NV Access are very pleased to announce the release of NVDA 2024.2! Please download from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-2/

Highlights include Sound Split, numerous new keystrokes, new Braille mode & other features, updates to eSpeak, LibLouis & other dependencies & programs.

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #A11y #Accessibility #New #Release #FOSS #Update #NewVersion

There doesn’t seem to be much going on in this forum. I wonder if one reason is that the UI UX is a bit clunky. At least I’m finding it challenging to use NVDA with it. I’m used to having a learning curve for NVDA use on practrically all new websites I visit. But this forum seems more challenging than even Reddit (and that’s saysing a lot) and groups.io. The main screen is easy enough. H gets me going through the thread titles just fine. But when I open a thread I H to get to the top of the thread content, but then I have to do about 9 downarrows to get to the the content. Then getting to the next post is okay, but once again tetting to the content of the post requires lots of k and downarrowss in just the right sequence. Seems like a real pain. And then there is the fact that credentials go stale immediately upon leaving. I always have to log back in. Again, more priction. Am I just missing something here?

Hello,

I'm trying to help my Dad talk to his brother (my Uncle).

Can you recommend a voice calling app that:

• works on Android and iPhone
• supports Siri "Call [contact] using [voice calling app name]"
• supports VoiceOver two finger double tap Magic tap to answer or end a call
• does not require an actual phone number
• bonus points if it supports video

Long winded background follows...

Uncle lives in UK and can see just fine, but does not like Apple or Facebook so he's got an Android phone. Dad is in Canada and has an iPhone. He's pretty good with Siri and making good progress with VoiceOver. He does not have a phone plan so no phone number.

If my Mum is around my Uncle sets up Zoom calls and they can talk. If my Mum is not around Dad can call Uncle's regular phone number using a VOIP client "Hey Siri, call Uncle using GroundWire." However for some bizarre reason the UK reverted to 1990's phone rates after Brexit so these Canada-UK calls cost $0.4361/min vs the Can-US VOIP rates of 0.01/min. $25/hr feels egregious, although it does work very well.

I thought Signal was the answer, but Dad won't be able to register since he doesn't have a phone number and even then Signal doesn't support Siri.

I looked at Discord but it seemed pretty cluttered and complicated.

This looks like the replacement for BGT. For those of you who haven't heard of BGT, it was a game engine for creating audiogames that was developed throughout the early 2010's. It's possible to migrate old BGT games to NVGT with just a little bit of work. Here's hoping that NVGT brings on a new golden age of cross-platform audiogames.

Life is hard - for everybody, but in many ways more so for blind and visually impaired folks. It’s also awesome though, so let’s talk about that.

What did you recently succeed in and want to talk about? Work, relationships, travel… something else?

Hi everyone,

As part of a school course, I am currently conducting a survey for our product "Color Sense." This project is specially designed to help blind or visually impaired individuals choose their clothes independently using tags that integrate braille and a QR code. Your participation in this survey would be extremely valuable in helping us improve our product and better meet your needs.

Link to the survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd-ShxAK5tcA4lYLcq9AyD5EHNvY1zNvGvM-VELhZoG0n3K7A/viewform?usp=sf_link

If you have difficulty answering the survey yourself, please feel free to ask someone to help you complete it.

Thank you in advance for your participation and valuable assistance!

I was looking into linux distros for blind users and was curious what distros the blind linux community prefers.

I found one called Accessible-Coconut which seemed promising though you still have to click on the installer without a prompt from the screen reader.

It also has a desktop background which might be considered bloatware for the fully blind.

