Accessibility, the Origin of Innovation
This article is based on material originally created for my employer, Fable. A condensed, edited, and illustrated version of this content will be available there soon; I will update this post with a link to it when it becomes available. While many of these stories are well known in the disability and accessibility communities, they tend to be told as urban legends. I wanted to actually research and source some of these frequently used examples.
Correcting Years With NVDA and Espeak
I'm mostly documenting this for myself. I've been trying to switch away from eloquence for ages, with little success. One possibility is Espeak-ng, at least with NVDA on Windows, and on Android. Unfortunately, Espeak on IOS has a bunch of serious bugs, and hasn't been updated in forever.
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.