Notices by Simon Jaeger (simon@procrastodon.net)

@Fragglemuppet Wow, this is very broken for me. As soon as I paste your ID and press next, it just sits there loading infinitely. VoiceOver can't read a single thing.

@Fragglemuppet Strange, I've got nothing. Can you send me yours? Perhaps if we both add each other it'll sync up. Annoyingly, I now remember having this problem when I tried it a couple of years ago, so it also might be me.

@Fragglemuppet I got that a long time ago, never got to test it with anyone. 05b73b7e226da819b9faed41bca45ed55c3c587b90bc676f0ba64c0874909bba14

The OnePlus setup wizard has a little intro screen that says "Welcome. Are you ready?" Followed by a next button which is completely invisible to Talkback. Notably, ChatGPT helped me find it.
Feels like a very nice phone so far. Not a great start on software, but I can't say I wasn't warned.
We'll see how the rest of this goes. I'm keeping all the packaging.

@singingnala What are you trying to do that requires more than 16 GB? Just curious. I unfortunately don't know which laptops are good these days; I might have to look into this myself soon, and I'm not really looking forward to it. My current one is a Lenovo Thinkpad, which does have expandable memory, but the more compact ones like the Carbon lineup do not. This is a business laptop I got on sale in late 2020, and unofficially goes up to 40 GB.

@munchkinbear @singingnala @JamminJerry I barely remember any of Fifty Shades, because it was objectively terrible, but one thing I do remember is Christian basically love-bombing Anna with gifts. And one of those gifts was a MacBook Pro with 32GB RAM, and a geek to come set it up. And at one point the geek asked her what she'd be using it for, and she essentially said "IDK, checking emails?"
Back then, that was meant to sound absurd, highlighting the extravagance of that computer. Now, that's not too far off from reality, and isn't that just depressing.

Turned off autocorrect for hardware keyboards in iOS, but it still kept trying to change my words and randomly pluralize them. Turns out predictive text is a separate setting, and you can’t turn it off only for hardware keyboards, so I turned it off entirely. I really think the only thing I like about iOS these days is the fact that it has all my apps on it, and it’s accessible until it isn’t.

While we're calling out good #Accessibility from companies people love to hate, I just found this in the Google Home app when trying to set up a Google router. In the image, the WAN port is highlited, but someone has overwritten the VoiceOver label with the following text:

The WAN and LAN ports are found on the bottom of your Google Wifi. Position the device upside down with the ports facing you. The WAN port is on the left and the LAN port is on the right.
My only complaint is that the label wasn't clearly the alt text for an image. I almost posted the screenshot, thinking that text was visible to everyone. But if we describe the image instead of just describing the ports, that creates way more cognative load for blind users. Imagine a label like this: "Image of the bottom of the Google Router, with the ports facing the viewer. The left port is labeled "WAN" and highlighted." Then, I'd have to think about that alt text and contextualize it with the rest of the text. This is clearly a better experience. Interesting thought processes over at Google HQ.

An e-mail I just wrote to Amazon's accessibility support--which has fixed approximately 0 of the issues I've reported so far, but I can dream, right?

Hello,

As of a recent update to the amazon.ca website, I am no longer able to read the price of products on search results pages. I'm using the NVDA screen reader but I suspect this issue will affect all screen readers.

1. Go to amazon.ca (NOT .COM) and search for anything.

2. Navigate to the first search result and read through the information following the name of the item.

3. Notice the link called "Price, product page". This is--for some reason--a link that has been re-labeled for screen reader users. In doing so, the actual price of the item has been removed.

I now need to open the page for each individual product and find the price there. This adds an unimaginable amount of page loads and time onto the process of shopping for multiple items.

I do not need support; I know how to find the prices of items. This just needs to be fixed.

(It's worth noting that I can actually use object navigation to drill down into the link and find the actual text label with the price. Some moron has just obscured it with an aria- label.)

@Estrella HCaptcha is a shit company that basically gaslights blind people into thinking their shit solution is totally fine. Contact them and say you're a web accessibility professional and make a completely valid and privacy-respecting suggestion for how they can make this better with almost 0 effort and get a response from them telling you to fuck off, I dare you.

When a website is technically accessible, but in reality, the login menu item reads as follows:

banner landmark Top Header navigation landmark Header Menu Right Navigation menu menu item subMenu My Freedom

I called the taxi company this week and asked if the Jelly Star had been turned into their lost and found. Unfortunately, the answer is no. On a more interesting note depending on who you are, I heard what I thought were Zello sounds in the background, so I asked. Apparently all the drivers are using tablets with Zello for Work now. It took 10 years, but I finally found Zello users in the wild.

@jscholes Of course it will.

We have AI text-to-speech, AI sound effects, AI music, and of course large language models.
How long until we see a full-cast story generator?
Nothing about it would be especially good, but you could hypothetically combine all of these things and maybe end up with something that made the average person go "Wow, a computer seriously came up with that whole thing?"

My favourite thing about AirPods is the way they automatically pair to all your Apple devices when you pair them to one of them. This way, instead of being tied to only one device, I can start listening to my book, get in the shower, and have my watch randomly pair to them from the other room for literally no reason, causing me to get out of the shower and fumble my way to reconnecting the phone.