strategy-since-petzold/ The article said that WPF was good technology. I couldn't let that go unchallenged. I remember the bad performance that my brother suffered running a WPF app in 2010-2011 on an average 2008 laptop, because WPF's bet on GPU acceleration turned out to remain...

• Post #959951

  Re: last boost (https://caneandable.social/@JessicaTegner/116357917490605343), for me, the bigger story is the initial release of AccessForge, a one-click installer for game accessibility mods. And it's written in Rust using wxDragon, a project to provide Rust bindings for wxWidgets. Good work, @JessicaTegner.

• Post #957271

  I just read the latest post by Sean Goedecke (who doesn't seem to be on the fediverse), "I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years" https://www.seangoedecke.com/will-my-job-still-exist/ Regardless of what we think about whether LLM-based agents can actually reduce the demand for software developers, I think he's right in the "Tasting our own medicine" section. I tell myself that it's not so bad in my case because, wo...

• Post #909822

  This blog post recently crossed my timeline. https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2026/03/07/money-isnt-going-to-solve-the-burnout-problem/ It talks about burnout among FOSS maintainers, which is an important subject. It saddens me, though, that the author called out Rust alongside generative AI as a contributor to their own burnout as a distro maintainer, going back to the Python cryptography package's adoption of Rust in 2021. Is there anything that we who use and promote Rust can do about...

• Post #758113

  Re: last boost (https://toot.cat/@plexus/116283016837715719): > Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. 1000% this! This is the part of that post that really resonates with me. And the recent flooring of the accelerator on this trend makes me want to fight it, to pay *more* attention to quality, especially at lower layers of the stack. Admittedly, sometimes this hurts my productivity when...