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Question for any blind desktop Linux users, particularly GNOME users, out there: What are the remaining practical issues with running Orca in a Wayland-based GNOME session? I'm guessing inability to synthesize mouse clicks is the main one.

I remain uncertain on the ethics of using generative AI, and I know I've posted some hard-line anti-genAI takes here and elsewhere. But if one is interested in locally runnable models, IBM Granite 4.0 is worth a look IMO.

IBM Granite 4.0: Hyper-efficient, High Performance Hybrid Models for Enterprise

IBM Granite 4 models feature a new hybrid Mamba/transformer architecture that dramatically improves speed and efficiency without sacrificing perfor...

It uses something other than the typical transformer architecture, allowing for much longer contexts with much less RAM usage. Also interested in what they mean by "ethically acquired" data. cc @npub1gv26...tlwl

There was a toot that went around a few years ago that I wish I had bookmarked. It said something like, and I'm badly paraphrasing from memory, "When you consider the usability of your software, think about what it will be like for an elderly person, like Margaret Hamilton, who worked on the software for the Apollo 11 guidance computer and would be dismayed at how modern applications require megabytes just to display a button." Does anyone know the one I'm talking about and have a link?

Do any #blind folks here use FreeBSD as a desktop OS? I've read that the audio stack is more sensible there than on desktop Linux.

Question for any blind people who are on Bluesky: What's the most accessible way to access Bluesky on Windows? The official web app, or is there a good third-party client? Just curious at this point. I don't want to argue Bluesky versus fediverse. I just think it's good to know what the options are for accessing Bluesky since it's increasingly popular.

There was recently an article about using salvaged Sun Ray thin clients with a modern server. @npub1ks7u...zt6a's response to that article on Hacker News mentioned his story about using DTrace to debug a performance problem on a Sun Ray server. He linked to a paper he wrote for Usenix, but I prefer his extended telling in this 2007 talk:

Apparently this is slightly old news (the Git commit timestamp is just over three months ago), but KWin, the KDE window manager/compositor, now implements the solution pioneered by GNOME for letting screen readers monitor and intercept keystrokes on Wayland, specifically, the org.freedesktop.a11y.KeyboardMonitor D-Bus interface. I prototyped this solution in GNOME last summer. Thanks to @npub1hl6m...hych for bringing it to production in GNOME, and now to Nicolas Fella for implementing it in KDE.