Notices by Matt Campbell (matt@toot.cafe)

@hynek To clarify, do you have concerns specifically about Ruff being a non-Python project? I understand that this is primarily about it being a VC-funded project profiting from years of community work and sucking all the air out of the space.

@vertigo Was the source code for the Windows version of colorForth ever released? I can't be the only one who's curious about what unusual thing it was doing that Windows finally broke.

Quin says Paperback uses the following widget types: "a menu bar, a tab control/notebook, rich edit, a tree view, both single and multi-column listviews, checkboxes, spinners, combo boxes, and a few others".

So, Rust GUI toolkit developers, we have a lot of work to do. I can implement the necessary things in AccessKit, and contribute to one toolkit, but I can't fill this gap alone.

My friend @TheQuinbox has been working on an ebook reader for blind people called Paperback (https://github.com/trypsynth/paperback). So far it's all written in C++, using wxWidgets as the GUI toolkit. Now Quin is working on making it a Rust/C++ hybrid, with the UI still in C++ using wx. As far as we know, the Rust GUI ecosystem isn't nearly ready to support a desktop app like this, with perfect screen reader accessibility and native-feeling keyboard behavior.

Question for any blind desktop Linux users, particularly GNOME users, out there: What are the remaining practical issues with running Orca in a Wayland-based GNOME session? I'm guessing inability to synthesize mouse clicks is the main one.

Putting a terminal front and center is a statement that you, the user, will want or even need to do things with your computer that we, the developers, didn't necessarily anticipate and design prefab, polished user interfaces for. Burying the terminal is a statement that we developers know best, and you users are a lower class that need to be protected from the things that we think you can't handle.

I recently saw a toot saying that Linux on the desktop will take off and go mainstream once the terminal is hidden away under advanced settings (actually, twenty years after that). I had an immediate emotional reaction to that. This was my response: https://toot.cafe/@matt/115485907341571353

I feel like future generations need to be able to easily discover programming, almost stumble into it, as I could on my family's first computer, an Apple IIGS. So the idea of burying the terminal just seems wrong.

Will our industry, the software industry, ever get to a point where it's expected that we write a piece of software, and after a brief period of debugging, it does what it was meant to do, perfectly, forever? Can we ever get past the point where it's just expected that any project will have to track the upgrade treadmills of all of its dependencies forever?

I mean, with hardware, a machine is designed once, then it just keeps doing its job until it physically wears out. When will software mature to that point?

Hot take about the fediverse: Maybe the solution to the oft-mentioned problem where we don't always see all replies to a post is that we shouldn't be _able_ to see arbitrary replies, except for posts from people that we follow (including boosts), and of course, specific profiles that we view. A corollary is that maybe random folks shouldn't have the right to intrude on someone's notifications with replies to their posts. The result would be more fragmented but possibly better in some ways.

@drew @pesh FWIW, those things do appear as proper markup when I'm reading the toot in Semaphore, if I'm browsing through it in NVDA's browse mode rather than moving keyboard focus through the list in focus mode like it's a list view.

Recently came across a 1984 quote about "agents" by Steve Jobs featured on @simon's blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/18/steve-jobs/

I, for one, don't want an imitation of a "little person" inside my computer, anticipating what I want, or steering me toward what its developers want me to want. I'm fine with a "responder" as Jobs called it, that keeps me in control.

Maybe that reaction is just a sign of how pessimistic the current zeitgeist has become. Or maybe that Jobs quote was always hopelessly naive.

@TetraLogical @craigabbott As a former screen reader developer myself, I mostly agree with this article. But, for the specific exzample of the clapping hands emoji, I think it would be easy enough to add a special case to the screen reader -- not "AI", but just a good old hand-coded heuristic -- to filter the text and then play a clapping-hands sound effect synchronized with each of the words. I just wonder if there's broad consistency on whether the emoji comes before or after the word.

@glyph I wonder if government-mandated surveillance and censorship are going to come to the fediverse too, making euphemism and indirect phrasing unavoidable. Or maybe they'll just outlaw the fediverse altogether. At least the instance you're on is outside of US jurisdiction, unlike the (way smaller) instance I'm on.

For anyone who thinks Wayland compositors are being overly restrictive by not allowing applications to set absolute positions for their windows, as I did, there are good reasons for this restriction. https://canonical-mir.readthedocs-hosted.com/stable/explanation/window-positions-under-wayland/

@ariadne

> that someone is trying to improve on this by integrating screen reader hints and other accessibility features into wayland itself is an improvement over X11.

Hi. I think you're talking about my project. It's been on hold for a year now; the last status update was: https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/

What I like about my approach is that accessibility tree updates are serialized, unlike any existing platform accessibility API I know of... so they could efficiently be pushed over a network.

@skinnylatte I'm a white American, and I don't like American gift-giving culture. Of course, one factor is that I'm a nerd, so I'm hard to buy gifts for. Especially now that I'm an adult with money, if I want something, I'll just buy it myself.

Question for #blind people who have to work with PDF documents: Is Adobe Reader still the only Windows PDF reader with full tagged PDF support? Is there any good PDF reader with tagged PDF support on other platforms?

@david_chisnall Do you have an example? I'm guessing something like how the classic Macintosh Toolbox and Windows API faked an object-oriented GUI so they could ship on computers not powerful enough to run Smalltalk.

This is an impressive purely-local web app from @soapdog. Upload a folder containing a book manuscript in Markdown; get back an EPUB and a website as a zip file. All done locally in the user's browser. https://little.webby.press/