Notices by Matt Campbell (matt@toot.cafe), page 2

@anna Was it because that faculty used self-hosted infrastructure while all the other faculties were on some big cloud service?

@cwebber Will these browser-based applications ultimately use HTML for the UI, or will they run a new UI toolkit in a canvas like the video game demos? That's the one thing that makes me worry about the call for new foundations; the existing web platform is already pretty good for accessibility, in particular. Of course, there's a way to make canvas-based UI more or less accessible, by constructing a parallel DOM. But it's tricky.

Just to make sure I'm clear, what I mean by line-oriented programs with linear control flow is that the program writes some output, then waits on some user input, and keeps going that way. Of course, there's branching and looping, but none of the complexity of event-driven GUIs, whether desktop, web, or mobile. Think of classic BASIC games like Lunar Lander or Oregon Trail (the original version). 2/?

It seems to me that some of the approachability that BASIC brought to programming, first on time-sharing computers and then on early personal computers, has never been fully recovered since the rise of the GUI. Sure, you can write line-oriented programs with linear (as opposed to event-driven) control flow in modern languages, but they're confined to running in a terminal, and most people find that arcane, especially since the rise of mobile devices. 1/?

So to fill a niche that seems underserved, I'm thinking of hacking together a little JavaScript front-end framework, tentatively called Basic.js (the name seems to be available). I would provide it as a template for users to use as the starting point of their project, consisting of a library JavaScript module (the titular "basic.js" file), a boilerplate index.html file, and a main.js file with a little boilerplate for the main program. 3/?

@inthehands Well, I got some negative feedback about putting those subsections in one big list, especially about the increased indentation and how that affects small screens. That was a somewhat weird structure anyway. So I backed that out and made the font size of h3 smaller. What do you think?

@inthehands Ugh. If the h2 and h3 styles are hard to distinguish, that's arguably the browser's fault. But if all the browsers have that problem, e.g. because they're all keeping slavish compatibility with something Netscape did in 1994, then maybe that's on me to fix.

I need feedback from sighted people about the website for my open-source project.

Here's the current version, using a third-party theme; I know the typography on the home page has problems: https://accesskit.dev/

And here's my proposed new version, using a minimalist template and CSS derived from an existing site (I stripped it down quite a bit): https://preview.accesskit.dev/

My main collaborator says the new appearance is from a past era. What do you think? Is it off-putting?

@david_chisnall How do you envision the framework being split between Rust and Lua? I mean, what would each language be used for?

About my last boost from @drewdevault, this makes me ashamed to consider myself part of the Rust community, especially since some of the comments he quoted in the thread were posted in places where the Rust code of conduct are allegedly in force (that is, it's not just Reddit and Hacker News). We've got a problem with tribalism in our community. I know it's not up to me to police the community, but still, what can we do about this?

@andriyngvason @emersion @drakulix Unless I'm misunderstanding the blog post, it sounds like it's a foregone conclusion that this won't be adopted by Mutter or KWin? If that's correct, then why is that? Is there a schism between those big desktop environments on the one hand, and more niche Wayland compositors on the other?

@Conan_Kudo @lanodan @javierm It sounds to me like it would help if platforms and toolchains would slow down and stop breaking things for downstream developers who don't test against the bleeding edge. Of course, I'm aware that some things do need to evolve, and volunteer developers shouldn't be expected to go through the heroics that Microsoft historically did to preserve backward compatibility in Windows. Still, it feels like there's too much churn.

@Conan_Kudo What kinds of advances do you think are being held back because projects develop and test against old distro releases?

@forteller No problem, it's a valid concern. Really though, a lot of us who use this stuff every day are fine with eSpeak. I'm using it right now, by choice.

@forteller eSpeak NG is more tolerable, even entirely acceptable for some of us, if you speed it up, but I knew I couldn't run the voice at the speed I typically use, when doing a demo for a mixed audience.

Here's my latest update on Newton, the #Wayland-native, #Flatpak-friendly #accessibility project for the modern #FreeDesktop ecosystem, developed as part of @gnome and funded by @sovtechfund. It's not ready for production yet, but this blog post includes a demo video and links to GNOME OS and Flatpak runtime builds you can try. As a bonus, because I'm integrating #AccessKit into #GTK, GTK apps will finally have #a11y on Windows and macOS. https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2024/06/18/update-on-newton-the-wayland-native-accessibility-project/

Question for anyone who writes JAWS scripts or NVDA add-ons to make niche applications usable in a job environment: When working with Windows applications that don't use old-style Win32 controls, a.k.a. "standard" controls, but use a newer framework like WPF or UWP, do you ever have a use for the UI Automation class name property on individual controls? Not to be confused with the window class; in these newer frameworks, there's typically just one window class for the top-level window.

Hey NVDA power-users, how hard would it be to customize NVDA, via an add-on or otherwise, so that while browse mode is on, the Space key is passed through instead of simulating a click? I'm giving a talk tomorrow, and I'd like to use NVDA browse mode in Edge to check my place while going through my slides. But I have to press Space to advance through the slides.

@samplereality I guess the urban legend is popular among people who struggled to learn to type. Steven Levy, one of many who propagated the legend, wrote in his book _Insanely Great_: "My own high-school instruction in typing was nightmarish. So fumble-fingered was I that after my mistakes were deducted from my word totals, my scores on the speed drills were usually gauged in negative numbers." FWIW, I can't relate; typing came naturally to me. But I started much earlier.

@AndresFreundTec Is there anything we can do to reward and thank *you* for discovering the backdoor? Any crowdfunding thing we can contribute to as a gesture of thanks? We were all lucky that you tracked down the anomaly, and I for one appreciate that you chose to take the time to do so.