@fastfinge@quanin@lynessence Have you considered firing him and putting AI in charge? That seems to be the hot new thing that definitely will not go wrong.
@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin As a large language model, talking about fire is irresponsible and against my ethical guidelines, as it may burn people. Perhaps we could talk about something else instead, like pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.
@quanin@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence At least, from Ice Crhimp, you could go to a version with less bells and whistles, called frozen shrimp. And then, a very basic one called, breaded shrimp.
@mcourcel@quanin@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic Oh you mean while you're writing all kinds of AI music? Lol but seriously, I agree. I'm worried about the long-term effects on both the planet and our children.
@lynessence@dhamlinmusic@quanin@mcourcel I'm kind of not? Like, they didn't need AI to elect a fascist government to our south. AI might make things slightly better, or slightly worse...but mostly it'll just make things different. We didn't need AI to lose trust in the news media. Covid and vaccine conspiracies were alive and well before GPT. Bitcoin and cars were already destroying the environment. Cheap kids crap on YouTube was already destroying brains. AI is either a cure or a null factor.
@fastfinge@lynessence@dhamlinmusic@mcourcel I mean, all of those things are bad, absolutely. But this drive to lean on AI like people want us to is making us lazy in ways YouTube can only dream of. People at least used to google shit 5 years ago. Now they just ask GPT and GPT googles shit.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Nah, five years ago they used to ask on mailing lists for someone else to Google Shit. The lazy people were always, and will always be, lazy.
@fastfinge@quanin@dhamlinmusic@mcourcel This is truth. I work in customer service, I have people calling me all the time to fill out Google forms that are perfectly accessible. But then they tell me "but I'm blind and this is inaccessible", and I secretly laugh at them in my head because they don't know that I am also blind and in filling the form out for them.
@lynessence@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@mcourcel ROFL. When I worked for Dell I had someone try that with me once. The 30 seconds of dead silence when I told them so am I was priceless.
@quanin@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@mcourcel I really really really want to say that one of these days. I just don't know if I would get in trouble or not. Probably not. But I can't afford to be jobless.
@lynessence@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@mcourcel I highly doubt you'd lose your job. You work for a company that assists people. What you'd be doing is basically gold standard confirming that yes, this thing is accessible. You might offend the odd blind person who thinks "accessible" means "I know how to use it", but that's not a firable offense.
@quanin@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@mcourcel Agreed. I don't think I would get fired. But I already have Aira explorers who hang up the phone when I answer it and refuse to speak to me, so best not to rock the boat. I don't understand what the issue is, I'm a nice polite Canadian. Maybe they are Republicans who don't like Canadians. Lol
@lynessence@fastfinge@quanin@mcourcel See I have run across this more than a few times, something should be accessible, but the entity that created it only tested it on something like JAWS with Firefox, or Voiceover with Safari, and it falls apart when you show up using Talkback on Edge, or Narrator on IE11.
@pixelate@fastfinge@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel I am trying to figure out why Facebook will not log in on Edge with #NVDA, the information is correct, works on Edge on my phone, even saved it there to have it auto fill, my best guess is uBlock.
@fastfinge@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel Somehow Talkback on Chrome either works flawlessly, or they manage to break it in ways even Google cannot figure out. I had Google Forms that someone managed to break for use with Talkback.
@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel I think that says more about how fragile and broken TalkBack is. I have an Android phone for work and I had to replace talkback to get anything done. And it's still not as smooth as IOS.
@dhamlinmusic@fastfinge@quanin@mcourcel These are folks who are using windows with jaws or NVDA, and I know Google forms are accessible with those screen readers. I am using a Mac, which is usually more troublesome and less accessible.
@pixelate@dhamlinmusic@fastfinge@quanin@mcourcel I have heard that, but I've never run into any issues myself with DocuSign. But I suppose there are probably multiple ways to format a document and some are probably inaccessible.
@lynessence@dhamlinmusic@fastfinge@quanin@mcourcel I seem to remember one where the form fields weren't labeled, so it wasn't clear what it wanted me to enter. But then I could be remembering one the many PDF's I've had to look through at work. I absolutely hate PDF's.
