@fastfinge

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

So I’ve been sharing my Weird Dreams with the fediverse lately. Because I’m a bit of a nut, I figured: why not share my normal dreams as well? I’ll be doing that with the #fedidreams hashtag every morning. If you, too, find dreams interesting, feel free to join in! Some ground rules and background: as a teenager, I was extremely interested in #lucid dreaming. I practiced #dream recall and put a lot of work into it, as the first step to lucid dreaming. While I never achieved it, to this day I can generally remember 1 or 2 dreams a night. I don’t believe dreams are supernatural, or have any deeper meaning.I just believe they’re fun, and sometimes an interesting way to get a glimpse of your own subconscious. Also, thanks to some medication I take, my dreams have become even more vivid over the last couple years. If I’m lucky enough to have any explicit dreams, I’ll be keeping those to myself! Will sharing my dreams with the world every morning get me any closer to my long abandoned goal of lucid dreaming? Will my subconscious get performance anxiety and stop dreaming entirely? Will the focus on writing up my dreams in something more than point-form for my dream diary make them even weirder? It’s a social experiment, bro! And you get to follow along on this journey of entirely unscientific and meaningless science! Yay! Yeah…feel free to filter out the #fedidreams hashtag entirely.

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

13h

@fribbledom Nah. You'll find them as soon as you purchase replacements. They'll be in whatever spot you decide to put the replacements. Happens to me constantly.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

Lying here with a Godawful flu on new years eve, realizing this will be the first year in my adult life where I won't be staying up until midnight, and having that thing. You know, the grumpy #reader thing. Where you go "I want a good book to #read! Right now! That will make me happy and not sick!" But you're grumpy and sick and cranky, so every book on your TBR pile isn't good enough and you throw them out of the pram in a tantrum. Then you go through your Goodreads recommendations for a while, sniffling snot and muttering "Does nobody write any good books anymore? I just want a good book! I must have read all the good books already. All of these books are stupid. Why do they let stupid people write stupid books." So you look through your list of comfort books for a re-read, but it turns out all of those books are also either bad or boring and you hate them, and this must, somehow, be somebody else's fault. I guess I'll just put on some stupid YouTube videos if I can get the stupid app on my stupid phone to work and probably fall asleep between coughing and shivering with a fever. All because nobody writes any good books, anymore. I'd like you all to know that this is your fault. #bookstodon

