Piotr Machacz @pitermach@dragonscave.space
- Website
- https://piotrs.site/
- Github
- https://github.com/pitermach
I'm just a blind geek who's main hobbies include sound design, accessibility especially of games, podcasting, books and movies/TV (mainly SCI-Fi and lit RPG), and programming. Regularly do let's plays with @talon as @pg13lp. Game database editor and newsposter on audiogames.net. Most of my sound design work can be found on currentlyuntitled.design and various games.
Joined Aug 2018
Pinned post
I finally decided to move here, so I figure it might be worth a new intro since I have more room here. Hi, I'm Piotr. I'm a bit of a geek, so most of what I'll be posting will be tech related, very often with an emphasis on blind accessibility since I can't see myself. I'm also a huge gamer, so game accessibility is of particular interest. I often stream games with @talon as @pg13lp. I also love anything audio production related, especially sound design. I've done audio for a bunch of games, IE most of @talon's, but I also created a lot of notification and UI sounds under CC attribution with a few friends on currentlyuntitled.design. If you need custom audio for an app or game feel free to hit me up! Other than that I really love anything SCI-Fi, LitRPG, retro tech, and more things I didn't think of when writing this lol. #noxp #introduction
Yay the pixel event is a thing, and I decided to ignore it and catch up later. The problem is Pixels always have been very US-centric devices, it's very hard to get one here, which is sad considering they're theoretically the best thing to get if you want the latest and most accessible Android. Would love to be proven wrong on the availability front though!
My Discovery of the day: The new bluetooth Mic codec apple added to the AirPods isn’t exclusive to the pros and max like I initially thought. Regular 2nd gen AirPods have it as well and man it makes a difference.
Netflix started to do some weird things with breaking basic web features… THis is probably going to effect any watch together type extensions.
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RT @newsycombinator
Netflix's new player breaks the ability to modify the seeking of a playing video https://plopdown.video/blog/netflix-open-web-failure
https://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/1449753219014463489
I found this very cool video yesterday: AI generated Dectalk songs. If you don't know what a Dectalk is, then you should watch it regardless for a different take on AI generated music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AwSZdNknIE
Piotr Machacz
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Happy World Standards Day, a day where the entire world celebrates international standardization... well, the entire world except the US, which celebrates this on October 22nd 😂
(I wish I was kidding)
Piotr Machacz
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Apart from this what I'm curious is if they took the time to renew some of their music right. A bunch of songs got patched out over the years, so for many the Steam versions were already worse. Also of course what else they might add in these new versions, the press release says they're keeping the original look and feel. Hope they keep the cheats too.
Rockstar officially announced the GTA 3/VC/SA remasters coming later this year. They also announced that they're about to remove the existing versions from stores, so if you want a version that's not tied to the rockstar launcher now's the time to grab them.
Piotr Machacz
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RT from Lea Verou (@LeaVerou)
Can't setup washer/dryer bought in Europe because my iPhone's region is US and the @hoover_uk hOn app is not available in the US App Store. If that's not @internetofshit, not sure what is.
Original tweet : https://twitter.com/LeaVerou/status/1445336004320243715
Piotr Machacz
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ai generated british food
I decided to give two neural nets a go at the Great British Bakeoff technical challenges. They did both much better and much worse than I had guessed.
https://www.aiweirdness.com/neural-networks-vs-the-bake-off-technical-challenge/
Piotr Machacz
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wow thanks to tvtropes i just learned mr. rogers is the reason recording TV on like a DVR or VCR or whatever isn't illegal
"In a case that made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984, the TV and movie industries sued manufactures of VCRs on the grounds that recording their programming was copyright infringement. Enter Fred Rogers, who testified on behalf of home recording, saying he didn't mind if people recorded his shows and that it was a very good thing for families to be able to watch programs together whenever they wanted to, rather than being controlled by an arbitrary network. The court specifically cited his testimony in their decision. So in other words if you like not being tied down to Appointment Television, you can thank Mr. Rogers."
source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppointmentTelevision
Piotr Machacz
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"Luke, you switched off your targeting computer! What's wrong?"
The targeting computer:
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Oh my goooooood github has finally fixed the label for the star button! This took what, 2 years or so?
For those curious, for the longest time screen readers always read the star button as "unstar" no matter what its state was and you had to look at its hint to figure it out
Piotr Machacz
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Accessibility rant
@talon Good stuff here. Just wanted to put this on your radar: https://accesskit.dev Very early days, but Matt is aiming to wrap all the platform-specific accessibility APIs, including Android and HTML via auto-generating a parallel element tree, in a single API that UI toolkits can work with. Exciting stuff.
Piotr Machacz
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Accessibility rant
A lot of people usually comment things like: "It should be the screen readers responsibility to figure out what's on screen. Do some OCR and image recognition and whatever and boom!"
Think about it. That won't work. Not only are there many different fonts that OCR just simply cannot read, but also things like interacting with those controls present a major hurtle at that point. Is it a checkbox, a button, or a button checkbox hybrid? Is it a slider? Is this a fancy button or a turnable knob? What about scrolling text?
Is this syntax highlighting or spelling errors or both? Or does it just mean I selected something? What about if I use another app? We can infer what things mean from context, but can OCR and image recognition? Does it know this is a code editor or a text editor? What if it's Emacs and it's literally everything?
This is why accessibility API's exist. There's a lot of context that would be lost if there was just OCR and image recognition.
Piotr Machacz
boosted
Accessibility rant
It's sad that at this point I'm almost happy to see Electron apps simply because it means that the chance it'll be at least somewhat accessible are just so much higher.
So many new UI frameworks coming out, none of which are accessible. More and more "native" apps just... don't work anymore.
Also... I guess native means something else to me than it does to most UI devs. I wouldn't call drawing directly to the screen a native UI. Sure it might be nice and comfy and allow for beautiful coding patterns like stateless UI composition but that stuff's useless if I can't use it. Please keep this in mind when developing your latest and greatest native app using the latest and greatest new immediate mode GUI framework. Not a single one of them will be accessible. And if you're a dev working on one, please think of us.
Feels like the new Apple betas for both iOS and Mac OS have addressed a lot of the biggest bugs that cropped up. Don't wanna jinx it but Safari on Mac is behaving itself. Meanwhile, iOS 15.1 has definitely fixed wallet crashes and the inaccessible time picker in screen time as well. Not sure about the other things people brought up like the share sheet or app switcher because they weren't broken for me.
Who wants some fire to go with your braille?
Braille display demo refreshes with miniature fireballs
Safari bug update, there might already be an update that addresses this (see https://www.applevis.com/comment/128472#comment-128472) there was also a new Monterey beta which also seems to fix this.
Update: Looks like this already landed in the stable version of Discord as well, so you shouldn't need canary to enjoy this improvement.
- Website
- https://piotrs.site/
- Github
- https://github.com/pitermach
I'm just a blind geek who's main hobbies include sound design, accessibility especially of games, podcasting, books and movies/TV (mainly SCI-Fi and lit RPG), and programming. Regularly do let's plays with @talon as @pg13lp. Game database editor and newsposter on audiogames.net. Most of my sound design work can be found on currentlyuntitled.design and various games.
Joined Aug 2018