Notices by Brandon Tyson (btyson@dragonscave.space)

This was inspired by a post I saw that got me thinking about this. People have mentioned how they can visualize, or mental map, or have good spatial awareness. For reference, I don't think I have ever been able to see more than light at any point in my life. When doing O&M, they would always show me maps and I cannot translate the information from those into anything meaningful that will help me when I'm walking, ever. If you show me, for instance, a map that has a school, then a driveway, and then another building in close proximity, about all I can do is recognize the symbols. I know the symbol for the school, I know the symbol for the driveway and for the building. If I trace the map so as to virtually follow the route, that doesn't mean anything to me. I could trace it for a long time, go outside and I'd still be just as confused as I would have been if you hadn't shown me the map in the first place. This is more than just O&M though. Give me a map in an audio game, ask me to find a certain thing on it, or identify it, I can't do it. I can never tell the shape of something in an audio game. About as far as I can go is you can show me a grid with a straight line, I can tell you it's a straight line, but that's about as far as I can go. If I have something where I have to count rows and columns, for instance, and have to find something in that, such as count the sheets in Crazy Party, I can't spot patterns. I have to count the whole entire grid to be able to do it. And some people might tell me like, "This thing is a square," such as a section of a map in a game, that doesn't mean anything to me either. Yes, I know what a square looks like, but that doesn't translate at all to my understanding of the map. I just merely know that I'm looking at a map and that there is something at this location, another thing at this other location, etc. But that's literally it. That's all the farther it goes. And in O&M, they would always try to help me by showing me the map, but that's just amplifying the visualization problem more so every time. And I didn't even know I had a problem with this until somewhat recently. Feel free to share any thoughts on this, I could give more examples but I'd run out of characters.

@Kaliah I used to play games on my phone a lot more around 2018. Although it was mainly Dice World back then, I was also much more active back then due to using my phone a lot more. From 2018 to around 2021, I used my phone much more than my PC. I used the phone for literally everything back then. And now I'm that way with the computer. So I think my gaming tends to lean towards whichever thing I happen to be using the most at the time.

This is by far my favorite version of Silent Night. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJWU0Q1vzs

@tspivey I wanted to mention @NVAccess on this so we can discuss this as I'm not in favor of completely disabling add-ons on secure screens at all and I will not update my NVDA if this happens. Apart from Remote, we need to think about people who prefer a certain speech synthesizer due to, for instance, hearing loss, or cases where the built-in synthesizers do not have very good language support for a given language (for instance, I heard that eSpeak has some foreign languages that are not good at all and there are some OneCore voices that also do not have high quality support for certain languages). Please consider these points before enforcing the inability to use add-ons on the secure screens. The correct approach is to either allow the add-on developer to indicate in the manifest whether the add-on is allowed to run on a secure screen, or to allow a user to individually select which add-ons to copy to the secure screen. The fact that the plan is to just completely disable all add-ons on the secure screen, instead of allowing users to selectively copy add-ons over to the secure screen, when users express that they want this, is not good and it is not in the user's best interest. I am hoping that this thread can start a dialogue about this so that this can be discussed further, as opposed to completely disabling add-ons on the secure screens without considering the possible ramifications.

I didn't know this until now, but at least in Edge, from anywhere in the window you can apparently hit ctrl+f6 to immediately jump to the web content area so you don't have to worry about hitting f6 to move through the panes to get to it, or hitting tab several times to focus it.

@Kaliah Oh, and can I add to this to not do the thing where you question if a blind person actually knows who you are/if you're there, even if they haven't said something to you directly? I.e. One of my Uncles was sitting next to me talking to someone else and I knew he was sitting there next to me, yet he felt it necessary to ask, "Who am I? What's my name?" It tempts me to purposely say the wrong name just to get him to react. I have no idea why he does that but it really bothers me.

Happy pi day!

It really says something about the "improved Discord interface" that even my brother, who can see, got confused when trying to find the friends list.