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@esoteric_programmer The issues happen an update fails for whatever reason.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@ander_dapo Ah got you.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@esoteric_programmer They do in theory. But theory and practice often do not align.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@ander_dapo Why is that sad? Assuming they get the same compensation as a sighted developer, I would prefer that the person working on the accessibility tools I use every day was also blind. Not only is it a good job for a fellow person with a disability, but they also know and understand the needs of other blind people better than anyone else ever could.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@ander_dapo Also, I think that Microsoft’s famous “Developers, developers, developers!” Focus is another reason Windows is so accessible. Microsoft works hard to make VSCode work with screen readers. So a lot of accessibility solutions on Windows are developed by users, for users. The developer experience on Linux isn’t quite as nice, from what I understand. So you have fewer disabled Linux developers, so fewer Linux accessibility tools that really work.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@ander_dapo It depends on my settings. I can have it skip all emoji, read them, skip if there are more than three, etc. The problem with government right now is that the closed source big tech products generally include enough absolute minimum accessibility to comply with the law, and the open source products do not. So if you’re a sales person for big tech, you have a huge advantage. You can bully government into buying your product, because it’s the only way they can avoid a lawsuit. So it’s a chicken and egg problem: governments don’t use open source tech because it’s not accessible, and it’s not accessible because governments don’t use it. I think the only way out of this is to get government to adopt open formats, open API’s, and open data. Then one employee could use the accessible solution, and the other could use the inaccessible open source solution. And everything would be compatible. And of course, governments won’t want to buy two software packages that do the same thing, so they’ll then start funding open source accessibility. Europe is slowly making progress in this way with Office products. First, they required Microsoft to fully support the ODF, Open Document FOrmat. Then, they started moving to LibreOffice, but employees who couldn’t work with it could stick with Microsoft Offfice and just save as ODF. Then LibreOffice started having more and more accessibility features. Now, slowly, blind folks are starting to begin dipping our toes into LibreOffice. Right now, complex features like track changes are still more accessible in Microsoft Word, so blind users can still go back to Word for complicated requirements. But for simpler documents, LibreOffice is fine these days. And we can test it out without giving up word entirely, so we’ll know when it becomes good enough.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@esoteric_programmer Exactly. Compiling your own kernel isn’t something everyone should have to do every update.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@clv1 Lenovo and Toshiba used to. I don’t know if they still do.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@esoteric_programmer Also, unified kernel images cause a bunch of other annoying problems. Remember the days of speakup?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@esoteric_programmer Okay, you're assuming some special brand of OS that nobody else runs. I was assuming standard Debian/Ubuntu/the thing the rest of the world uses. It's just not possible to do accessible disc encryption there.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@esoteric_programmer Right, but these days, OS updates are rolling. What happens when the kernel updates? The kernel isn't in /usr...but I think the dkms modules are? So then you get kernel/driver mismatch and ugly things happen.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@ander_dapo A lot of this problem happens because, whatever we say about capitalism, it is really good at incentivizing individuals to do things they, personally, don't care about. In an open source product, you only get accessibility if that's someone's passion, and that person has the skills to submit directly to the codebase. Microsoft and Apple pay developers to do accessibility, so they can meet their legal obligations. It doesn't matter if the iMessage guy working on accessibility cares or not. It's a requirement, so he'll do it because he's being paid to do it. In open source, things only generally happen when someone is excited about them.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@esoteric_programmer You're assuming that when I actually need my replacement base /usr, whatever mechanism that's supposed to keep it up to date with kernel and driver changes is working. I'm not even sure what that would look like. Hooking into apt somehow?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@esoteric_programmer I'm sure it's possible. But it almost certainly involves a lot of undocumented hackery, and the sound drivers probably don't work, because sound drivers on Linux never work without endless babying. Accessible disc encryption on Linux is, I suspect, not the default, and not easy to set up.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@neurrone I upgraded the motherboard and video card. You can find an accessible description of the framework here:
community.frame.work/t/framework-16-visually-impaired-owners-case-mid-plate-and-mainboard-orientation-guide/51168

And step by step instructions are here:
guides.frame.work/Guide/Mainboard/283?lang=en

Between these two things, you have enough to get the job done.

When you have to re-enter your bitlocker key, it boots into a recovery version of Windows, where you can load narrator, enter your key, and restart.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@esoteric_programmer it happens in a cut-down version of Windows, where narrator is available. I don't know how it works, but I assume Microsoft has an unencrypted boot partition with some sort of recovery Windows that it boots to. You enter the key in there, then reboot. If I were running Linux, you would probably be correct and it would be inaccessible.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@clv1 I haven't written any review. But to quickly answer your questions:
* no critical keys are missing, at least on the North American keyboard layout, and I also have the number pad module. The only missing keys from a full keyboard are the six pack (home/end, page up/down, etc.)
* the keys are fine, though there is no gap between the function keys, and no dot on f4, f8, etc.
* However, the laptop runs hot enough that I prefer to leave it on a table and use a wireless keyboard, instead of holding the laptop on my lap
* Audio quality is fair, once you enable the NVDA or jaws feature that stops the sound system from falling asleep. It's just the standard real tech audio chip that's on pretty much all laptops these days
* Framework updates the driver bundle regularly, and the driver and bios updaters are fully accessible
* The only problems come if you allow Windows Update to install driver updates. Sometimes it installs incorrect drivers and you have to use system restore to roll back an update
* If you live with others: the fans are extremely! loud when the laptop is busy. If someone was trying to, for example, watch TV or listen to music while you were gaming on the laptop, they would get quite annoyed

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

Upgrading my Framework 16 took about three hours, but was otherwise painless. Windows did need me to re-set-up my fingerprint and pin after changing the entire motherboard, and I had to re-enter my bitlocker recovery key. But that process was accessible.

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