mastodon 4.5.8thirty-something/male/Canada. I'm likely to post about tech, books, accessibility, blindness, and general life updates.
I work in accessibility, read a lot, collect weird tech, and selfhost things (including this instance).
I accept others as long as they accept others.
Feel free to say hi.
How replacement approvals work with Instacart:
How replacement approvals work with Uber Eats:
I already feel like I'm on an iOS beta every time I use my phone. How bad can this iOS 27 thing really be?
WhatsApp's latest party trick is randomly changing the apparent keyboard focus from the message text field to a blank control while i'm in the middle of typing a message, so I have to regularly (every few seconds) tab and then shift+tab to make NVDA recognize that I'm still focused on the text field.
The constant quest to find an efficient way of Instant messaging is, without exaggeration, one of the most exhausting and frustrating parts of my tech life.
Dear router manufacturor who decided to make default administrator passwords that are printed on a tiny label, mixed case letters and numbers, and 19 characters long:
I hope you step on a lego. Every day. At least seven times.
... Yes, I did just wish lego stepping upon a company. I'm just going to leave it here to illustrate my current mental state. (I'm still not logged in, by the way.)
What YouTube means to say: 90 views, posted 9 years ago.
What it actually says according to a screen reader: 909y ago.
Today is a good day for books. Dungeon Crawler Carl book 8 and the last full-cast Harry Potter are both happily sitting in my Audible library, clocking in at 41 hours combined. .
The NVME drive that held my entire Komplete library seems to be dying. Random disconnects and read failures all over the place. I had to remove it from the PC because any write operation would cause my entire machine to freeze. Not sure about the best way of re-downloading the lost content, or if I should even bother trying to copy files from the dead drive. I have a 2 TB SATA SsD I can use, but I'm fairly sure the M.2 slots on my desktop don't support SATA, so it'll have to be external.
I've now bought two large NVME drives which have failed less than a year after buying them. The first was for my Lenovo, which had a second SSD slot in it. Naturally, this is probably the worst possible time to replace hard drives, so I'll keep using what I've got.
Has anyone done anything with the Bookport Classic from APH recently?
I found mine in a cupboard, along with a card that had actual books on it. After taking it apart and cleaning the board underneath the rubber keypad, I seem to have a fully working unit.
I wonder if anyone ever reverse-engineered the text format it used. If I recall, each document was represented by two files on the bookport, one being an index file and the other being a line-separated copy of the text file. The index file defined headings and possibly other metadata.
I think there was a unix tool for creating these, so my guess is "yes", but that tool seems to be gone from the internet now. I think I have the source code archived, but if anyone else has more info about this old thing, I'd like to know.
I think there's also a firmware update for it, so I might have to go to VM land to get that working.
Fun fact: The carrying case for the Freedom Scientific PacMate is exactly the correct width for an Ableton Move. I think there might be just enough leftover space for a tiny MIDI controller.
In September of 2020, one of the iOS 14 betas developed a bug where notifications wouldn't work when the phone was unlocked. No banner would be displayed, no sound or vibration would happen, and--since the phone was unlocked--the Apple Watch mirroring wouldn't work either.
It's now almost June of 2026, and I'm on the iOS 26.5 beta. And this bug is *still* here. It goes away for long enough that I start to believe it's gone, but it always comes back.
Many of my notifications happen in multiple places now, but things like iMessage are still iPhone-only. I don't know how widespread this issue is, but if a six-year-old bug isn't clear writing on the wall, I don't know what is.
Does anyone still play Windows audiogames that use SAPI voices?
If so, which voice do you use? I know there's a closed-source NVDA SAPI bridge that some people were able to get working some of the time. I think I have Eloquence from CodeFactory, but I lost another registration thanks to changing hardware, and they make the registration reset process even more annoying than Freedom Scientific's. Has someone managed to get a working SAPI5 Eloquence? It seems possible in theory, though I'm not sure if 64-bit support would be possible.
The iOS Files app has no way to show hidden files. Because iOS is Unix-based, it considers any file or folder that starts with a period to be hidden. So the next thing I'll be doing is walking over to my computer, opening up File Explorer, and renaming the .ssh folder to just "ssh", before copying it onto my phone and then immediately renaming it back to .ssh.
And before anyone asks ... no, I can't just type the folder name into search. My phone is coded to insist this folder does not exist.
Thanks for such an incredible file manager, Apple. You really managed to do what no-one else has ever done.