This week's In-Process is out, featuring all you need to know about copying text in Word, using Browse mode in Word, getting help in NVDA, and a special thanks to our friends at ISCB! All online now: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/in-process-6th-may-2024/

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Accessibility #Microsoft #MicrosoftOffice #Office365 #Office #Keyboard

hi all I want to trade my hearthstone account, with a lot of grinded time and resources for a suggestion of an other tcg game the best suggestion wins, it's on forum audiogames.net too. https://forum.audiogames.net/topic/53175/trading-out-my-hearthstone-account-for-any-other-interesting-tcg/ I'll aggregate all replies from everywhere, don't worry. blizzard do'es really bad decisions, and I am fed up with that, but if someone wants the account they can participate, if you aren't interested, you can stil give suggestion, by just saying that you don't participate.

Join the Brailliance native app beta!

iOS TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/PSwzeHVM

Android Beta: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.exceptionullgames.brailliance

We are testing app versions of Brailliance, our new game where you count braille dots to guess the word. This version incorporates a ton of your feedback from the web version of the game, all while benefiting from the advantages of being a native app.

To download the beta on iOS TestFlight, download Apple's TestFlight app on the App Store. Once you do, you can follow the link above and TestFlight will allow you to register for early access. Once you do, you can find a download button for Brailliance directly within the TestFlight app.

To download the beta on Android, so long as you have Google Play, follow the link above and tap "Become a Tester." After a moment, you'll see a link to access Brailliance on the Google Play store.

We're particularly interested in the impressions of VoiceOver and TalkBack users on phones and tablets. Brailliance supports a lot of ways to play, from standard web-style navigation to Perkins input via braille displays and the on-screen braille keyboard. The game also supports keyboards on most devices.

HOW TO PLAY:

Type a word to make a guess. The correct word will contain the number of braille dots shown.

As you make guesses, you will be told which letters are in the word and which letters are not. These "green" letters can be anywhere in the word.

Try to guess the word in as few guesses as possible. However, you get unlimited guesses. Also, you can guess any word up to the correct number of dots, but not over it.

Use your math skills to figure out which letters are likely to be in the answer. For instance, if you know all of the correct letters except one, and that you need three more dots to complete the word, that last letter must be a three-dot braille letter.

NV Access is pleased to announce that version 2024.1 of NVDA, the free screen reader for Microsoft Windows, is now available for download. We encourage all users to upgrade to this version.

Highlights

• “on-demand” speech mode
• Native selection mode in Firefox
• Bulk actions in the Add-on Store Many more updates and fixes. Please see the release announcement for all the info and download links: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-1-released/

Hello everyone, this is Velix.

I am a geographer from Germany. I am a sighted person, but I create accessible documents (PDFs) at our research institute. An exchange with visually impaired people is therefore very important to me.

What I have noticed is that although there is a lot of specialist literature on the subject, there are only a few good example documents that do not contradict the current standards (e.g. PDF/UA-1).

For example, I currently have the problem of how footnotes should be correctly tagged in documents. I don't want screenreader users to get into trouble with those notes.

Can someone link me to a few good documents that have footnotes and are easy to read with the screenreaders?

I'll then borrow the implementation to make our scientific reports even more accessible.

Thanks in advance, Velix

I'll be checking out the exhibit hall on Friday, and then heading to Disneyland.

How about you guys? For anyone attending, what're you looking forward to seeing this year? I believe Orbit Research is going to be demoing the Optima laptop, which I'm pretty excited to get a look at.

cross-posted from: https://rblind.com/post/2652410

> I was making a braille learning app when I came up with this game idea. You count the braille dots to guess the word. https://www.themisgames.com/brailliance/menu > > Do you think it's too hard? I want to experiment with ways to make it easier. I'm also actively working to add more iOS-specific VoiceOver support with a native app. Perhaps make the perkins input easier.

Hi everyone, I read somewhere that you could connect the rblind lemmy instance to mastodon, does this mean that I can use Mona to create and browse posts in rblind lemmy? If so, how do I do this please? Thanks for your help everyone :-)

In a brief departure from sanity, I recently thought to myself, "surely ZoomText must be better than it once was, I'll try it again!"

I downloaded on my laptop, looks relatively good. I download it on my desktop, I download it on my desktop, everything just looks blurry/squiggly.

