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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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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)
xmpp fastfinge@im.interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
blog https://stuff.interfree.ca/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@NVAccess @prism @cachondo And that can only happen when the facts aren’t already public. For an open source foundation, that is a problem in and of itself. However, I apologize for wasting your time. In future, I’ll be sure to waste just as much of your time asking questions that should have had public answers when the pull requests were first opened.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@prism @cachondo @NVAccess Seems a bit late to discuss decisions that were already made…somewhere…by someone. Compare to the Linux kernel mailing list. If I want to know what was decided, who decided it, why they decided it, when and where, all discussion is right there. NVDA also operated this way up until the last couple years. When Michael or Jamie decided anything, the reasoning was all in public. Even if I didn’t like it, the chain of thought that got them there was fully visible.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@NVAccess @amir I did what I do for any open source project. I checked the GitHub and the mailing lists. Largely I found these things being done as though the discussion about what should be done happened somewhere else. Now it was time to execute.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@prism @cachondo @NVAccess It’s not based on that at all. It’s based on the fact that when I search the GitHub and mailing lists, as far as I can tell these discussions don’t exist.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@NVAccess @amir Good to know. Again, I tried hard to present both sides of every decision. They are all decisions I think are incorrect, but reasonable people can draw different conclusions on them. What I’m not seeing is the discussion, or the reasoning. This is a notable change over the last few years. And during that time is when, after many years of making decisions in public, I started feeling like maybe I wasn’t thrilled with some of the decisions I could find little to no public discussion of. As I’ve said multiple times in this thread and the article, it’s possible I’m wrong about the patterns I’ve noticed. But I’m getting nervous. As, seemingly are others.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@NVAccess @cachondo I think you are confused between discussion and argument. But if these things were discussed publicly, searching GitHub and groups.io didn’t turn them up. If they had, I’d have no questions and nothing to write.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@NVAccess @amir @FreakyFwoof I did check GitHub for the relevant discussion. Finding no discussion about the tradeoffs I was left to guess.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@NVAccess @FreakyFwoof But in addon could have been updated without updating NVDA.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@NVAccess @amir And the assumption that were wrong I and others had corrected long before you got involved. The rest you declined to speak to, other than to complain that the discussion was public.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@NVAccess @amir In an addon perhaps. Nv speech player was tested that wway. It didn’t work and was dropped. Someone else picked it up, and it lives on to this day.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@NVAccess @cachondo So anyone with any questions at all should ask directly and in private? That doesn’t scale. The fact you can’t point anyone to the public places where these answers can be found is even worse.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@NVAccess @MostlyBlindGamer This is, to be blunt, not true. You corrected assumptions that my post was edited to correct hours before you got involved. The rest of the thread is you complaining that the design of security systems should be conducted completely behind closed doors. I am doing my best to believe you are conducting this discussion in good faith. But I’m starting to struggle. As you are the nv access official account, it’s starting to look like nvaccess just doesn’t want any public discussion or criticism of its design choices.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@dangero I don’t entirely disagree with you. But that begs the question: what is the smallest atomic screen reader core? No braille support, obviously. No synthesizer built in, of course. MSAA and aria and all the other accessibility APIs should be addons. Uh…what’s left? Soon you just end up with an addon manager that makes so few assumptions it does nothing at all. Sounds like just telling someone to download Python and build a screen reader from pip packages. My point is it’s possible to go too far in either direction. But where the line is requires intentionality. It should be designed and decided, not just evolved.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@pixelate @amir I mean, if I had found a way to create an HTML file that would cause NVDA to delete all of your files whenever you opened it, I would agree that security through obscurity is, in fact, the way to go. Disclose that privately and let NVAccess fix it. But I can't agree that discussions of the design of the entire security system can, or should, take place in private.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@amir @FreakyFwoof And the idea that "We've never done it that way, because we don't do that, so it can't be done." is another alarming sign of shallow decision making. Also, NVDA has never moved an addon into core. So they're already doing things they've never done before.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@amir Yes. And I experienced hard criticism for even discussing a security feature in public. This, too, is a problem. Is NVAccess under funding pressure? Are they struggling to get grants, and public criticism of them is endangering that? Repeat it with me, everyone: I'm probably missing context, so I'll just have to trust that NVAccess knows things I don't.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@amir @FreakyFwoof Could NVDA have taken over maintaining the addon, but not have made it part of core? That way, it could be updated separately from NVDA. Maybe that would have made maintaining it harder somehow? I don't know. To repeat myself again: "I'm probably missing context, so I'll just have to trust that NVAccess knows things I don't." That phrase is doing far too much work, I think.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@amir I agree. But I do think it was worth exploring. In the same way I wrote my proof of concept AI text to speech addons. Without actually making them, I wouldn't have fully understood what a bad idea that is, and why it's a bad idea. I would have loved to see NVDA develope a prototype on-device image description addon. Then maybe realize it wasn't good enough and scrap it. But of course, as an addon, someone else could pick up the work if they thought they could salvage it. Because it was in core, now it's removed, and nobody else can hack on it even if they want to.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@FreakyFwoof @miki Right, but I am the one who decides if it gets enabled or not. Once NVDA is installed, the corporate security people have no control over that. But NVDA does have a corporate mode that disables addons.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5mo
@FreakyFwoof @miki @ednun_p You could, in theory, run your NVDA Remote server on any port you want. I don't know anyone who does. But you could.
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