I wonder if any category of tech is as abandoned as my box of TV stuff. I have a talking Samsung TV, multiple Apple TVs, the NVIDIA shield (a much faster Android streaming box than Google's option at the time), a Fire Cube, an HDMI splitter, an infrared repeater, and too many cables and remotes. Oh, and I have a digital TV box from Rogers which is still in its original packaging, because trying to figure out how to set it up and use it just seems really daunting. I do have free cable channels in this apartment, so that might be the thing that's most worth keeping, but it's also the only device that doesn't talk.
I thought he TV would make a decent media hub and I liked the idea of all the talking boxes for it, but I think at the end of the day I don't have enough reason to use it. Most streaming boxes are built for the major streaming services, and I now pay for none of those, except prime video I suppose. There's so much messy inconsistency in which shows are described where, and being in a country that isn't the US just makes it ten times worse. But the Apple TV isn't designed for loading arbitrary audio files. And if I cut out the TV itself as a dependency and try to use something like an HDMI audio extractor, it works, but I haven't found one that respects the volume signals sent by the Apple TV. Even if I connect the Apple TV to Airpods, the volume controls (either on the remote or the AirPods themselves) have no effect when no TV is connected.
All these small papercuts have just caused me to realize that there's nothing wrong with listening to shows on my phone or a dedicated media player, and treating them like any other audio files. As flawed as Bluetooth is, it also works with fewer dependencies than any other wireless audio protocol.
So, my TV is now abandoned on the wall in an awkward viewing place with a bunch of abandoned equipment hooked up to it. I wonder if it's worth trying to sell some of this stuff. Even if I keep an Apple TV and an Android TV for testing, that still leaves a lot more unused devices.
The root of this problem isn't necessarily straight-forward accessibility. it's a mix of my own stubbornness, the fact I didn't engage with TV very much at all until sometime in the 2020s, and some accessibility and accessibility-adjacent problems, like the availability of audio-described content across streaming services and the ability to add postprocessing to episodes with quiet dialog. I know there are plenty of people who just use Netflix and Disney Plus on their Apple TV through their Sonos speakers. And if I'm honest, I have legitimate practical reasons for using the audio versions instead, but part of it is just a natural inclination against any platform that locks me into its UI. It's the same reason Amazon will never be able to make Kindle accessible enough for me to use it if I have the option of removing the DRM from my kindle books.
Is this the mentality of a pirate or is it the mentality of someone who just wants one more thing to remain consistent and controllable? I don't know, but I guess I've concluded I don't have a good enough reason to change it.
For the last few days, WhatsApp on Windows has been randomly shifting keyboard focus to a blank "pane" while I'm writing a message.
Today it logged me out, and whenever I enter the verification code to log back in, WhatsApp on my phone just says "Couldn't link device. Try getting a new code."
It's hard not to feel like this is the beginning of the end for cross-platform messaging with this app. I liked it specifically *because* I didn't have to fight with it like this. And I'm not sure if anyone is even working on accessibility anymore.
I don't have time to try and guess what was hiding behind that human-readable error, and the moment this becomes unusable on Windows i'm just going to switch back to the messages app on my phone as the default.
This sucks.
EDIT: I tried it again right after I posted this, and of course it worked perfectly.
I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not. Exploring messaging alternatives is very much on my to-do list next week.
I really should have asked this long ago but ... for those who don't want to deal with the bloatedness of Microsoft Word on Windows, what are you using for an accessible spell checker? I'm half-tempted to just use the terminal for this.
For years, I and many others used a tiny MIDI sequencer for Windows called QWS. It became more and more impractical to use this over the years as DAW accessibility improved, but I spent an absurd amount of time making MIDI files in this thing. Sometimes I just want to pull out QWS to jot down a musical idea in 2026, because after all these years, there's still something easy and familiar about it.
The problem is, even if I'm just using hardware like my Roland keyboard, I still have to contend with the fact that patch/bank changes don't affect QWS's track settings, they just get recorded as part of the MIDI data for that track. It creates this disconnect where changing patches on the keyboard is way quicker, but changing patches in QWS makes them stick. If I forget to record myself changing the patch, it will be wrong the next time I open the MIDI file. There *should* be a way to just write the most recent settings to the track properties, but unless I'm missing something, there isn't.
Also, my keyboard is one that doesn't have an instrument list, which just figures.
Needless to say, making stuff on the Ableton is a lot more intuitive. Even making stuff in Reaper is more intuitive. But sometimes I still want that interface back. I had such a strong urge to just sit down in front of my keyboard and write something on my tiny computer, that I might actually end up doing it.