So I called tech support, to see if they can help me sort this out before I buy the app.

Highlights from the call have included, but are not limited to:

"The clarity of the text depends on the website, what font they use. As it gets bigger it's going to get blurry."

When I explain that zoomtext hooks into, like, the actual text in the apps it can (which I don't actually know the technical term for, lol) tech support guy informs me that he doesn't think that's how the app works. (That it's all just, like, interpolation like zooming into a digital photo.) EDIT: I subsequently found out that they have been having issues with the "xFont" feature for years now.

Dude wants to make a registry edit. Bold move, tier 1 tech support bro, but it just looks like a font change, probably not going to brick anything.

Taskbar no longer functions correctly after reboot, even with Zoomtext off. He scrolls aimlessly in the registry before going into Zoomtext and trying to make changes that have absolutely no relation.

I pointed this out. He told me he knows. He proceeds to try to make changes in zoomtext repeatedly anyways.

He then informs me that he's waiting for his colleague for help.

When I ask if this can be escalated above tier 1, as I rather would like them to unbrick it, he tells me "he's the one who gave us the change." Okay, that does not inspire confidence...

At one point, he told me to "calm down."

When I asked him to just email me over the changes he made, he tells me "you're looking at it." I was not, in fact, looking at it.

We are now on hold for his "colleague," or at least for him to furiously google registry changes how to revert or something.

In addition to the above bricking, the text in zoomtext is just as blurry as it was. 😂

Update: after he failed to solve the problem, he tells me that although it's "hard to believe," the registry edit had nothing to do with an immediate problem upon reboot, and they're totally unrelated and there's nothing he can do. But don't worry, he's going to forward my contact info to management!

Update 2: I fixed the problem a couple of minutes off the call by, shockingly, reverting the change he made to the registry.

Update 3: to their credit, a manager and supervisor called me just now. They expressed concern over the support I received during the call, and were ready to help me fix the registry issue, which was thankfully already resolved. I outlined the troubleshooting steps I've taken, they agreed that I tried all the easy fixes, and said that the person to talk to was someone with much more Ai Squared/Zoomtext knowledge to their Freedom Scientific/JAWS knowledge, who was out on vacation and could call me next week. Overall the people I spoke with seemed fairly competent and helpful. They sent me over a 90 day trial code (versus running in 40 minute mode) to troubleshoot the problem. While they didn't have an immediate solution to my issues with Zoomtext, I appreciated both their willingness to follow up on the issue as well as their acknowledgement that a mistake had been made by the previous person I spoke with.

10/10 experience all around.

hi everyone, hope you're doing well and staying safe :-) please can somebody recommend accessible platform style games on either iOS or macOS? Please note, I am not looking for puzzle card or board games. Thank you very much everyone :-)

Hi everyone, hope you're doing well and staying safe :-) can somebody please explain to me how I download Thunder for macOS? Thank you very much everyone :-)

Blind On The Move was incredibly useful to me, when I couldn’t get O&M training during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Besides that convenience, video resources like this are also very interesting for family and friends, and for dipping your toe into rehab, when you’re still coming to grips with blindness or low vision.

I’m excited for this series!

I use full screen zoom/magnification on all my computers. That works fine on laptop displays or on a single desktop monitor, but if you use more than one monitor, the computer zooms in both as if they were a single display and it all becomes a huge mess.

I know ZoomText supports zooming in on a single monitor and I know ZoomIt can be coaxed into working the same way on Windows, but, until a little while ago, there were no acceptable options on macOS.

So what changed?

Well, the other day I left my work laptop open at the office after plugging it in to the dock and accidentally zoomed in on the internal display and… it zoomed in on that alone. Nothing funky happened with the other display.

I’ve tested this at home with my own MacBook Pro and it worked the same. I guess it was a macOS update? There was no mention of any of this on any release notes I read.