@pixelate@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel But making accessible PDFs is possible! All you need is fifty thousand hours of training directly from Adobe, two software packages nobody has ever heard of before, and for making accessible pdfs to be your full time job. Either that or you could just hire one of the people from the thousands of ads I get in my Linkedin messages every day from companies nobody has ever heard of who specialize in pdf remediation.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel And then I take those PDF's and either convert them to something else or run them through AI if they're image ones. Of course if I have to make them accessible PDF's I just use Word to save as PDF or something. I wish the format hadn't been invented and people used EPUB for readonly files. Or HTML. Or something.
@pixelate@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel The problem PDFs still solve, that no other file format is even trying to do, is that it makes it obvious (if you know where and how to look) if a PDF file was modified after generation. That's why they get used for contracts.
@pixelate@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel The obvious solution is just put every file on the blockchain and then something something cryptography hash mining something something distributed something something free market Yay! Success!
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@mcourcel Yes, I know. This need to connect everything to the internet is going to kill us before anything else does. I mean, what's next? You can't open your fridge unless you can pass Face ID on your phone? Don't even get me started on why my fridge needs internet access anyway. Every appliance I own is dumb and it'll stay that way where possible.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@mcourcel Samsung is putting ads on there $3,000 smart fridges. So yes. But sadly, if you want accessibility, you don't really get that choice. Thermostats with just a couple buttons are pretty much gone, for example. It's a touch screen now, and that means an app for us.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@mcourcel And you have no idea how much that pisses me off. Same with the people (and yes, I've heard blind people say this) who say "well just connect it to your Alexa and it'll be accessible". No, that's not accessible. That's lazy. And I'm not buying a fucking Alexa.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@mcourcel I have none of those, and absolutely 0 appliances that require them. Yes, I'm aware that won't be a permanent thing and yes it annoys me no end. I mean look. I get the convenience, ish, though I fail to see why I need the ability to adjust the temperature of my house in Ottawa from Toronto. But I just woke up to no internet this morning for about 2 hours. That already delayed me doing a thing that gets me paid. If it also delay me doing a thing that gets me coffee I will slap someone.
@fastfinge@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@mcourcel actually if you get the thurmostat we have, it still has all the buttons on it. yes you use an app caled sensi, but if for what ever reason something goes tits up, like when the AWS thing happened, our sensi app had remote API connecting issues, so I just walked over to the wall, and used either the up or down arrow keys to adjust the temprature. I don't know how to switch it from heat to air, but there is a mode button, so I assume, I just have to memorize how many times to push it, but the point is it can still be done.
@quanin@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@mcourcel here is the thing. yes, we have smart things here, however, when we buy smart things, we get ones thatyou can still use if the internet shits the bed. smile. our thurmostat for example looks just like a normal one. it even has all the buttons too, so if the app has issues for what ever reason, I can still walk to the device on the wall and adjust it the old fation way. The smart microwave we have, I guess we aren't as smart as as we can't even get it connected to alexa. we even had two or three different sighted people here looking at the manual, and not even they could get it connected, but that is ok. we put dots on the 2, 5, 8, 0, start/30 seconds, and stop/clear. from those few things marked, we can use it just fine. If I can't use it without the internet, I don't want it. sure the smart thing makes things easier, but you never know when something is going to go tits up on you.
@JamminJerry@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@mcourcel Yes, this. Before actual accessible microwaves were a thing, marking the buttons like you're talking about was exactly a thing I've done. And I mean, I'm perfectly fine with even doing that. It's the devices where even doing that isn't helpful that I'm more talking about.
@fastfinge@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@mcourcel thank god ours isn't. it has a nob that you can turn to set it to the preset you want. just memorize how many clicks, and you are good to go. in fact our dryer remember what you use most, so we changed some of the settings on the time dry, as we don't like that sensor dry shit, and we use that as apose to the normal dry setting that uses the sensor dry. all I have to do is push the power thing, which yes is a touch button, but we put a dot right above it, I then turn the nob one click to the right after waiting a few seconds, and then I press start, another touch button, but again, we put a dot right below that one, and away it goes.
