Notices by Matt Campbell (matt@toot.cafe), page 4

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.

Update on Newton, the Wayland-native accessibility stack I'm developing for GNOME and (eventually) other desktops: I have an end-to-end prototype, using a Wayland protocol extension for the connection between applications/toolkits and the compositor, and D-Bus for the AT-to-compositor interface. I have an experimental branch of Orca with basic focus announcement and mouse review working. 1/?

@nah @aral I'm removing Sonny from this thread. I don't think we need to bother him with this extended debate.

@aral GNOME folks are well aware of the problems with Orca on Wayland, and actively working to fix them. There's even funding for this work, thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund. I'm personally working on a new Wayland-native accessibility stack that aims to eventually replace AT-SPI and support sandboxed apps, but there are also efforts to fix problems in the existing stack in the short term. cc @sonny

It's clear that the name of my AccessKit project (https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit) is a recurring stumbling block. When mentioned without appropriate context, it carries the connotations of being an Apple API. Plus, there's actually another AccessKit, which ranks higher in a DuckDuckGo search: https://accesskit.media/

So I'm actually thinking about renaming my AccessKit. The best names I can come up with are:

accesslib
libaccess
a11ylib
liba11y

None of those are particularly inspired.

@drewdevault And if people really want to keep using X with their old window manager, they could run Xwayland in rootful mode under a full-screen Wayland compositor like cage, right?

@sxpert @drewdevault I presume that if someone really wanted to put in the work, they could create a new stand-alone X server based on the modern KMS/DRM graphics stack, the same one used by Wayland compositors, using Xorg code as a starting point. I think it would be much less work, though, to write a script that starts cage and Xwayland. Then you could invoke that script as if it were a good old X server.

@sxpert If there's so little to be done, then maybe you can do such a good job at it that the distros decide to keep Xorg after all. What I've read, though, is that Xorg doesn't just work, particularly with newer hardware.

@drewdevault

@luis_in_brief @dalias @simon @danilo @maria It would be interesting to see an LLM tuned for instruction-following, particularly iterative instruction following taking prior context into account, that is specifically trained not to emulate a person, e.g. no first-person pronouns.

I'm getting tired of simplistic, indignant characterizations of generative AI like this one: https://social.ericwbailey.website/@eric/111584809768617532 "a spicy autocomplete powered by theft that melts the environment to amplify racism and periodically, arbitrarily lie"

It's a tool like any other; it can be used for good as well as bad. Yes, the copyright issue is real, but we can presumably overcome it by using models whose developers are more scrupulous about their sources of training data, not throwing out the whole thing.

I'll mention again a more balanced take from @danilo that I posted the other day: https://redeem-tomorrow.com/the-average-ai-criticism-has-gotten-lazy-and-thats-dangerous

I also like @simon's writing on generative AI.

I like this post from @danilo which addresses some lazy criticisms of generative AI while also discussing several legitimate criticisms: https://redeem-tomorrow.com/the-average-ai-criticism-has-gotten-lazy-and-thats-dangerous

If the only legitimate use of that setting is for that specific Vietnamese input utility, then I have a proposal for a different solution to that specific problem, which eliminates the setting, since it's too easy to turn off the setting without knowing what one is doing and break other things. But I want to collect more information about possible other uses of that setting before proposing my own solution.

Question for NVDA users: In the keyboard section of settings, there's a checkbox called "Handle keys from other applications". This setting is enabled by default. If it's disabled, it prevents remote access tools from working well with NVDA on the remote target machine. But this isn't clear to someone just looking through the settings. The setting was added due to an issue with a specific Vietnamese input utility. Does anyone have any other reason to turn it off?

Thanks to my foray into GNOME history yesterday, I'm thinking about this NVDA setting in light of a classic article by a GNOME developer on the cost of preferences: https://ometer.com/preferences.html

Came across this article on the decline of usability which, among other things, puts GNOME 3 in the same category as the notorious Windows 8. https://datagubbe.se/usab2/

I know that classic Mac/Windows conventions like menu bars and title bars aren't sacred forever. But this article does make a convincing case that the industry at large, including GNOME, has gone backward. And, at least for me, that's uncomfortable to contemplate.