ndarilek

This is cool. I just posted the link on a blind gamers' Discord. I don't do much D&D--really want to change that at some point--but they're frequently complaining about D&D Beyond being an accessibility dumpster fire and looking for something else.

I poked it a bit, and really appreciate that command output is automatically spoken under NVDA. I don't imagine that is accidental. :) Thank you.

Now you have me wondering what web-based command lines I might build. Maybe a crazy idea, but have you thought about adding external command support somehow? Accessible map representation is vastly unexplored, and it'd be fun to build that in the context of initiative.sh somehow. Maybe a web service, or a wasm module if you want to be one of the cool kids.

I could also see this being an embeddable widget in something like a Matrix room. Give everyone a shared context that all their commands can reference, maybe with different permission levels. The context might share all characters with the DM, each character with its own player, a representation of the map which they could move their character on in turn, etc. I've probably just scope creeped the hell out of your project, but this is really neat and I'm intrigued.

Because I want it to look good (or at least OK) and work on mobile.

Same. I've been using Bevy to experiment with some accessible game mechanics for the past few months now. The speed from which I can go from "I really want map exploration to report this and that detail on an entity, based on this and that characteristic," to code that just works and does what I want, is astounding. The degree to which I can then optimize that code, to only run it when this or that component changes value for instance, is also amazing. And when some Bevy subsystem or other isn't up to my standards, I can plug in some other library, add a few components in my game, and more or less forget about the details of the lower-level integration. It's an amazingly productive engine. If it'd launched a year earlier, I'd probably have built my just released game in Bevy rather than Godot.

Funny you should say that. I'm a blind screen reader user, and assumed this was some new 7-inch laptop. Since I don't need a huge screen, I'm always on the lookout for small, performant laptops. Seems this one is anything but. :) Glad I read the comments first.

This is a surprisingly personal legal battle for me.

I'm totally blind. For a long while now, iOS has been the mobile accessibility leader, and unless you as a blind person have some specific reason to use Android, you're encouraged to use iOS.

Back in 2009 when Android accessibility was a joke, by which I mean as a developer I found major API issues within a few hours of development, I wrote one of the first and most popular Android screen readers. I think it was at least the first to be publicised even before TalkBack, where by "publicised" I mean TalkBack wasn't in Android's release notes, but I at least had an APK installable via tinyurl and posted to a mailing list. I quite literally had nothing else to do with my time at that point in my life, and Android 1.6 had an accessibility API, so on a lark I started writing a screen reader. The project has since died out, but for a long while, Spiel was a thin on Android.

iOS won't let me do anything like that. Further, iOS won't even let me code for it unless I use MacOS, and while MacOS has some decent accessibility features, it's been a royal pain in my ass to code on. I could elaborate, but to keep this comment brief, take it as a given from a subject area expert that developing on MacOS as a blind person is worse than any other platform I've used to date. And that's saying something, since Linux is my primary platform, and there are a number of blind developers who won't touch it with a 10-foot pole. I don't want to claim that coding on MacOS under VoiceOver isn't possible, but it's more difficult than it needs to be.

Yes, these are two huge corporations slugging it out, and it's hard to muster much sympathy for Epic. But I wouldn't be the developer I am today if it weren't for Android's openness letting me build a screen reader, and its further openness letting me build an accessible GPS navigation app which I've hacked on in some form for around a decade now, and which I've come to rely upon. It bugs me to no end that the more accessible mobile platform is so locked down such that a budding blind software engineer handed an iPhone can't code for it using JAWS or NVDA. So Apple is handing blind people internet-connected mobile computers with all sorts of sensors, and telling them the only way they can develop for these devices is by using a sub-par development environment that's going to fight them every step of the way and, likely, turn them off of software development more broadly. Then maybe we wonder why we don't see more blind software engineers?

So, go Epic. If they start being asses later then of course I'll oppose that, but if they have a big enough saber to start breaking up Apple's stranglehold on the most accessible mobile platform, they've got my support 100%. Hell yeah, the web wouldn't have been possible under Apple's rule. And while I respect those of you who want more secure devices and a curated experience, don't under-estimate the harm caused by locking blind developers out of one of the most accessible computing environments they're ever likely to get. No, jumping through certificate hoops to install something that will expire after a week isn't anything near what I'm asking for.

And to those of you who say "Just tell your blind friends to use a Pinephone," I wish I could, but Linux accessibility infrastructure has no support for touchscreens and touch events. Any of you millionaires reading this interested in funding that development? ;) Serious question, I'll work to put you in touch with the right folks.

Will it be possible to temporarily turn off example.com, let its absence propagate across the network a bit, then turn it back on under a new server? Synapse has been good to me, but I know Rust more than Python, and Conduit's use of Sled is one less moving part for me to maintain for my single-user server. Looking forward to migrating to a lighter server I can potentially hack on, and would rather not change the underlying DNS infrastructure much.

Wow, native English speaker and I didn't even get the pun until this comment. I thought it was a stupid play on "What app should we message each other on?" and thus kind of a silly name. But folks use it regardless.

Careful about calling something a dumb justification. It's often the simplistic-seeming features that expose unforseen privacy issues, in large part because today's internet is such a complex place. In the end, it may turn out that privacy concerns are unjustified. But dismissing them out-of-hand isn't wise.

Do you have an automated way for turning it off when you're on home wifi? Trying a similar setup, and it isn't immediately clear other than via manual activation how to not use Wireguard in that situation.

Thanks.

Nice, should be good enough for now for me. Is there a GitHub issue or something I can watch for updates?

Haven't looked at Ghost in a while. The subscription system looks neat. I'd recently considered launching an indie game development site for a very niche style of gaming (audio-only) that could probably benefit from a Patreon-style model, but my margins would be so low that the Patreon cut would be hefty for little to no network effect benefit, and I know better than to try rolling my own.

Is there any mechanism for both subscription tiers and pay-what-you-want? So maybe I had a $5 tier and a $10 tier, and if someone wanted to pay $7 then they could and get the $5 benefits?

I'll research this myself when the 3.0 Docker image becomes available, but thought I'd ask first. Not even sure if Stripe supports that functionality, or if it does, how hard it'd be for me to add and contribute back.

Thanks for making Ghost.

Sometimes it's about taking what you can get, even if the solution is only partial. As a blind woodworker, I can't route a pattern laid out on flimsy material, but make a wooden template and I'm fine. So for more complex projects, we'll have someone make us a template we can trace, but we're still doing most of the work.

Granted, I'd love a solution that doesn't require sighted help. For this case, some sort of color identifier app might help. Given that Lego's color palet probably doesn't span too widely, this would probably be an easy weekend project.

They're just so easy to work with, and while directions are great, they're not strictly necessary to at least make something. Compare that with the handful of model cars I tried playing with, which had so many screws/bolts/gears that weren't at all interchangeable. I wanted to play with those, but doing so required me borrowing someone's eyeballs to get the thing built, and that deprived me of some of the fun of having a toy like that.

As an adult, I derive similar pleasure from woodworking and other crafts, but it's challenging enough to do that as a normal kid, to say nothing of also contending with folks who can't/don't support you because they don't know how or are too afraid. So, in the end, you have either legos or the simplest snap-together models to satisfy your building urge.

Even as an adult, I have a soft spot in my heart for legos. I've considered using them as snap-together cases for custom electronics projects, but haven't delved into them enough to know what sets would work best for that application. And as much as I like them, I really don't want to buy some castle or spaceship set just to build custom cases for my DIY doorbell or assorted RPIs. :)