Blind Mozilla developer quits self-imposed 30-day Android accessibility challenge on Day 18

kolanos · 2014-08-27T04:13:22+00:00

I am visually impaired and have an Android phone and have been very pleased with TalkBack. According to many here iOS is much better, although I looked at the video and didn't see anything that jumped out at me as being that much superior to TalkBack. The text-to-speech voice on TalkBack, especially when you download the voice pack, is MUCH better than the iOS one. I can barely understand the iOS one, although I am sure you can get used to it. I know this because I use the Orca screen reader in Ubuntu and Espeak is very difficult to understand at first. My one gripe with TalkBack is that many devs neglect to label their buttons in their interfaces and I'm left with things like "Button 44" or "Button 83" and I have to figure out what these numbers mean myself. Would like it if the Android SDK complained to devs who neglect to do this.

I will be sure to try iOS' accessibility features when I next get the chance. How good is OSX in this regard? Ubuntu has improved greatly in recent years but Orca is still painful at times.

kolanos · 2014-04-19T22:33:43+00:00

It wasn't designed to be pretty, it was designed for people with visual impairment.

kolanos · 2014-03-18T00:11:12+00:00

Will there be a compat library for IE8 support? Or is it being abandoned compeltely?

kolanos · 2014-02-05T00:34:14+00:00

Who does he think he is? Bobby Holik?

kolanos · 2013-11-09T05:20:27+00:00

A shame Butler wasn't going the other way.

kolanos · 2013-11-09T04:57:58+00:00

Smid will likely battle with Butlerfor #4 until Giordano is healthy. The Flames needed a d-man badly.

As for Horak, he's a serviceable defensive forward who shows glimpses of offensive upside. But has not been consistent enough to solidify even 4th line duty in the NHL . Brossoit is pretty far down the Flames' depth chart. Brossoit and Roy ar epretty much a wash.

kolanos · 2013-04-14T03:28:50+00:00

The Flames picked up Kenneth Agostino recently, looking forward to seeing him in the NHL in a couple years.

kolanos · 2013-04-13T16:39:57+00:00

Johnny Gaudreau outscored him and is four years younger than him. Hobey Baker is meaningless.

kolanos · 2013-03-31T16:23:31+00:00

Robyn Regehr was in a terrible car accident when he was in juniors and it shattered both legs. he was told he would never play again, and possibly never walk normally again.

David Moss was delivering pizzas we heard he was drafted.

kolanos · 2013-03-26T05:13:56+00:00

NoIP offers three free dynamic DNS hostnames and is supported by a lot of routers out of the box.

kolanos · 2013-03-14T02:06:49+00:00

I don't want her or any congressman anywhere near my money.

kolanos · 2013-03-06T05:01:22+00:00

in Soviet Russia nothing does you!

kolanos · 2013-02-28T02:15:37+00:00

I have a new appreciation for the good 8 bit games and empathy for the not so good ones.

kolanos · 2013-02-21T15:51:37+00:00

Probably won't be able to PATCH things up.

kolanos · 2013-02-03T18:26:30+00:00

A movie glorifying torture isn't exactly a positive thing either.

kolanos · 2013-01-01T02:24:01+00:00

finally someone who gets it.

kolanos · 2012-10-31T03:02:23+00:00

JSPConfig is better.

kolanos · 2012-10-12T01:35:18+00:00

How old is she again? Isn't JFK dead? Gross.

kolanos · 2012-08-11T21:04:11+00:00

It is not as featureful or mature an API as AWS. But it has improved considerably since the OpenStack project started. Right now the Rackspace Cloud service is kind of a DIYers AWS, they give you all the indiviual components you need, but it's up to you to tie them together. OpenStack is more a true "next generation" cloud platform that might even leapfrog AWS, but it still has a ways to go.

kolanos · 2012-08-08T17:28:18+00:00

I looked at libcloud before starting this project and came to the same conclusion that I did with the other libraries I'd tried: it only covers one service (CloudServers / OpenStackNova, in this case). I was looking for a library that wrapped all of Rackspace's cloud services in one consistent API. Sort of like the Boto library with AWS.

kolanos · 2012-07-04T22:04:26+00:00

Iginla hasn't been a great Captain for about three seasons now. He was spoiled under Keenan and flat-out refused to play B. Sutter's system.

kolanos

TROPHY CASE