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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
Admin
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
Location Ottawa
Birthday 1987-12-20
Pronouns he/him (EN)
matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
According to the warnings on archive of our own: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage Sex This may be the most surprising , , , One Piece, Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, Star Wars, and Sonic the Hedgehog I have ever read in my life. I promise that if you click, you will be absolutely surprised and astonished by this 4 million word opus of text: archiveofourown.org/works/68860766/chapters/178377056
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
pinging you @DavidGoldfield as this sounds like something your community might like to hear about: "Are you passionate about accessibility in tech? The Open Source email client Thunderbird is starting a new Accessibility Standards & Compliance Committee, and we’re inviting one community member to be part of it.
We’re looking for someone who cares about inclusive design, development, or content and wants to make a real impact. You’d help review features, share ideas, and make sure accessibility stays front and center in how we build Thunderbird.
If that sounds like you, send an email to community@thunderbird.net with "Design Committee" in the subject line to request more information. We’d love to hear from you!
Let’s make email better for everyone." www.reddit.com/r/accessibility/comments/1mkdt8q/want_to_help_make_thunderbird_more_accessible/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@twynn @blindndangerous Sorry about that! Assuming a sampling rate makes things much easier and faster than having to resample in real time.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@blindndangerous Waiting for addon store approval now. github.com/nvaccess/addon-datastore/issues/6333
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@cavyherd @jdp23 @jeridansky I’m 37. Can I also be old and tired and done with it all? Lol
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@cavyherd @jdp23 @jeridansky I hope you’re right. But the insentives online are far more perverse than in any other endeavour. Advertising incentivizes obfuscation to prevent ad blockers. Vendor lock in incentivizes closed standards. I’m even starting to see creators pull back from microformats and intentionally violate standards to make things harder for AI, without caring about the accessibility side effects. Nowhere else in the entire field of human accomplishment have things been so perfectly aligned against useful standardization. The standards that do exist are used as a tool to lock small players out, more than anything. For example Microsoft’s xml office format, and the w3c embrace of drm. Not to mention that the standard has become so complex that writing a new browser isn’t realistic anymore, unless your Google, Apple, or Microsoft. Even Mozilla gave up and are still using what is effectively the Netscape browser engine. Yes, I’m aware of ladybird and servo. I’d say wake me up when they’re accessible and a viable browser replacement, but I expect to be long dead by then.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@cavyherd @jeridansky @jdp23 Something something AI? Hey, that’s a more detailed plan than several vc funded AI companies!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@cavyherd @jeridansky @jdp23 One of the issues is that the incentives are all wrong. The marketers and developers all have adoption targets they need to hit in order to justify the feature/pay cheque/etc. Those pop-ups are to make the adoption number go up, not to help you.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@jdp23 @cavyherd @jeridansky I don't even know if you can in the official Mastodon app; you might need a third party one for that. And now we're getting into the biggest problem we have: there are nine thousand different apps with fifty different ways of accomplishing everything. There's something here about trying to rethink the way we talk about tech "problems". IE, instead of documenting "how to do X", document "You need/use accomodation Y, these are some useful things you can do". I don't know what this looks like at scale. But users who have no idea that a thing is even possible if they just change a setting/use another app/update/whatever are not going to search for how to do that thing. It happens to me countless times where I tell a fellow blind user about a setting they can change in their screen reader to help with something I'm hearing them struggle with, and the reaction is "Wow! I had no idea that was possible! That makes my life a thousand times better." How do we surface useful customizations to people, when they don't yet know that they want them, while not being annoying, making assumptions, or violating privacy?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@cavyherd @jeridansky To me, this is a perfect example of why we (the indiweb) need to double down on standards and customizations. With microformats, non-obfuscated HTML and JavaScript code, and an open browser ecosystem that allows everyone to modify the online experience as they like, there's no reason why conflicting accommodations should be a problem. Why can't I set a "date display preference" in my browser, and have every website respect that? We can't expect every developer to know about every possible accessibility need. But we can expect them to use open APIs and follow open standards, so that everyone can interact in the way that works best for us, even if it wasn't the way the developer planned for. That's why the fediverse took off in the blind community. Don't like the Mastodon app? Use one that works with Braille displays, voice control, switch systems, game controllers, or whatever else is best for you. Don't like the Mastodon server? Activity Pub means you have a dozen to choose from. My personal server just drops anything from pixelfed servers, because I'm the only user and image-based content just doesn't interest me. I also just have display names turned off, and only see everyone by their username, solving the problem of emoji in display names entirely. The primary issue with this approach is tech literacy. Unfortunately, most people who use the word "tech literacy" are ablest, classist, or working for big tech. Tech literacy doesn't mean knowing how to program and compile your Linux kernel. Nor does it mean knowing how to use Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Cloud. It means knowing how to discover your available options, determine what works for you, when to set things up yourself, and when you shouldn't, how to judge if the person or organization you're allowing to do it on your behalf has your best interests at heart and is doing a good job.