André Polykanine

Socialism and Christianity are completely incompatible.

We only need to do a quick search of Socialism’s history. For example, the word ‘Nazi’ is an abbreviation of the German term "Nationalsozialist. The term refers specifically to the National Socialist German Workers' Party, which was led by Adolf Hitler.

And let us not forget the USSR – the abbreviation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

I want to be clear about this: Voting for politicians who call themselves Socialists is like signing your own death warrant and the death warrants of everyone you know and love who faithfully serves Christ.

Prove me wrong.

If you have come across a black cat. Pet it. If it will let you. It’s not bad luck

So today I worked on an interesting project.
One of our customers is a Dragon and J-Say user and is completely reliant on using her voice as she cannot use the keyboard.
She needs to work a great deal with custom applications which are complex in layout and also Outlook Classic to find messages within specific date ranges, and then respond to them.
So I set up the ChatGPT app for her and we worked with the Computer Use element of it which I detailed here on Sunday.
Now, she can ask ChatGPT to do a lot of this work for her. J-Say works well in the ChatGPT app, so she can ask it to do things like:
Create a task in this application with the subject of, followed by the subject.
Summarise the details of all messages received within the past three days.
Open the third of those messages and reply to it, saying I will send a full response within 48 hours,
Etc.
There's still a lot of work to do but it's a fun project and is going to be of great value.

Hallelujah! #Google fixed password autofill #Accessibility in #Chrome! Coooool!

Just submitted this to Google accessibility support. What the actual hell is this timeline?

If you use TalkBack and navigate by exploring by touch rather than swiping, when you drag your finger over the player controls while a video is playing in the YouTube Android app, within seconds the entire app dies with a `StackOverflowError`. Over 4,500 frames of pure recursion before the 8 MB stack runs out.

Naturally, the app restarts, immediately reloads the exact same video and player state, and the second you touch the screen again to find the pause or seek controls, it blows up again.

I pulled `adb logcat -b crash` and it's a ridiculous infinite loop between Android's framework and Litho:

`View.dispatchTouchExplorationHoverEvent`.
-> `TouchDelegate.onTouchExplorationHoverEvent` (framework forwards hover event to delegate).
-> `ComponentHost.dispatchHoverEvent` (Litho forwards back to host).
-> `hdu.onTouchExplorationHoverEvent` (obfuscated TouchDelegate subclass.)
-> and back around forever.

From the looks of it, a `TouchDelegate`, presumably meant to enlarge the tap target for one of the smaller player controls, was given a delegate view that points right back to the `ComponentHost` that owns the delegate in the first place.

The best part? Normal touches don't hit `dispatchTouchExplorationHoverEvent`. Sighted users will never encounter this, and even blind users swiping through elements one at a time won't trigger it because linear navigation doesn't emit hover events. It strictly breaks explore by touch. Conveniently, the exact interaction model a huge chunk of us rely on to quickly locate controls.

I handed them the exact cycle, device specs, and the obfuscated frame name for build 21.34.243. Now taking bets on whether an engineer actually sees and fixes the root cause or if support tells me to reinstall the app and clear my cache.

N’importe qui peut prétendre faire un audit d’accessibilité numérique, alors comment faire confiance ?

Eh oui, l’expertise-conseil en accessibilité numérique n’est pas une profession réglementée.

Je vous donne des pistes de réflexion : formations et certifications, expérience, façon de faire un audit, possibilité de demander un exemple de grille/rapport d’audit, tests à réaliser sur le site du prestataire…

#accessibilité #RGAA #a11y

https://www.copsae.fr/nimporte-qui-peut-pretendre-faire-audit-accessibilite-numerique/

Think of AI as a brilliant, eager intern who just walked in. Knows a staggering amount about the world, and absolutely nothing about you.

Every single thing it needs, you GET to hand it. That is not a limitation. That is power. Use it.

No Sight Required.
#AI #Accessibility #Blind

SharpLouis, my #LibLouis #DotNet wrapper, is updated to version 3.0.0.
Main changes:
* Updated to LibLouis 3.39.0 that was released yesterday.
* Now the Braille translation table metadata is fully handled. for example, some tables have several languages, like Israeli Braille table has Hebrew, Arabic and English, and now `FindByLanguage()` will return those. Also, missing fields like region, grade, system, version, unicode-range, variant are handled by the wrapper.
NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/AccessMind.SharpLouis
gitHub: https://github.com/accessmind/sharp-louis
Do you like my work? Please donate. https://oire.org/donate/. Thanks!
#Braille #BrailleTranslation #Wrapper

Currently working on improving the accessibility of PitchNet, an open source alternative to plug-ins like Melodyne. Thanks to CodeX got a preliminary version working in about an hour or so, but I'm not sure if I like my implementation. I'll probably end up releasing the code on GitHub anyways after I do a little more work, but here's the original repo in case anyone who actually knows what they're doing wants to take a crack at it: https://github.com/SessionLoops/PitchNet

I wonder whether it's accessible. I'm reconsidering #1password for my family anyway.

What about blind children who will want or need to use smart glasses for navigation throughout the building? If a teacher distributes a print handout, will a blind child be allowed to use a cell phone's scanning app to read it? These full bans on some of these technologies really concern me.

Many have pointed out that Aaron Swartz was driven to suicide by the prosecution for his copyright infringements, while the LLM companies can violate copyright with impunity. The proper resolution to that isn't to say that those companies shouldn't be able to do what they do, let alone that we shouldn't use the models that they create. The proper resolution is that information should be as freely accessible as Swartz wanted, and the legal system shouldn't have driven him to suicide over that.

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

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

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

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