Talon @talon@dragonscave.space
Admin
Hi! I'm Talon.
I post little, lurk often.
I make music sometimes. Mostly electronic.
I also work on audio games in my free time. I'm fascinated by 3D sound and accessibility.
I also read occasionally. Mostly fantasy-related genres. The real world is bad enough.
Say hi! I don't bite.
Joined Aug 2018
Pinned post
#Introduction For those that are new, Hi! I'm Talon! I mainly talk about #accessibility, #audio and #software - I mean to talk about more but for some reason that never happens.
Webdev during the day, audio game dev and music producer at night. Oh I also make sure dragonscave.space sorta kinda mostly runs.
#MusicProduction #AudioGames #VisuallyImpaired / #blind
I want to stream more. I don't want to work. Meh. Was a lot of fun!
Want to watch a blind person try to play Wow Classic? https://twitch.tv/TalonTheDragon
Long post
I was told to post this by @bluespacedragon. Never tried this before but we have a long char limit now... Please go easy on me. Ahaha
The suns rays carefully stretched over the horizon, the winds a whisper over the sounds of the retreating night. "Very soon", they thought. "Very soon, none of this will be audible anymore.". And so it was.
Not even a year later, and the sounds of the night were extinguished. No longer could the creatures of the forest express themselves, singing desperately to try to be heard over the rhythmic thump of the industrial machinery installed not far away. Not that they knew what it was. Not that they cared. They had done this before. Brave souls would stay, but the tired would move on. Like they had so many times before.
"Where do we go?", someone asked. "Is there even a safe space left?".
But they searched and searched and found nothing. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months. The comfortable climate turned to fire, turned to ice. Everyone sympathized with a wolf's howl. Nobody had even seen an owl in a long time. Where had they gone?
Slowly but surely the realization was a resounding "no". There were no longer any safe spaces left. Their young would not grow up nourished and strong. They would grow up painfully and slowly adapting to the changes of the world. A world that, by and large, did not want them. Or was it the world? No. No it wasn't. It was those strange creatures. Those that walked upright. Those that made so much noise and collapsed living space after living space.
And so, the birds scouted. Snakes lay in ambush, the cats licking their paws. For they knew it was time to exact revenge. And like a tidal wave it spread. One howl. One scream. Slowly but surely it spread all over the world. And all at once, the entire animal kingdom struck. The bipeds would never know what hit them. They could not win. Not this time.
#tootfiction #microfic
PH negative
Woke up with major eye pain. Went to doctor and apparently there is now a small tear in my cornea. How is your day going?
Talon
boosted
Hey @talon, remember this melody? I beefed it up a little and you are going to hate me for it, lol. This is what happens when I have some free time. Enjoy!
Poor animal crossing... you didn't deserve the wrath of my boredom. Also if the whole of 2022 is going to be like this then I'm so, so sorry in advance. 
Happy new year. I woke up this morning, opened the laptop, and found this still open from last night. Must have made this at some point during the new year "celebration". Don't remember actually doing it, but it sounds cute, so hey why not.
That reminds me, we don't have a cover image or mascot or anything! This is a problem in need of a solution... If anyone has any ideas, or wants to help, let me know? I'll pay of course!
I know I posted about this before, but it's still so... surreal to me that this Mastodon instance has been running for a little bit over 3 years! It really doesn't feel like it's been that long. Time flies...
I would totally get a Switch too if they had. They haven't. So I would basically either be using OCR on a computer, or holding my phone over the screen like a total idiot. No thanks.
Nintendo is the only one that didn't yet add a screen reader to their game console. Sad.
Talon
boosted
'Music should be heard, not hoarded.' My new phrase.
That's why I give so much of it away to podcasters, youtubers, people that need high-quality mp3's for any kind of situation. You'll find tons of them freely available here. Download at will.
So JUCE is getting accessibility and the Surge XT synth already implements some of it! Let's throw it into Logic Pro and see what we can do!
I've been playing around with Zig and it made me wonder why you would ever want to metaprogram in a language that isn't the language you're metaprogramming in? It's all just zig, even with compile time executed code. Meanwhile you've got like a million different ways to macro in Rust, and C++ is C++. As awesome as Rust macros are, I don't find them particularly readable. If I have a large-ish macro with an error somewhere, I usually just rewrite it because it's quicker than untangling it. But I never find myself wanting to do that in Zig because I'm not context switching to a different macro-specific language, and especially not depending on what I'm macroing. Am I the only one that feels this way? I mean... Don't the lisps and schemes already do this too and have found out again and again and again that this is a good idea?
That feeling when the Microsoft docs have more info about a MacOS API than Apple's developer docs do.
Talon
boosted
Game accessibility, barriers, and representation
So to be clear, I don't begrudge anyone their successes, and I'm glad that games like Blind Drive and The Vale have brought audio-only games into gaming zeitgeist, as it were.
But I wish more games for blind people were made by blind people. I won't knock anyone for liking bop it-style combat or story-heavy games. I like those too, sometimes.
I write fast-paced, strategic, tactical, arcade-style games because I like those elements, and because I don't think many audio games handle those well. That isn't all I'll ever do, but some of those are sorely missing from these masses of Blind Legends or Blind Quests with comparatively amazing reach and production values.
So why can't I, a blind person, get the funding to design the kind of game I want to play that The Vale and others got for their game? Can we please stop treating blind people as if we all want this same left/right/center action + narrative experience?
Hi @restless_coffee and welcome to the instance! 
Take a look around and feel right at home. If you have any questions, just ask.
Talon
boosted
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.
Admin
Hi! I'm Talon.
I post little, lurk often.
I make music sometimes. Mostly electronic.
I also work on audio games in my free time. I'm fascinated by 3D sound and accessibility.
I also read occasionally. Mostly fantasy-related genres. The real world is bad enough.
Say hi! I don't bite.
Joined Aug 2018