completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those. keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
@wronglang@menelion@matt@nolan@zersiax Even something as simple as reading logs, establishing what normal values are, then collating and describing periods of time where values go outside of normal could help. Just knowing quickly that at the exact time this one endpoint is called disc io goes way up and database response time goes way down but cpu and ram stay within there normal ranges could help a blind human pinpoint where to start looking.
@wronglang@menelion@matt@nolan@zersiax You’re correct as far as that goes. But audibly representing large amounts of graphical data is still an unresolved research problem. If there was one true proven solution to that part of it, I’d already be pushing hard for the tools to implement it. Whereas AI skips the problem entirely (when it’s not just making things up) by pinpointing and describing the small slices around the problem exactly (“Whenever anyone hits endpoint X, database Y freezes for X time because storage array W is overloaded”).
@matt@nick Ah, got it. I misread you as suggesting yet another accessible programming language. I think the problem with Quorum falls less out of it being accessible, and more out of it being an “educational” language. Educational languages either never escape into the real world to help students do anything useful (scratch, logo) or they do escape into the real world and set everyone back for years (basic).
@wronglang@menelion@matt@nolan@zersiax Yes. But this smells like a problem that requires AI to solve. Or every program ever to write better logs. As it is, how do I accessibly reconcile my web server logs, my database logs, and my storage activity, so I can track all the symptoms of an issue? Sighted people get graphs with colored lines from stuff like grifana or whatever. Blind people get four log dumps in four different formats, without even colored lines to help us, and told to just listen to every line read out.
@matt@nick Please no! If BGT and quorum haven’t taught everyone that designing an accessible programming language is a dead end, we are beyond hope. I would far rather blind people vibe code everything and at least get second hand exposure to mainstream tools, and maybe learn something that could help them get a job, than write BGT by hand.
@nolan@zersiax@menelion@matt Yes, seconding log files. AI read 68 megs of logs and helped me fix a database performance issue in half an hour, that I’d previously been debugging on and off for two years. If only I could have read the pretty graphs, the issue would have been immediately obvious.
@matt@menelion It’s not about the language itself for me. It’s about how inaccessible the tools surrounding it are. Debugging is still awkward and terrible. Designing forms still sucks. Profiling is a pita. We can’t test on the iOS or Android simulator last I checked. We have nothing as clean and easy as unity. All tutorials and cookbooks are incomprehensible YouTube videos, LLM slop, ad covered, or all three. AI allows me to use one interface, with one modality, to do the hard bits.
@menelion I haven’t found any issues yet but I am using prism for speech output, not uia. Because I want to speak things like status changes when the app is in the system tray.
Isn't interesting that before #AI could code, assistants were always gendered #female (Siri, Alexa, etc.) As soon as AI became able to code, it got #male or non-gendered names (Claude, Chat GPT). I'm not saying explicitly gendering assistants as female was a good thing. I'm saying it's interesting that the trigger for tech/society in general to stop doing that was when the AI became able to write programs. It really does say something unflattering about our assumptions and worldview.
Today I get to learn things about MSIX and WinUI3. I'm really not loving how WPF feels with a screen reader, and I don't want to use the ancient winforms.