There you go: rational multi-monitor zoom on macOS. Enjoy!

Have you noticed this at all? Who else had my use case? I really like using macOS with magnification, compared to Windows, so I image a few other people will get good use out of this feature.

Beta7 of NVDA 2024.1 is now available for download and testing. Changes from the previous beta include:

• When copying text in Microsoft Word with NVDA’s browse mode enabled, formatting is now also included
• Updates to documentation, Native selection mode, errors when session is locked / unlocked and translations.

Read more & download at: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-1beta7/

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #Accessibility #Beta #News

Which Linux distributions are most accessible? I researched the accessibility of Linux distributions before choosing Ubuntu. My sources included 8 accessible Linux distributions by Opensource.com and 5 Linux distros for visually impaired people by It's FOSS.

I opted for Ubuntu as a solid base distribution with the Gnome desktop environment. I now question this choice, because "Ubuntu Software" does not distinguish which application packages are apt, snap, or flatpak. How do other distributions compare for accessibility?

There are new NVDA releases!

• NVDA 2023.3.3 fixes a security issue. Read more & download from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2023-3-3/

• NVDA 2024.1 Beta 6 incorporates the same security fix, plus documentation & translation updates. Read more and download from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-1beta6/

Which version is right for me? If you'd like to check out what is new in the next version of NVDA, then grab the 2024.1 beta. If you're happy staying on the stable version - grab 2023.3. #NVDA #NVDASr #ScreenReader

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11303446

> I appreciate Lainey highlighting the inequities of this panel session. It is important when creating a panel to include a wide range of diverse perspectives and people from different backgrounds.

It's a double release day! (Or it was yesterday, apologies for the delay here, it's my first day back for the year today and I quickly shared the releases to a few places yesterday but .... saved you as my first task officially back at work!)

For those on 2023.3 we have a security point release, NVDA 2023.3.1. We encourage all users to update to this stable release. Full info & download at: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2023-3-1/

For those on the 2024.1 betas, we have a new one - 2024.1 Beta 4 includes the security patch above, plus more - read all the info and download from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-1beta4/

#NVDA #NVDASr #ScreenReader #A11y #Accessibility #News #Breaking

heya. here's my hs group for everyone playing

So for those of you who have been having issues getting two-factor to work, uh, (blushing) you should try that again. I forgot to configure time syncing on the server, and it had gradually drifted about 90 seconds out of sync with the actual time. Thanks to fellow server admin and mod MostlyBlindGamer for performing the incantations required to tell the server that we do, in fact, need it to keep the correct time. As each two factor code is only valid for 30 seconds, this could have been an issue for you if your computer's clock wasn't off by a similar amount as our server's clock. Turns out the clock on my laptop is also off by 50 seconds or so, so it wasn't causing any problems for me, meaning I couldn't reproduce the bug whenever I got complaints. Anyway, it's fixed now, and it will stay fixed in future! These are the adventures you have when you run servers for other people, but only do it as a part-time hobbyist rather than a professional system administrator. I'm really glad I didn't file a bug on the Lemmy github complaining about how two factor still doesn't work. Yikes.

If you have more info on any of these currencies, let this person know! This is a unique resource for travelers.

When do blind children begin to learn Nemeth code? Is Nemeth introduced gradually alongside math or do young learners exclusively use literary UEB until they reach a certain complexity of math? For example, would blind students learning numbers learn numbers in just UEB or in both UEB and Nemeth? What about learning addition, subtraction, fractions, multiplication, division, simple equations, superscripts, and subscripts?

Some of you might be interested in this Mastodon thread. It’s a bit of bashing PDFs for having poor accessibility, and some guidance on improving PDFs for accessibility.

Some people are saying they prefer MS Word over PDF for accessibility reasons. Of course the elephant in the room is that “accessibility” is an over-loaded word. It usually refers to usability by impaired people, but in the case of being generally usable to all people on a broad range of platforms, MS Word is obviously inaccessible due to being encumbered by proprietary tech by a protectionist corporation.

