devinprater

I'm completely blind. I like Linux. I've started to love Android since getting a Samsung and getting rid of OnePlus, cause accessibility. Termux is cool, but it's accessibility wasn't. So, I had Gemini rangle it up a bit into my fork of Termux [1]

Now it reads (usually) only newly incoming text, I can feel around the screen to read a line at a time, and cursor tracking works well enough. Then I got Emacs and Emacspeak working, having Gemini build DecTalk (TTS engine) for Termux and get the Emacspeak DecTalk speech server working with that. I'm still amazed that, with a Bluetooth keyboard, I have Linux, and Emacs, in my pocket. I can write Org and Markdown, read EPUB books in Emacs with Nov.el, look at an actual calendar not just a list of events, and even use Gemini CLI and Claude Code, all on my phone! This is proof that phones, with enough freedom, can be workstations. If I can get Orca working on a desktop environment in Termux-GUI. But even with just Emacs and the shell, I can do quite a bit.

Then I decided to go wild and make an MUD client for Emacs/Emacspeak, since accessible ones for Android are limited, and I didn't trust my hacks to Termux to handle Tintin++ very well. So, Emacs with Emacspeak it was, and Elmud [2] was born.

Elmud has a few cool features. First of all, since Emacspeak has voice-lock, like font-lock but for TTS, Ansi colors can be "heard", like red being a deeper voice. Also a few MUD clients have sound packs on Windows, which make them sound more like a modern video game, while still being text-based. I got a few of those working with Elmud. You just load one of the supported MUD's, and the sound pack is downloaded and installed for you. It's easy and simple. And honestly, that's what I want my tools to provide, something I, or anyone else who chooses to use them, that is easy to get the most out of.

None of this would have been possible without AI. None of it would have been done. It would have remained a dream. And yes, it was all vibe-coded, mostly with Codex 5.2 on high thinking. And yes, the code may look awful. But honestly, how many closed-source programs look just as bad or even worse under the covers of compilation?

[1] https://github.com/devinprater/Talking-termux-app

[2] https://github.com/devinprater/elmud

Nah, just Microsoft Copilot. No Os.

No way. There's just no way.

I hate that so much. When blind people are trying to start JAWS (the screen reader) by typing "jaws" into the start menu and pressing Enter, it will sometimes pull up a Bing page on Jaws the movie instead. And the blind person is just sitting there waiting for the screen reader to start. I tell people to use the run dialog for that reason. Sucks but that's what you have to do in the age of inshittisoft.

Linux is even getting more accessible. I'm thinking of Elementary OS which not only posted about their accessibility work, but linked to the articles which really fired things up. I'm a Fedora guy, mainly because I want the latest Orca, AT-SPI2 and such, so I don't feel like an Ubuntu dirivitive would work as well.

So I installed Fedora on my work machine and find that I can still get all of my work done. Well except the parts that require testing accessibility on Windows screen readers or helping with Windows-related issues.

The only thing I miss now are the many addons made for NVDA, especially the ones for image descriptions. But if I can get something to work with Wayland, I could probably vibe code some of them. Thank goodness for Claude Code.

A ton of studies colleges/universities/corporations do on blind people give gift cards as payment. Usually $20 or so for a good 40 minutes of time.

What are you trying to sell me again? :)

AI features you say? They could start by taking the alt-text generation model and making it browser-wide if blind people want it, not just for PDF's.

Wow, I never heard of that before today. Sega Genesis was my first console. I still remember the six button controller. It worked well for Mortal Kombat 3.

Can the tables have column headers so my screen reader can read the model name as I go across the benchmakrs? And the images should have alt-text.

Emacs and Emacspeak make me feel something. A lot of something. This kind of "playground" feeling where I can dive into a manual that's just sitting right there. The the entire Emacs is a manual. C-h m and boom, all keyboard commands for that mode are right, feaking, there. No hidden bullcrap, no patchwork HTML tables to drudge through, nothing. And if something doesn't work with Emacspeak, I can Codex it into working. Maybe. Enough to get what I want done, done.

Wow, just 32B? This could almost run on a good device with 64 GB RAM. Once it gets to Ollama I'll have to see just what I can get out of this.

Holy crap it even felt like the HN front page with my screen reader. I thought I'd clicked the wrong link until I read the LLAMA 12 and such.

