Notices by Luci for Chai Tea (zens@merveilles.town), page 4

in this way it’s an interesting abstract input/output interface that turns your gui app into something like an interactive text adventure.

you are standing in a room with 5 buttons and 6 menus. would you like to go north or south?

what’s important here is the exact shape of the events, because accessibility tech that already exists is software that hooks into microsoft’s, apple’s or (linux’s? ) version of this. so if we wanted to make a cross platform one, we’d need to make 3 proxy “servers” that do the translation, subscribing to our generic scripting server and translating our events into WinEvents, etc.

a client can then subscribe to listen to events, and send events, brokered by the OS. the client can be a refreshable braile display, screen reader, switch controller, ui testing framework, automation scheme, terminal console app… anything that can send and recieve events

i just looked up Microsoft’s accessibility API.
its name?

Microsoft UI automation.

because they apparently consider it to be the exact same thing as a scripting interface

the basic concept is an application implements a “server” that emits events when parts of the UI change, and recieves events that are requests for information about the UI, or requests to activate things on the screen. The UI itself is expected to have detailed descriptions for each UI element and its location within a heirarchy so screen readers can sufficiently describe “where you are”

so when designing an accessibility api for an OS, it turns out it looks a heck of a lot like an automation/scripting api, like Mac’s OSI (open scripting interface) which forms the foundation for applescript.

so if you’re designing a new OS workspace environment or GUI toolkit and going “uhg” at the idea of implementing accessibility? think instead of implementing scripting and automation, it’s the exact same thing and way more fun to think about.

idea: an NES emulator where you can replace a chr rom with svg graphics and get resolution independent NES games.

karmamatic; it tracks all your wrongdoings and buys offset credits in all the appropriate charaties so you can continue being a polluting racist misogynist, guilt free

i wanna pirate netflix, but in a way that doesn’t promote the netflix brand to anyone and steals as much money from them as possible.

I see a lot of hype, including here, for various netflix shows, and it bugs me how little it takes for you all to send your money to fascists; how quickly you all forget their transphobic anti-union behavior

why is the only slightly usable cad program old versions of sketchup? what’s gone haywire in that realm?

did I word this in a way that implied it was rhetorical or that i was looking for cad software and asking for reccomendations? i feel like I am going mad here.

like, maybe people think of software as some kind of natural feature of the world, just the unchangable will of god, and so asking why the humans responsible for this software decided to make it suck more just sounds like a zen koan?

here’s a slightly different question: why hasn’t the open source world cloned the fuck out of sketchup’s UI yet? is there something hard about it? is it patent encumbered?

Douglas Adams on #Hypercard

https://arbesman.substack.com/p/open-ended-software-as-human-beings

Alan Kay on "should browsers have stuck to plain documents"

(spoiler, no absolutely not, but the way they didn't stick to documents sucks and browsers should take more responsibility and be more like operating systems)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to-being-document-viewers-and-a-discussion-of-news-5cb92c7b3445

@emilygorcenski
>> It should only be seen as a coincidence that my way of helping hundreds of thousands of people will also hurt marginalised people.

@alcinnz @akkartik yes, to stop trackers you need tracker blockers that need constant updates like antivirus. it’s better to put this at the proxy/vpn level rather than extension level. pi-hole is a popular option for that approach, but u-block origin is the best extension solution i know of.

@akkartik the purpose is hiding your porn from your wife, to put it indelicately

@akkartik a download is still evidence that might be dangerous/embarrassing for someone else to find.

but yes there are non porn usecases- mostly to do with the “other people in the house” threat model.
or possibly a police search threat model.

or a developer testing a site with a fresh cache, though any cookie like functionality is reduced or broken in incognito mode- which has a light site privacy side effect but is easily circumvented if the site really wants to track you.

@akkartik incognito mode actually does a pretty terrible job masking your identity from sites - if that were the point of it; but it isn’t.