André Polykanine

I think the fact that generative models, especially modern LLMs with reasoning and tool calling (agents), can clearly do useful things, plus the fact that these models are trained on basically the sum of all digitized human creative work, is possibly the most persuasive argument we have so far for abolishing copyright. Right now, only the powerful can ignore copyright with impunity. What they have now should be available to all of us, and not just indirectly through the models they let us use.

Orbit Flow 40 starts shipping September 7! Orders are now open. Initial batches are limited and will ship in the order received.

https://www.orbitresearch.com/products/orbit-flow-40/orbit-flow-40/

#OrbitFlow40 #braille #A11y

@mew Dectalk? No, eloquence!

I'm applying to the EU civil service, and the experience with the accessibility of the process is... suboptimal.

On the 31st of August at 10:30, Central European Summer Time, I received an email from EPSO (European Personnel Selection Office, which runs the process) asking me to verify whether the tests were accessible, in particular questions 11 to 15, and gave me a link to try it out.

They asked me to reply to this by the 2nd of September at 17:00, CEST. I was very lucky I returned from holidays in time to do this. 2 working days is not a reasonable deadline to do accessibility testing which should be done by the institution itself.

To add to my concern, but I must admit not to my surprise, I checked the test and found out the information for questions 11 to 15 (the numerical part of the reasoning test) is completely inaccessible, with the data necessary for the calculations presented as an image file with an arbitrary name such as ES3733N.

Just in case I checked an accessibility panel on the test, which contained completely unhelpful tools for me, though I'm sure they're vital to others, involving colour contrast, text size, and the like.

The calculator available as a tool is, I think, not technically inaccessible, but unusable on a timed test, given the way the interface works, requiring linear navigation through a list of buttons to input the numbers and the operations.

I try to not be too demanding about accessibility, but there are at least three things that bother me about this: the unreasonably short deadline, the off-loading of accessibility testing to candidates, and the fact there doesn't seem to have been any thought given to the issue. It does not require an especially knowledgeable person to work out tabular data given as an image with no alt text and no structured description isn't going to be a lot of use to a
screen reader.

#EPSO #a11y #EU #accessibility

@serge @acarson Exactly, that's why I love conversing and discussing with Jews, religious or not. English language is poorer than Slavic languages in this case, btw, we have two words for Jew/Jewish person: one for the religion (basically analog to Judaist), and another for the ethnicity. Anyway, it's super interesting that, being monotheistic, you are allowed and even encouraged to question everything, hence your minds are more flexible and more open for critical thinking.

Person:
'Help me poison my photos against AI because AI bad.'
Also person:
'Never including Alt-text ever because AI can train on it and AI bad.'

Who's really bad in this situation? Check yourself.

ppl on zig subreddit upset because I spent time unwinding after 10+ hour workdays contributing to Zig but on a hobby computer project, rather than whatever they think is the highest priority thing for me to do with my own time

wait until they find out I also watch anime and spend 1+ hour per day studying Japanese rather than working, not to mention eating, sleeping, and exercising, and god forbid taking vacation days

@gemlog Yes, especially in Europe. We have both Braille and that readable print (large and touchable) on guardrails at most train stations in France and in Germany at least. It says, for example, the track number or the street name.

@gemlog I also researched about it. It is present in Icelandic, Mongolian, isiXhosa (Nelson Mandela's real name is Rolihlahla Mandela, and you pronounce R like in French roughly, but unvoiced, and Hl exactly like Ll in Welsh). It also exists in Tolkienian Elvish languages. for example, hlas is "ear" in Quenya, and you pronounce it with this sound also.

@gemlog Oh, cyrillic! I mean, print form is okay, even I do know it and can read it if it's big enough to fit under my finger (my "native" reading font is Braille of course), but the handwritten form is absolute nightmare 😂

@gemlog I also can make it, but because I'm a language nerd :)

@aharoni Single-choice boxes… yes, sounds sane to me too, didn't think about it.

@gemlog A Welsh? Cymraeg is an extremely beautiful language, I love Welsh music also.

@gemlog Merging pull requests 😊

@aharoni Wait, I didn't talk about cars, I talk about… сорри, я не знаю, как это правильно по-английски (а у вас вижу русский в профиле). В общем, я про обычные домашние трёхпрограммники и прочие приёмники типа ВЭФ, где именно что одну кнопку нажимаешь, остальные отжимаются)

@aharoni But how would you call them? "Mutually exclusive checkable controls in form of circles with a dot inside the checked one?" 😊

@gemlog I'm a Ukrainian living in France.

@aharoni Not only Americans. We had such radios in the Soviet union also.

Pro tip for folks working with Apple documentation: add ".md" to the end of a URL to get it as Markdown – much lighter to load, and also friendlier for agents. Example: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/string.md

We are thrilled to share that Sriram Ramanathan was named Vice President of Engineering at Vispero. Sriram joined us in 2007 as a JAWS engineer and has led the development of our kiosk screen reading solutions, our transition to cloud-based services, and the applied AI team behind Vispero Companion. In his new role, he will lead Engineering across our software portfolio and shape how AI and emerging technologies build the next generation of accessible products. Join us in celebrating Sriram!