Openclaw Is More Fun to Fiddle With Than To Use
If you've never heard of openclaw (formerly moltbot, formerly claudbot), it's an open source AI tool that can actually do things in the real world. And sometimes, the things it does are actually the things you want it to do! Unfortunately, "sometimes" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Is Openclaw worth the massive hype it's received from people like Andrej Karpathy? I'll go over my experiences in this article.
The State of Modern AI Text To Speech Systems for Screen Reader Users
If you're not a screen reader user yourself, you might be surprised to learn that the text to speech technology used by most blind people hasn't changed in the last 30 years. While text to speech has taken the sighted world by storm, in everything from personal assistants to GPS to telephone systems, the voices used by blind folks have remained mostly static. This is largely intentional. The needs of a blind text to speech user are vastly different than those of a sighted user. While sighted users prefer voices that are natural, conversational, and as human-like as possible, blind users tend to prefer voices that are fast, clear, predictable, and efficient. This results in a preference among blind users for voices that sound somewhat robotic, but can be understood at high rates of speed, often upwards of 800 to 900 words per minute. The speaking rate of an average person hovers around 200 to 250 words per minute, for comparison.
Accessibility, the Origin of Innovation
Update: The Fable version of this material is now available here.
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?