Talon @talon@dragonscave.space

#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

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?

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.

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.

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.

Hi @restless_coffee and welcome to the instance!
Take a look around and feel right at home. If you have any questions, just ask.

iOS has this exact thing using artificial intelligence and while that's awesome in about 75 percent of cases it still fails to do its job properly. It helps getting around quirks, but I haven't found an app that was completely inaccessible that suddenly worked flawlessly. Don't get me wrong, I'm very much happy that it exists and it's super helpful. But there's just no way it will replace any other traditional accessibility in the state it's now.
I was never able to explore screenshots for example, but now I can. I can even look at memes and most of the time, the image explorer does a pretty good job. But translating UI's like that just... doesn't work yet. Or maybe ever.

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.

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.