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@cavyherd @jeridansky At least for blind folks, we could set our screen readers to say "January" when encountering "Jan." Most folks don't, because it's not confusing, but almost every screen reader has a setting for this. In the case of Braille reading, the abbreviation is actually more accessible; most Braille displays can only display between 20 and 80 characters at a time, so anything that saves space helps there. I won't speak to folks with cognitive challenges.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@wiresmith So I'm afraid I have to give you the dreaded "it depends" answer. If I'm trying to find a process/docker/whatever that's using more resources than expected, I probably want a table sortable by all of the various columns, with a combo box to set the window to examine ("average over the last minute/hour/day/week"). If I'm trying to determine what, exactly, is causing that resource use, I probably want some kind of real-time values reporting. Apple's Charts accessibility API does a good job of this: VoiceOver can actually play a beep that pans left/right for one axis, and pitches the beep up/down for the other. There are also tools (though only for Windows) that allow me to monitor the CPU or Ram use of a selected process on the machine, by just playing a constant beep, and changing the pitch up and down as the value changes. This way I can trigger various functions, and see when exactly the use spikes. It can also be useful to be able to set "expected resource use", and then get back a list of timestamps when the value was above or below what I set as the "expected" range. Then, at least, I can start matching up these timestamps with other things happening on the machine (chron jobs? A popular website post? Whatever.). I think the ultimate solution, here, is to get all of the people making these dashboards to use SVG and other standards a lot more, instead of just rendering png/jpg graphics. This way, the accessibility tools could be built as browser addons, rather than making every single tool that offers any kind of visualizations re-implement accessibility over and over again.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@scan Woo! A fellow iceshrimp.net server admin. Though I'm not brave enough to run an open registration instance. The 14 million posts in the database make my single user instance resource hungry enough as it is.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
TIL: Google Gemini is significantly better at reading the kinds of colourful graphs you see on server monitoring dashboards than are any of the other leading models from and . Why yes, I do, in fact, resent that I had to learn this. Because tools don't make data visualizations to (even on the terminal) sometimes the things I to get rid of big tech just mean I have to use big tech anyway to fix them when they explode. But never the less, Google is the only AI that doesn't tell me about the menus and other Windows I captured by mistake in my screenshot, doesn't make unhelpful recommendations, and actually provides the data without cluttering it up with Emoji. But I did appreciate metta telling me "This graph shows CPU use on the X axis, RAM use on the Y axis, network use on the Z axis, and time on the fake axis." I mean, open source UI is famously terrible...but I don't think it's that terrible...yet! Shhh, don't give the data visualization people any ideas!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@alexhall Palace uses openal. It’s just nicer if only it worked on windows.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@alexhall Linux only though
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@alexhall I was looking at palace actually
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
So here's an game I found. It's text based, with audio. It's not for me; you need to know stuff about franchise's and division's and moves and belts and things. But if you're a person who enjoys wrestling, this might be for you:
Step into the ring and take control! Welcome to GRUNT - The Wrestling Game, the ultimate text-based wrestling simulation where you are the booker, the promoter, and the wrestling god of your very own universe!
Tired of wrestling games that limit your imagination? GRUNT WRESTLING hands you the keys to the entire promotion. From creating a rookie in a local gym to running a multi-division global powerhouse, every choice is yours. Witness epic five-star matches, shocking betrayals, and the crowning of new legends—all brought to life through a detailed, moment-to-moment simulation engine.
This isn't just a game; it's a sandbox for your wrestling stories. Build your dream roster, book the matches, and watch the chaos unfold!
nmercer1111.itch.io/grunt-the-wrestling-game
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@alexhall Yes. But its python support is Linux only.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6mo
@pixelate Who took the number sign? C'mon, guys! The entire fediverse only has one and we have to share! Fess up and put it back where it goes.