@pixelate@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@quanin@mcourcel PDF's aren't bad if you have a truly accessible way to read them, and Paperback does that for me anyway! I've only hit it with a few PDF's so far but it presented the information just fine when Chrome couldn't even open them. Granted, I don't know if any of them contained images and how it handles those cases, but I bet somebody in this thread does!
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@mcourcel No it can't, and I have mentioned that to Quinn but also pointed out that it wouldn't strictly be a reader anymore, but they would still be very useful features and don't think I got a response so maybe they're just busy with other features and life and will get around to it at some point.
@fastfinge@GamingWithEars@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@mcourcel And, a PDF reader that can also fill out forms is a fundamentally different kind of user interface than the one implemented by Paperback (and Christopher Toth's QRead before it). Realistically, for anything besides Acrobat/Adobe Reader or Chromium itself to do it accessibly, it would probably entail an embedded web browser engine and converting PDF to HTML rather than a single text edit control.
@matt@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel This is also why none of the accessible open source ebook readers support Math content, or cope with footnotes and endnotes correctly. Modern ebooks really, really need to be loaded in an HTML webview. The issue is that I want continuous reading, and none of the HTML implementations like Thorium support that.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel By continuous reading, do you mean fine-grained saving of your position in the document, or something else? If the former, then yes, the fundamental problem is that Windows screen readers don't allow the application to know precisely where the virtual cursor is located. I ran into that in Serotek's DocuScan Plus; I had committed to an HTML view, then could only do bookmarks approximately.
@matt@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel I mean that I want to press NVDA+down arrow, start reading, and not have to press next page or next chapter constantly. But doing that requires loading the entire book into the HTML webview control, and now you get massive lag for various API related reasons. You can't do some sort of autoscroll to load content as you need it, because screen readers doing say all don't always update the focus position correctly, so you can't tell when they're about to hit the end of the currently loaded content. This is a thing I've thought about, and chatted with some folks about over coffee/beer.
@matt@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@GamingWithEars@mcourcel IMHO those are larger problems than bookmarking. We can get close enough (nearest paragraph) bookmarking in a webview. And that would be fair exchange to have working links, footnotes, endnotes, media, math content, and all the rest. But I can think of no way with current screen readers and API's that we can do autoscroll. Kindle manages it, but they're doing...something custom that I don't know anything about. And I'm just not willing to give that up.
@matt@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@quanin@mcourcel This is very good info. This makes me think somebody needs to create an accessible PDF editor, which is probably a huge undertaking, assuming so since it hasn't been done in all these years of people in our community making software.
@mcourcel@quanin@FreakyFwoof@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate Yep all the PDF things I've had to sign have luckily used Docusign, but I suppose it would be AIRA if that weren't an option. Sure wish there was an accessible editor that we could just open and fill out a big ol long form like a sighted person would with that Adobe product.
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@pixelate@mcourcel DocuSign on IOS is fine if you're not using the app, and you click the button for screen readers. It's one of the only places on the internet where you should; it's not an overlay, it actually fixes things.
@lynessence@dhamlinmusic@pixelate@quanin@mcourcel I think it has to do with how they require the signature. If it's a button where you can click, it works fine. But they can require you to draw it on the document, or attach a photo, and those don't work.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Even those people are now asking AI to google shit. A thing I hear regularly is "it will take me 20 minutes to find the thing. AI can do it in 2."
@quanin@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel And they are largely correct, mostly because Google has become utter shit. Kagi is better. But half the time I find myself using AI because I don't want to sift through the advertising filled news website and download 18 megs of JavaScript and skip four autoplaying videos just to get a single fact. So I use AI because, in the world that exists, it's much easier than the alternative. And it's not that much less accurate, when judged against the accuracy of most of the garbage websites out there.
@fastfinge@dhamlinmusic@lynessence@mcourcel Eh. I can still make Google do my tellings. In fact, on the occasion I ask AI to look something up I'm fact-checking it anyway because I want my own deep dive.