Good evening, #JAWS users. Have a question. How does one configure #Windows11 such that the list of system tray icons is always fully expanded? Thanks in advance for any help. @freedomscientific #JAWSForWindows #JAWS2024 #Blind #VisuallyImpaired #LowVision #BlindMasto #BlindMastodon #BlindFedi @mastoblind @main

So I went through about 10 iOS apps on the App Store to see what worked well with voiceover. Thunder is my new fave! customizable accessibility settings, fully labeled interface and easy to tell what you’ve read and voted on. My only wish is that we could have the voiceover actions in the roter.

The final In-Process blog for the year is out. I don't normally post each blog here, but particularly as this one has a note about our Christmas trading hours, I thought it would be useful information.

Aside from that, it also features all the news on NVDA 2024.1 Beta 1, a guide for Gmail users, an update on web accessibility overlays & activities to keep you busy over the holidays!

https://www.nvaccess.org/post/in-process-21st-december-2023/

We are taking a break over Christmas, so please be patient if you don't get a response as fast as normal! For anything urgent, please email [email protected] Have a very happy, holy & safe Christmas and New Year! #News

NVDA 2024.1 Beta 1 is now available for testing. Highlights include a new on-demand speech mode, the ability to drop speech modes from the NVDA+s command, a new "native selection" mode for Firefox, bulk actions in the add-on store & ability to review add-ons & more!

Note this release breaks add-on compatibility and only works on Windows 8.1 and newer.

Full info and Download from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2024-1beta1/

Hey, folks! As the holiday season approaches, and time off work is granted unto some of us, I thought it'd be a good time to post a quick and informal "state of the instance" report.

First, the critical info: I've updated the instance to the latest version, and that has changed the way two-factor tokens are handled. If you've enabled two-factor previously, please check to ensure it's still enabled. I posted this on our Discord, but realized I forgot to post here. Sigh.

Second, we're still looking for a designer to create a custom theme that prioritizes accessibility. We promised this ages ago, I know, but nobody has had the time to drive the effort forward. If you're a person with a disability, you have design experience, you're comfortable with Lemmy themes, and you're interested in helping out, let us know! You can post in the comments, or you can post in the lemmy-alpha-testing channel on Discord.

And that segways nicely to my third topic: when the heck are we getting out of Alpha? The answer is: who knows! The servers are stable, and the infrastructure is all working well, with one exception. However, I'm not willing to declare this a stable instance until we have a theme that's fully accessible to everyone, and the accessible apps on mobile have matured a little bit.

Next! Email, the one exception I mentioned above. If you have email notifications turned on here, please note that our email deliverability is terrible. If you're not getting emails from rblind.com, that's why. We do have SPF configured, and we send email via IPV6 and TLS. However, I don't pay for a service like SendGrid to ensure deliverability, and we send emails directly from our server. Paid email services are expensive, and I have no plans to pay for one. So check your spam folders, and whitelist our emails if you want them. Outlook usually accepts our emails, and Gmail does so when it's in a good mood. This will probably not be getting better any time soon.

The last topic I guess I have to talk about: threads. We have no plans to block federation with threads at this time. However, threads currently isn't federating directly with Lemmy, and federation is a per-account opt-in on the threads side. Should these things change, we will respond accordingly. In the interests of full transparency, because I don't think this information is publicly visible anywhere, we currently defederate with the following instances:

• lemmy.saik0.com: personal instance, user trolling
• lemmygrad.ml: communism, genocide denial
• invariant-marxism.red: more of the same
• hexbear.net: abusive comments in multiple posts, no action taken by the moderators of hexbear.

We only add a server to that list less than once every three months or so, and only when we notice or get reports of abusive or spammy comments. We don't use any automated blocklists. If this changes, we'll update the community.

That's everything! Happy holidays, everyone, however you celebrate!