Notices by Drew Mochak (drew@akkomane.social)

An aspect of President Trump ending DEI programs that I haven’t seen getting much coverage: he’s not calling it DEI anymore. Now it’s DEIA. The a stands for–you guessed it–accessibility!

Disabled people are next.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-and-wasteful-government-dei-programs-and-preferencing/

The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.

@storm Wait the linux version has TTS? I asked the ZDoom guys to do TTS and they told me to pound sand. Amazing! Can’t wait to try it out.

@storm That’s so interesting. So if I used it to play, for example, My House, would it read the status messages that pop up when you pick up certain things?

@storm Well now I have to have it for windows! That’s so freaking cool.

Pretty rough end to a pretty rough week at work https://www.axios.com/2025/01/10/meta-dei-memo-employees-programs

Not nearly enough booze in this house and the roads are closed.

@skinnylatte One of my liberal tech friends is capital U upset Trump supported H1B’s. He said that, while he has nothing against the workers, it was messed up that the companies would “treat them like slaves” and not spend that money on American workers. I told him he was being a median Fox News boomer for this take and he got very mad at me.

Live AI enters early access for ray ban smart glasses! This uses a video stream instead of a still photo, allowing you to ask questions in real time. This significantly shortens your response time! https://www.meta.com/help/smart-glasses/articles/ray-ban-meta/live-ai-ray-ban-meta-glasses/

“Does the US have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?”

“The work we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around […] creat[ing] a ceasefire.”

“But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.”

“Well, Bill, [death stare into the camera] the work that we have done has resulted in a number of [more panicked staring] movements in that region that were [looks around franticly] very much prompted by or a result of many things including our advocacy for what needs to happen.”

“Do we have a close ally in Prime Minister Netanyahu?”

“I think, with all due respect, the better question is do we have an important alliance between the American and Israeli people, and the answer to that is yes.”

I know we’re not supposed to point out how terrible these answers are because freedom Trump Democracy whatever, but Wowwy wowsers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?=iqbZ46GffOo

By popular request, #Voiceover no longer reads phone numbers of #WhatsApp group participants who aren’t in your contacts, and just reads the push name. You can still read the phone number on their contact info page, or by swiping up to the “message <phone number>” option in the actions rotor. This should make catching up with your groups faster and more efficient! Thanks so much for your feedback, please keep sending it.

#accessibility #screenreader

Amazon is allowing Audible narrators to clone themselves with AI The company says performers will retain creative control over their AI voice and will be compensated on a ‘title-by-title basis.’ https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/9/24239903/amazon-audible-audiobook-narrators-ai-generated-voice-clones

My semi-anual reminder to turn on braille mode in Google Docs/sheets/slides if you are a screenreader user. Do this even if you are not a braille user. It does far more than enable support for braille displays.

What it actually does is place the document in an off-screen content editable. This allows you to use normal screenreader commands to access things, E.G. insert+down arrow for say all. With braille mode off, the content is in a black box that communicates state changes via live regions, relying 100% on the browser to do so correctly. This mode is considered legacy and is no longer developed, despite it being the default.

This has been the case for 8+ years but Google is bad at branding, leaving it to me to inform the good people of Mastodon.

You’re welcome!

Watch me Solve crime in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney! https://twitch.tv/object_inspace

It has been observed that app accessibility tends to be better on the iPhone. There are a number of technical reasons people like to point to for why this is.

I’d like to raise one that is not technical at all: the app quality, in general, is better on the iPhone. If you see an app that is available for IOS and Android, and you do a comparative, the IOS app will come out ahead most of the time. But why is this, then?

I posit this is because most of the people who work in “big tech” have disposable income, and the most common phone of the well-off is by far the iPhone. In other words, the apps are better on iOS because most app developers use IOS as their daily driver.

I don’t have any stats to point to to prove this, so you’ll just have to trust me. Even at Google, where you would think the Chromebook would reign supreme, the macbook was still dominant. Anecdotally and very unscientifically, I’d say about half of their SWE’s use iPhones as personal devices. Compare that to Apple, which, from what I’ve heard, has almost no one working there who uses Android for anything other than testing–I mean, why would you?

@stefan @essjayjay @iaruffell @selzero FWIW, the “actual” Trump agenda is Agenda 47 https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47

Though in fairness, they did scrub the Presidential website of most of its positions the last time he got elected. This could well happen again.

My view on project 2025 is that they will be more likely to implement it if it makes liberals cry tears. So if we do not want this future, the best thing to do would be… the exact opposite of what we are doing🤷🏻♂️