FYI - Command Line Programs for the Blind

Linux for blind general discussion blinux-list at redhat.com
Thu Apr 14 00:30:54 UTC 2022


Kyle, I'm unsure on something. Not anything you said....but more a thought I had, and it came up in a discussion I was in the other day about oh we need a client for FB for the blind.

My stance was yeah, no. FB doesn't like third party clients. How the frack I'm not permabanned off of Discord for using a Pigin plugin I don't know, but back to my main point and this may get ranty, I'm tired, I'm all arg, why....

So. Why is it that there's this sub set of blind people who stick to what I've seenn called various names, the blind/blindie bubble, blinkosphere (which honestly just sounds like a navigation aid for someone....much like a Walkman, and Bill Bryson had a great joke about that in one of his books) et al.

Why do people in that sphere want to use blind specific apps over something that's bigger and more well known and has a lot of support. I've flat out had people say oh no, Ubuntu isn't worth using, I'll use Accessible Coconut or I want Vinux back.

To which my response can be summed up as you want something maintained by one person, who just does some scripts, turns off bits of an OS the smart people at Canonical (despite their isues and questionable decisions with some bits of Ubuntu) work on, and support? They recently wanted more A11Y testers over on the Orca list as well, yet there's the sphere of blind people who go oh I'm blind I must only use blind software, the same sort that go I won't use this service because it's not blind friendly, when it really is. They just didn't bother to spend more than ten seconds checking it out. THe sort that go use Elton, and then go but but why is Facebook so popular why can't Elton be like that...and they are the sort of people to, at the same time, cry for more inclusivity then fight against it by not using those apps or giving eeback to developers, yet be uber quick to call out those same devs for not 'doing enough' when the devs got put onto things that actually, you know, help a company stay afloat.

Sorry, it jusst got me thinking on that. m in your boat. Kyle. move over and keep paddling. I'm blind. I'm a person. I'm not 'the blind', whatever that is, that nebulous idea of 'the blind' and 'the sighted' really, really bugs me, the us vs them mentality /some/ blind people have.

Anyway, bringing this back to the point of the discussion, somthing else in Linux's favor is it does work on older hardware and lower powered machines as well, with things like XCE/LXDE (which I've had a tinker with on Arch and kind of do like for what it is). Now if QT can sort itself out and make something workable in the near futuree...

I don't want apps designeed for the blind. I want those talented blind people to work on apps everyone can use no matter your disability, no matter if you're fully able, or blind, or deaf, or whatever your disability. I mean, I've always thought the 'for the blind only' is actually ableist ina  kind of screwed up way, because they push away other disabilities and only focus on their own. Looking at you, audio only games or apps with a heavy, heavy focus on sound that drown out the speech

On Wed, Apr 13, 2022 at 08:01:35PM -0400, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> These are valid points. But what I get from Windows: a mostly clean
> > accessibility experience (mostly thanks to NVDA and community support), and
> > a good many apps designed by and for the blind.
> 
> 
> Having been on a laptop recently just to test a website, I can say that
> although improvements have been made that make NVDA easier to use, its
> virtual buffering makes things harder to use, not easier, and the
> accessibility experience I found far less clean. This laptop I was on was
> fairly new, and I still had major problems just browsing because the whole
> thing was made slower by the screen reader having to copy the page from the
> website. Even worse since it has to infinite loop over the original and
> compare it with its copy in case anything ever changes. Next I must point
> out that although I am blind, I have never fallen into the category of "the
> blind." This is a point I failed to make early on in this thread, although I
> make it here. I, AM, NOT, THE, BLIND, I, AM HUMAN! I shout it from the
> rooftops. I, AM, HUMAN, it's only my eyes that don't work so well. I will
> also point out that some years ago, I found myself running that horrible
> beast of a non-operating system just to play two games and to use a twitter
> client that was made for as you so eloquently put it, "the blind." Once I
> saw that this was all I was using it for, I tossed that virtual machine into
> the trash faster than you can say "toss that virtual machine into the
> trash." I found that it certainly wasn't worth my time and energy to keep it
> running just for that frivolous activity that I could do on the host Linux
> OS with just a little more effort, and the Twitter website really isn't so
> bad that it needs "for the blind" treatment.
> 
> > I mean I have Google Chrome set as my default browser right now. And I can
> > uninstall a lot. There's no Candy Crush Saga, and I just uninstalled Dizney
> > Plus.
> > 
> > What? How did you do all that? I got help trying to get some of that crap gone, and it WILL, NOT, GO, not even on 10. OK I think 3 of us were able to wrestle Disney Plus off the thing, but getting rid of that Microsoft browser is a no-go, along with many other things that just didn't have the appropriate uninstall or remove type of buttons, only a link that took us to a help page about how to uninstall software. But the crap simply won't go, no matter how hard we tried to get it gone. Did they fix this in 11 with the default browser thing? There was much talk around the interwebs about the browser in 11 being stuck, and it taking hours to try to figure out how to change the default, and then once enough people figured out how to change it, Microsoft went and fixed them so they got the Microsoft browser back and couldn't change it anymore. This is what happens when you let a single company with a known history of bad business control every aspect of your computer. They can do what t
> hey want with it, no matter how much of a power user you think you are.
> > Windows Terminal exists. They even have a Windows package manager. But if
> > you don't like that one, you use Scoop, or Chocolatey, which also have some
> > Linux apps and command line programs.
> > OK I'll give you that cmd is still a thing, and believe it or not, you will find many articles around the interwebs that tell you to open up cmd to do this or that. And I guess they've made it somewhat more useful again? Last time I used anything like that, they were taking things away from it to make it less useful, not adding choices to make it more usable. I pretty much lost it when they took move away for example.
> 
> 
> > That's still true. But you'd just install Thunderbird wouldn't you? It
> > works even better on windows than Linux because the accessibility bus is
> > faster to load all those messages into its buffers.
> > 
> > 
> Um, no. If Google Chrome is any indication, it would be slower, as it's
> loading all that stuff into buffers that are not needed and take time. One
> banking website that I tested felt quite sluggish on a rather new laptop. I
> can do my banking much much faster here on this 8-year-old all-in-one
> computer than I was able to do on that laptop. I felt like I was slogging
> through mud using that thing. I'm sure email in Thunderbird would be just as
> bad. It used to feel sluggish here as well, but this has been greatly
> improved now. I no longer notice any sluggishness here, even on less
> resource packed machines, even in large folders, which I will admit used to
> be a high pain point, not because of the accessibility bus itself, but
> because of event floods that have been largely fixed.
> 
> ~Kyle
> 
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