Android Days Five and Six: let's get appy!
I'm not saying I'll never write about Android ever again, of course. But at this point it feels like I have a working (and thus uninteresting) setup that seems unlikely to change in the near future.
Android day Four: Equality Achieved
Unfortunately, this morning I woke up to an unhappy surprise when I picked up my phone: Android had disabled full access for Jieshuo. Again. Why does this keep happening? It's possible to get it back on without sighted help, but it's still massively annoying. If the Android customizability is going to count as an advantage for the OS, the customizations you make really do need to stick for more than about 48 hours at a time. If I had had a medical emergency in the middle of the night, and picked up my phone to call for help, I'd have been utterly out of luck. Fiddling to get the screen reader back takes about ten minutes. In an actual life and death emergency, that's way too long to be survivable.
Android Days two and three: There has to be a way to make this better
On Day two with my android phone, I started bright and early, determined to move a bunch of accounts over and set up my apps. I got my email set up, Reddit logged in, and...after about two hours, I knew I had to find a better way if Android was going to be viable for my use cases.
Android Day One: How do I go home?
In spite of my Google payment problems, my new Pixel 9A arrived late in the day yesterday. Unfortunately, I had a dinner to get to, and some shopping to accomplish, so I didn't get to spend the entire evening with the phone.
Day Zero On My Android Journey
In a recent State of Mobile App Accessibility Survey, (disclosure: I, and the organization where I work, had some involvement in this survey) Android apps scored as slightly more accessible overall than IOS apps. As a life-long IOS user, since the iPhone 3GS, I found this finding slightly surprising. Of course, as with any result that goes against our preconvictions, it could be easily rationalized away:
Can AI Play Text Adventure Games?
But that was boring, and I really wanted a blog post out of this idea! So instead, I switched to using deepseek V3, set the randomness to 1.2, and gave it the game Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents Detective. This is a terrible nonsensical game, originally written in AGT, and ported to inform, but with commentary added by the cast of mystery science theatre 3000 about how awful the game is. Could deepseek keep all that straight? Or would it be distracted by the sarcastic comments and confused by the terrible game?
Jami could be a skype replacement if only accessibility was cross-platform
In response to this blog post, and without any outreach or advocacy on my part, I received the following email from the developers of Jami:
Some Pseudoscientific Sleep Solutions
Insomnia has been a struggle for me all of my life; ever since I was young, I've struggled with shifting sleep schedules and white nights. I'm far from alone. Studies show that as many as eighty percent of blind people struggle with chronic insomnia and conditions like Non-24 hour sleep disorder. Far too often, the problem is "treated" by Zolpidem or other powerful prescription sleeping pills. Unfortunately, these pills can be addictive, require ever increasing dosages, and have side effects. After years of trying countless solutions, I've finally got a collection of strategies that keep me sleeping on schedule about three quarters of the time without prescriptions.
Canadians: vote!
They’re not joking: Long lines at polling stations as Canadians turn up for advance voting | CBC News. I arrived at 8:55 AM, five minutes before voting even opened, and the line was already out the door. It moved fairly quickly, but the entire process still took over an hour. And the line kept growing as people continued to arrive. If you’re hoping to vote, be ready for that! Also: vote anyway! As for accessibility, I chose to go with a family member to assist me this time. While the Braille version was available and offered, my riding is one where a protest group has chosen to make the printed version over a meter long. I dread to think what the Braille template would be like! I also didn’t want to hold up the long line by figuring it out. The person helping me unfortunately had to complete a lengthy form, so I’m not sure that process was any faster. But the workers were well trained, and knew what needed to happen; glad to see the training continue to improve!
Can AI help me read scans of golden-age science fiction magazines?
I've always loved golden-age pulp science fiction. Unfortunately, the scans of magazines like astounding are generally of poor enough quality that standard OCR struggles with them.