I, myself, as a singular blind person, would absolutely love this. But we ain't there yet. On-device AI isn't finetuned for this, and neither Apple nor Google have shown indications of working on this in release software, so I'm sure we're a good 3 years away from the first version of this.

Thank goodness for emulation. With OCR, and now AI screenshot descriptions, I can know what menu I'm in, what menu option is selected, dialog on the screen, stuff like that. Case and point, Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 for the Playstation 2. On original hardware, I had no idea what I was getting when I'd finish a battle in story mode. Now, with NetherSX2 on my phone, after a battle, I can have TalkBack describe the screen, listen to the description of what I won, press B to exit the description, press A to advance the game screen, read the next thing I won, and so on. Of course, the app has to have an accessibility element that TalkBack can grab onto to describe, so ironically, Retroarch doesn't work for this, and either does Lemuroid, but I mean it's a start, and hopefully one day TalkBack can grab the entire screen for a screenshot without needing an element onscreen to latch onto.

Yes, they can. NVDA has a Speech Viewer. VoiceOver (Mac) has the caption panel.

NVDA Speech viewer: https://download.nvaccess.org/documentation/userGuide.html#S... Caption Panel: https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/use-the-caption-pa...

There are thousands of blind people on the net. Can't you hire one of them to test for you? Please?

Lol the Copilot app isn't even that useful on iOS for a blind person. On Android, you type something in, hit sent, and the app pipes the pure output of the AI, Markdown formatting and citation markup included, to the screen reader. That's at least something. I mean it's crumbs, yes, but we blind people are very, very used to crumbs.

On iOS, you type a message and send, and... nothing.

Audio described Youtube please? That'd be so amazing! Even if I couldn't play Zelda yet, I could listen to a playthrough with Gemini describing it.

Yep, they're nice. There are even online versions.

I suppose I should write about them. A good few will be about issues with the mobile apps and websites for AI, like Claude not even letting me know a response is available to read, let alone sending it to the screen reader to be read. It's a mess, but if we blind people want it, we have to push through inaccessibility to get it.

Image descriptions. TalkBack on Android has it built in and uses Gemini. VoiceOver still uses some older, less accurate, and far less descriptive ML model, but we can share images to Seeing AI or Be My Eyes and such and get a description.

Video descriptions, through PiccyBot, have made watching more visual videos or videos where things happen that don't make sense without visuals much easier. Of course, it'd be much better if YouTube incorporated audio description through AI the same way they do captions, but that may happen in a good 2 years or so. I'm not holding my breath. Google as a whole is hard to get accessibility out of more than the bare minimum.

Looking up information like restaurant menus. Yes it can make things up, but worst-case, the waiter says they don't have that.

Nah, best pun ever!

Mainly realtime processing. I play video games, and would love to play something like Legend of Zelda and just have the AI going, then ask it "read the menu options as I move between them," and it would speak each menu option as the cursor moves to it. Or when navigating a 3D environment, ask it to describe the surroundings, then ask it to tell me how to get to a place or object, then it guide me to it. That could be useful in real-world scenarios too.

Apple has a video understanding model too. I can't wait to find out what accessibility stuff they'll do with the models. As a blind person, AI has changed my life.

I hate it when it does that.

> Moments like these are truly a testament to Emacs' dedication to an accessible editor.

Ah, accessible. Word with a different meanings, and for me, in this sense, it's not helpful at all. Fortunately I managed to get Emacs talking with Speechd-el in Termux. Speechd-el is a poor man's Emacspeak. But it does seem to work. Well besides pressing SPC doesn't read the new text that scrolled onscreen, but if I have to, I can hook it.

Android accessibility is so not ready for PC. Navigate with keyboard and TalkBack and you'll hear "selected" everywhere which is redundant, since if TalkBack is speaking a UI element, it is selecting it for action. Apps aren't ready for keyboard either. They really, really aren't ready for a launch next year. But I'm sure they will. And few blind people will care because (almost) every blind person uses windows or an iPhone as their main computer and so Google will think they're doing just fine.

Steam has even added accessibility to their machines. Sure it's just Orca and ESpeak TTS, but I mean Steam Big Picture works.

If accessibility gets much worse, I'm moving to Linux even if Orca isn't as fleshed out as NVDA and its dozens of addons.