Notices by André Polykanine (menelion@dragonscave.space)

@A11yAwareness I'm still proud I created an Accessibility channel at my previous work.

@xogium All of those "De-googlin" and "de-microsofting" solutions preach about evil corporations that will eat our bodies and suck our souls, how good and cool they are, but actually they don't give a flying F about accessibility. Maybe "all" is too strong, but lots and lots of them.

Again unpopular opinion, but I don't care.
Those eco-activists lobbied a law that all plastic bottles should have attached caps.
I wonder only one thing: why everything they do is so fucking annoying, inconvenient and just extremely shitty? environment is good, protection, less waste, whatever, angels, flowers and butterflies, — everything is good, but why, for goodness sake, must it be so awfully inconvenient to use or simply disgusting, like those damned paper straws that smell and taste paper glue?
Bottles with attached caps. First, it's messy: when you want a bottle of water in a hot street, you'd be rather careful now, because drinking with that dangling thing near your mouth and not to spoil everything (let alone if you are eating something along with it) is nearly impossible. To drink only a part of it and put the bottle in your bag — also fucking impossible, because the cap doesn't close the bottle so strong anymore, and your liquid will be in your bag.
to buy larger bottles to drink a glass and leave everything for later? Also nope, because again, the cap is no longer reliable, and your bubbles of beloved carbon dioxyde will happily fly into the air.
Solution? Easy-peasy! Tell 'em that you take those bottles for 25 cents, you take those caps for 10 cents, and you take a bottle with a cap for 40 cents. That's it! No more bottles, no more caps, no nothing at all! They will be fightin' for them!
And me, with my character, I'll be keeping those small scissors in my bag just to cut those cap-attaching strings and drink my water, or cola, or whatever I want. Nobody will do as you want for the sake of some righteous ideas if, not hurting anyone, it ruins their comfort!

Those "Sign in with Google" pop-ups on every second website really start driving me nuts. #Google

Re last: I think it's one of the worst decisions Mozilla could made. Can't they afford a smallish Mastodon instance? Sorry, I don't believe. then it's a political decision: let's go back to the ex-bird site (pun intended), with all its hate speech and the jerk in the head; let's deprive many people that really care about the open-source community of a convenient way of communication. Nice of you, #Mozilla, nice of you.

Недавно узнал, что если вы хотите добавить новую резервную почту на Мейл.ру, то она применится не сразу, а через время, причём типа недели через две. Вот это для чего, мне интересно? Пока товарищ майор не проверит, что почта валидна? Пока изменения раскатятся по всем кластерам? Я даже представить не могу, почему такая суперэлементарная операция занимает столько времени.

Re last: there is a similar joke in russian, and there is even an expression "a spherical horse in vacuum", «сферический конь в вакууме» in Russian (because physicists modeled their experiment imagining a spherical horse in vacuum). It is so spread that the horse can be replaced with anything, like: "Trump is a spherical jerk in vacuum". Don't be surprised when you encounter something like this in daily speech of a person whose mother tongue is Russian.

"Send me the screenshot of the page.
— Okay.
— Please click the place where the red arrow is.
— As I've already told you, I'm blind, so please describe in words.
— I marked you the place with an arrow, can't you see it? If you can't, I'll re-mark the place for you.
— I'm blind, as I've already told you. Sorry to be that person, but the word "blind" means, I cannot see. At all."
That's how my day goes. #Work #MyDay #accessibility

@stvfrnzl I'd be definitely annoyed. I would make it a link in the beginning, somewhere in the middle and towards the end of the article, but I've never heard about a standard for those. // CC @aardrian

@simon Wow, thank you! am I right that it will nag you until you turn it off? That's the feature I've been searching for in all reminder apps. Like, not beep twice and go away, but reeeeally annoy me till I shut the reminder up.

@pollbot I mean… as pets or as food (sorry)? 😂

@JenMsft I wonder if it works in SSH sessions. If yes, then I had been an idiot for at least four years to select and copy everything to Notepad for further review.

@Kaliah To me their desktop interface is also this.

@Kaliah Probably that's because I'm a huge fan of Slack. To me, if developing an app in Electron and alikes at all, that's very close to how it must be done for accessibility. With Discord… I tried, I didn't really get it.

@Caoimhe @Kaliah Yes, I was lucky enough that they made it accessible just before I found my previous job. there we used Slack and I was happy. We once tried to use Teams for everything (we used Slack for chats, Microsoft Teams for calls), but it was just awful. Slack does almost everything right: channels, messages, message editing, emojis, Windows notifications, everything is just intuitive.

today I've heard for the first time about the #RigelA open-source screen reader project for #Windows written in #RustLang. Unfortunately only Readme has an English version, all other documents and code comments are in chinese, but the project seems very promising. Use Google Translate or another translator if you, like me, don't speak Chinese. https://gitcode.net/mzdk100/rigela

Dear #blind folks, does anybody know about the #accessibility of audio conferencing service called #BigBlueButton? It used to be totally inaccessible, but sighted people say it got a redesign. Any ideas? The same question about #Jitsi. Oh, the platform of interest is #Windows. Thanks!

Today I had a new #HateCaptcha incident. I received a link from one French state organization. that link was valid only for an hour. And guess what, there was a HateCaptcha challenge there. I even did their humiliating dance with signing up (for the seven thousand first time), set that darned cookie twice, but still was getting "Cookie not set". And of course, I had to quickly ask my wife for help, so she could pass that good-for-nothing captcha visually. Please tell HateCaptcha to remove their so-called accessibility, it's beyond awful and miserable.

Re last: Please please please, don't use #HCaptcha! We blind people call it HateCaptcha, and it's for a reason. Their accessibility so-called innovative technology is simply broken and doesn't work reliably. You can't imagine how much time I spent fighting with this so-called accessibility cookie. Please don't use it, for goodness sake. #MastoAdmin

Re last: I love Americans actually, know about cultural differences, but the absence of teakettles as a general phenomenon still surprises me 😊