Notices by James Scholes (jscholes@dragonscave.space), page 3

I think per-activity configuration is a hard problem to solve, mainly from a user experience/workflow perspective. There are still certain parts of NVDA config profiles that constantly trip people up, for example, and many of them without obvious solutions.

Having said that, Apple's decision to explicitly define a subset of settings that can go in an activity seems like the wrong way to do it. It only leads to fragmentation, and the feature being far less amenable to creativity than it otherwise could be.

As an example, activities include an "audio ducking option", the options for which in iOS 18 are: "Default", "On", or "Off". In other words, the new ducking modes exposed by the rotor haven't made it into the activities system, because it's isolated and fragmented from the rest of the screen reader.

It requires Apple to explicitly opt aspects of behaviour into activity readiness, and make a new UI for their configuration even though one already exists elsewhere. The result, unsurprisingly for something that relies on humans to put in extra work, is activities feeling like an outdated island, or a feature that's still very immature.

Aside: apparently the setting to not change the active rotor on focus is not new in iOS 18. Which makes it even more disappointing that it can't be set on a per-activity basis, and only proves the point about the activities feature being badly designed.

According to Messages settings, my iMessage is disabled, and I'm not signed in. But I just received an iMessage from the Apple Store, and sent one to someone. Doesn't matter that much to me, given that I used the Messages app about once a year, but I'm not sure what's going on.

Live Recognition claims that there's a group of people in my living room, standing in the snow.

@BorrisInABox If you got rid of the boxes, then the image will demonstrate an absence of boxes, because there are no boxes. However as previously stated, we have a one lifetime box per customer policy which, by your own admission you have violated by having several boxes to dispose of. As such, your account will be permanently purged from our system in 15 calendar days should you be unable to refute these claims with appropriate evidence.

@BorrisInABox Any image showing the absence of boxes will suffice, as long as it is signed by a qualified private investigator in your jurisdiction, witnessed by one of the permissible professionals listed on our website, and notarised by a solicitor.

I like: URLs with slugs in that give me a clue to the title/theme of the content before I click.

I dislike: #Mastodon apps truncating URLs for display.

@JustinMac84 Mastodon already treats all URLs as being the same fixed length, regardless of how many characters they actually are. And I'm talking about apps displaying URLs, not people posting them.

@JustinMac84 Any link starting with "http://" or "https://" will be treated as contributing 23 characters to your post, even if it takes up more or less space than that in reality. So Mastodon is a friendly place to post full, unshortened URLs... which apps then truncate so I can't read them.

The latest winning mark-up from #GitHub turns all release asset download links into table cells, despite them not being in a table:

```
<ul>
<li role="row">
<div role="presentation">
<a href="..." role="cell">...</a>
</div>
<div role="presentation">
<span role="cell">108 Bytes</span>
<span role="cell">
<relative-time datetime="..." title="May 24, 2024, 9:41 PM CST">2024-05-25T03:41:28Z</relative-time>
</span>
</div>
</li>
</ul>
```

#accessibility

Trying not to read anything into the store I ordered a new SSD from needing to manually send me the shipping notification... from a Google Mail address.

@BorrisInABox Cisco's totally not-catchy resolver IP got a chuckle out of me. 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, and... oh yeah: 208.69.38.205.

@BorrisInABox You can never be sure. Better up your own efforts just in case.

If you're a #screenReader user and struggling to find the start of responses in the #ChatGPT interface, you can instruct it to add a heading at the start of each one:

1. In the web interface, press the "User" button.
2. In the menu, choose "Customize ChatGPT".
3. In the dialog that comes up, the second multiline text field is labelled: "How would you like ChatGPT to respond?". In this field, you can add something like: "Whenever you respond, prepend a level 1 heading in the Markdown so I can easily find the start of the response with my screen reader.".
4. Near the end of the dialog, ensure that the toggle switch is in the on position, which will confusingly mean it has a label of: "Disable chat preferences". But this does mean it's enabled.
5. Press "Save".

In my experience, this works for something like 96 to 98 percent of responses, and is probably possible with other models too.

#accessibility

A few responses I'm not interested in:
1. I hate AI.
2. I hate OpenAI.
3. I hate ChatGPT.
4. OpenAI should be better at accessibility (true but unhelpful).
5. "This is a level 1 heading, should it be level N?"

To those who've pointed out that I should've probably been using bookmarks all along: those can indeed be exported from the account preferences section on my instance. Unfortunately:

1. I haven't been using them all along; and
2. the CSV only includes post URLs, no text or metadata, so still can't be searched, and hence doesn't come close to solving the problem of searching them.

In the end, it took me over an hour to extract one link from my #Mastodon favourites, as someone who already had a Python environment set up ready to run an archival tool without much fuss.

There's also an unexpectedly large number of tools to export #Mastodon data to #Prometheus. I'm not sure I even understand what Prometheus is, nor why so many people apparently want to export Mastodon data to it.

Some replies have suggested using "in:library" as a search qualifier. Unfortunately, no matter what I specify after it, my instance claims there are no matches.

So, I'm going ahead and using the aforementioned archival tool. I don't like that it's hitting the API to obtain a lot of data that I don't want or need, but I think I've legitimately tried hard enough (short of modifying the software itself) to avoid it.

@BeAware Don't get me wrong, you raise a good point: the archive from the account prefs includes all my posts if I want those, which makes using a third-party tool and the corresponding toll on the server doubly disappointing.