ClawsOnPaws

It has a pretty profound impact on me, since the only way I can use a computer is using a screen reader, which works primarily using a keyboard. It can read things under the mouse, but it is not at all a comfortable way of working.

As a screen reader user, Apple does have a first party screen reader, VoiceOver, and does indeed not let you run a third party one. In fact, it does not work well even on the more open MacOS. So essentially it's VoiceOver or nothing. Luckily, especially on iOS, VoiceOver mostly works well.

I'm in a similar position to the OP, unemployed for about 10 months, with tons and tons of applications sent both remote and local, and yeah not sure where this is gonna go or what I'm supposed to do. Also disabled, my eyes don't work so that automatically removes many, many non-software jobs I'd otherwise do from the equation.

Don't even really have anything else to say other than that, but maybe commenting it somewhere helps someone else realize they're not alone. I don't know how that helps you or me, but that's what I got. Maybe there's still something for us somewhere, but it is very difficult to stay motivated, and I don't have an answer.

I am blind, and I could imagine several usecases which would make my life a lot easier by using glasses like this. But because of their reputation I will most likely never use them, and especially not in public. I'm already afraid enough people will think I'm recording them when I use my phone to get info about what's around me, definitely don't need to get punched in the face for wearing meta on my face.

Edit: Not that I would want Meta to get all that data anyway. But even if glasses exist which are more privacy conscious, I think Meta and Google Glass thoroughly ruined the reputation of any kind of wearable like this.

I absolutely LOVE! Voice Vista. It is an amazing bit of software. I wasn't able to use SoundScape when it first came out because it was never made available in my region, but VV is, and I would never want to miss it anymore when traveling. I love it. A lot.

It is just random bugs. Switching punctuation schemes. The terminal doesn't read very well, VoiceOver loves to say "not responding" in Safari and locks up, live regions don't always read correctly, quick nav (basically automatically holding down the voiceover modifier so you can more quickly use navigate through the screen) adds random delay to each key press, it's just lots and lots and lots of small issues like this that compound. This is just a small list of them. None of them are a huge problem by itself, but combined they do make things frustrating sometimes. And then of course the ability to script badly behaving, or completely inaccessible, apps is just missing, so you can't fix apps even if you knew how to. And of course VoiceOver on the Mac is all you get. So if you don't like it, tough luck. You won't ever get a real alternative that can access what VoiceOver can.

Blind person using Apple products here, and at least for phones, I agree. I wouldn't say it's exclusively because of iPhone, but a large part of my independence is definitely it. There have been problems, bugs that go unfixed for years, MacOS VoiceOver is quite a disaster even though I do still use and enjoy the platform overall, and anything worth using can be criticized I think. But iOS has so many features built in that help me every single day. VoiceOver, but also all of the features utilizing vision like door detection, OCR, etc. they're in the magnifier as well so you don't need VoiceOver enabled to play with them, and I think a number of them also require a lidar sensor?

Anyway, my phone is such an important companion wherever I go that I keep several magsafe batteries on me whenever I leave the house for a significant time. It has made an absolutely huge difference in confidence. It is definitely one of the single most important assistive tech devices I have together with my computer.

Not to mention that this seems to completely ignore all the things that we might use computers for. Browsing websites is only one of the things I do. Many of the things I do I think would be extraordinarily clunky through natural language. Also I just do not feel comfortable talking to my computer out loud, especially when I'm anywhere with other people around. Or I don't know... playing games with friends on voice chat. It seems to be common for people to assume that a fix is very easy and simple. LLM's, OCR for screen readers, etc. If it really was as simple as just slapping OCR on everything, it would already have happened. Also I definitely like some privacy and would prefer my computing not to happen entirely through OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, and whether someone can use computers well or not, we shouldn't force them to do that exact thing. At least in my opinion. And that doesn't even go into the costs associated with all of that LLM usage.

You are correct. At least in my case, more synthetic voices like Eloquence are easier to understand at high speeds especially because of their 'formulaic' nature. You don't listen to each individual phoneme or letter, you listen more for groups of syllables, tone, etc. The more unpredictable the text to speech, the harder this is. Also, performance is another big point. If you have large bits of silence at the beginning of the audio, or slow attacks, then the responsiveness will suffer, whether that's because of the actual audio itself, or the generation time.

Some of this is surely ssubjective, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only screen reader user with these opinions.

And sadly it is also not accessible to screen readers. VS Code for all its flaws is really, really good for screen reader accessibility. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it's not only one of the most accessible code editors we have, but one of the most accessible electron apps overall. So losing it to this Microsoft stuff would be a huge deal to anyone who relies on screen reader or accessibility tools. :(

you are correct. This makes text almost completely unreadable using screen readers.

Just as a quick datapoint here in case people get worried; yes, it is absolutely possible to program as a blind person, even without language models. Obviously you won't be using your eyes for it, but we have tried and tested tools that help and work. And at the end of the day, someone's going to have to review the code that gets written, so either way, you're not going to get around learning those tools.

Source: Am a blind person coding for many years before language models existed.

The core thing here is the "I'm sorry you feel this way". This immediately deflects all sense of wrong-doing from the people actually doing wrong to the people feeling hurt. There are so many other ways to phrase this that are either more neutral or even acknowledging of some kind of mistake being made that's not on the volunteer's side, but that's not what's happening here. Essentially this means "We did the right thing and now we need to figure out how to make you understand this", not "Something went wrong and we need to figure out how to come to an understanding which might include us having done something wrong".

Heh, that roadmap is also not accessible to screen readers, at least on FireFox. That's unfortunate. But I understand it's a big undertaking with little reward for most people. I do think there are UI libraries with AccessKit integration, egui I believe?

Ah well. I'll check back on it every now and then either way.