Notices by James Scholes (jscholes@dragonscave.space)

After updating from iOS 26 to 26.3, Safari has reverted to the behaviour of collapsing the address bar even though I had it configured not to before the update. Does this mean the setting no longer exists? Is there another way to make the address bar be always expanded?

Fed up of the miserable search experience that I have on Mastodon.

1. Search for a term that I know appeared in the post I'm looking for. No results.

2. Go to a different instance that hopefully has full text search enabled, and repeat the search. No results.

3. Remember that there's no feature in my desktop client to search the current timeline.

4. Switch to Mona on my phone, which does have a feature to find text in timelines. But I've recently unfollowed the person in question so Mona has removed the posts.

5. Give up.

6. Finally locate the post by manually reading a couple of timelines I vaguely remembered might contain a repost of the content I'm looking for. Realise it was posted on my own instance, making it even more ridiculous that the search didn't work.

7. Favourite the post so I don't lose it again, even though searching thousands of favourites doesn't seem like a solved problem either.

For use in a demo, does anyone have examples of things that are announced in distinctly different ways by JAWS and NVDA?

Current downsides: I need to get used to typing "wt" in the Run dialog instead of "cmd" that I've been typing for about 18 years, and typing "wt" in the Explorer address bar doesn't seem to open Terminal in the current directory.

Yesterday I switched to Windows Terminal and PowerShell 7 from the old Windows Console Host and batch syntax, and I do somewhat feel like I've been asleep at the wheel for years.

Proper UTF-8 support, aliases, a profile to configure things at shell startup, command output capture, correct parsing of ANSI escape sequences... In short, things people should expect from a real shell.

Hopefully this doesn't prompt NVDA to start shitting the bed at every opportunity as it apparently does for many others.

In today's #blind ballaches:

FedEx handed a package of mine over to a "trusted third-party vendor" for last-mile delivery. This afternoon, a driver for said vendor sent me a WhatsApp message and photo without a description:

Driver: "I've left your package at <local business name> for you to pick up."

Me: "I can't do that, please bring it to the house."

Them: "You can pick it up after five."

Me: "No, I can't. I paid for home delivery, not a drop off at a different place. I'm busy and also blind, and that isn't convenient."

Them: *silence*

Me: "So, can you please bring it to the house?"

Them: "No. I already left it. Have a good week."

@alexhall I'm not saying I believe in curses or anything, but you are one heck of an unlucky bloke when it comes to tech.

"Give me whereon to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the earth."

Hand out firearms and fear, and ICE agents will make orphans.

I hope the earth moves against them.

In case the comment is deleted, it currently reads:

"Hi there, thank you for reaching out! We understand you need to convert your Audible files (AAX/AA) to MP3 for your waterproof headphones. Since Audible files are protected, simple online tools won't work. We recommend using specialized, user-friendly desktop software like AAX Audio Converter. These tools can efficiently convert your downloaded Audible books into the MP3 format required by your swimming device."

In which what I assume to be an official #Audible support account on Reddit appears to recommend people remove #DRM:

https://reddit.com/r/audible/comments/1pm21lc/help_with_trying_to_convert_to_mp3/ntwtdsw/

A severe #accessibility issue I've seen very few people talking about is the widespread adoption (in my country at least) of touch-only card payment terminals with no physical number buttons.

Not only do these devices offer no tactile affordances, but the on-screen numbers move around to limit the chances of a customer's PIN number being captured by bad actors. In turn, this makes it impossible to create any kind of physical overlay (which itself would be a hacky solution at best).

When faced with such a terminal, blind people have only a few ways to proceed:

* Switch to cash (if they have it);
* refuse to pay via inaccessible means;
* ask the seller to split the transaction into several to facilitate multiple contactless payments (assuming contactless is available);
* switch to something like Apple Pay (again assuming availability); or
* hand over their PIN to a complete stranger.

Not one of these solutions is without problems.

If you're #blind, have you encountered this situation, and if so how did you deal with it? It's not uncommon for me to run into it several times per day.

why do you think this is not being talked about or made the subject of action by blindness organisations? Is it the case that it disproportionately affects people in countries where alternative payment technology (like paying via a smart watch) is slower to roll out and economically out of reach for residents?

@alexhall I think the download size argument is fair, unless they have components downloaded on demand. The startup time issue seems completely avoidable; checking if you have magnification enabled is a tiny operation and with any luck they then just won't run the relevant code paths if it returns false.

@KaraLG84 More likely that they'll remove the ability to turn them off at all, I suspect.

@alexhall You can opt out of many foobar2000 features during the installation process, but I think you have to set up your own hotkeys. Worth it though.

Alternatively there's Media Player Classic Home Cinema (MPC-HC). It does support videos and DVDs, but those features don't get in the way.

Every GUI toolkit/accessibility API has the concept of windows. So I'd love to know why NVDA only announces the window role for some of them and not others.

E.g. I know I'm using an application powered by UIA (or toolkits that use it like WPF) because NVDA announces the word "window" after the window title. But for windows surfaced via IAccessible2 it does not.

@alexhall @marco I don't know why anyone bothers using the word affordable irrespective of price because it's a hugely personal thing. For someone struggling to buy food on a weekly basis, even a revolutionary 200-dollar braille display would be a struggle. Particularly if they had to all but bribe a customs official to get it into their country

@TheQuinbox Is this with the web app or desktop/installed version? If the former, switch to the latter. And then try with UIA for Word both enabled and disabled to see which one is less shit for you.

Reminder that it doesn't matter which Mastodon server you join, as long as you:

Don't join one that's too big;

Don't join one that's too small;

Don't join one using server software your client doesn't support;

Don't join any of the hundreds of servers that are widely blocked by admins;

Don't want to move servers more than once in some cooldown period; and

Don't care about leaving your posts behind when you move.

Other than that, it's a completely inconsequential choice and totally like choosing an email provider.