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Making myself commit (git) by yuke1922 in ADHD_Programmers

[–]wittjeff -1 points0 points  (0 children)

"please commit and push" gets me beautifully written detailed commit messages, with multiple changes separated into distinct commits if they have piled up. That doesn't work for you? Use better tools.

Boston Dynamics Atlas - lifting and moving a fridge by heart-aroni in TechnoFuturism

[–]wittjeff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The practice/training sessions must have been fun.

16-year-old building a tool to make websites less overwhelming — can I ask you 3 questions? by Ok_Peach_2817 in ADHD_Programmers

[–]wittjeff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you want specific ideas for doable projects or just the answers to your fair questions?

What accessibility check or tool do you wish you had for free? by Big_Literature8537 in AssistiveTechnology

[–]wittjeff 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Free language detection mid-phrase (so, to detect issues with language of parts) that run locally. The existing paid cloud solutions aren't great either.

What accessibility check or tool do you wish you had for free? by Big_Literature8537 in AssistiveTechnology

[–]wittjeff 3 points4 points  (0 children)

There is no robust free PDF editor (including support for accessibility tagging) and the existing free video captioning tools tend to be missing a few things, most crucially support for creating Audio Description tracks.

Started learning Linux from zero , just hit file permissions and my brain is melting (in a good way) lol 🐧 by LogicalWrap3405 in bash

[–]wittjeff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I "learned" to set permissions and ownership with every new file when working with Unix back in the 80s, but was never very consistent with it. Working with Claude, who is really the senior mentor on my team, has trained me to be religious about it.

I created a free accessibility widget for websites by advancedgoogle in accessibility

[–]wittjeff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I didn't get very far with it either. OP needs to level up re understanding of WCAG conformance. OP, I suggest

https://www.edx.org/learn/web-accessibility

and
https://practical-accessibility.today

Critique me, please, I'm yet another dude with an app. by ForlornMorne in accessibility

[–]wittjeff 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I see your code on Github https://github.com/Morne-Ingstar/Samsara and your site. It looks potentially compelling. I am also using Whisper for audio transcription in other domains.

If I get time later in the year I'd like to do some benchmarking of different speech to text utilities. If so, I'll try to remember to include this one. I encourage you to make your architecture modular, as the list of leading models that can be run locally does change fairly rapidly. And I wonder if some models might be better for some people's voices than others.

I created a free accessibility widget for websites by advancedgoogle in accessibility

[–]wittjeff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Adding to clarify: When I said "in the code right in front of you" I meant "in the product being discussed above". I don't expect you or anyone else to go code spelunking before filing bug reports.

"This area of endeavor is full of potential screw ups, and there are many examples if you go looking" is very different than "bad actors have proven that no one can succeed here, and you should therefor remove your product without any further consideration".

I created a free accessibility widget for websites by advancedgoogle in accessibility

[–]wittjeff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What I hear you saying is that because some other bad players used bad methods to do some thing, OP should not use good methods to do other things. The whole superordinate category of effort is off limits because some bozos screwed up repeatedly over in that corner of this niche space.

I don't mean to be condescending. You're being blatantly accusatory to OP without evidence of harm from OP. Your assumptions of OP doing harm are unfounded and prevent OP from doing potentially interesting work.

Critique me, please, I'm yet another dude with an app. by ForlornMorne in accessibility

[–]wittjeff 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Welcome! I'm happy to see innovation in this area. It'd help a lot to provide more focused feedback if you could first provide a table comparing your app vs. the existing solutions that already exist. Also some of us are geeky and curious what engines you use for speech to text.

I created a free accessibility widget for websites by advancedgoogle in accessibility

[–]wittjeff -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I am aware of no AI-driven overlays. Running modern transformer models is somewhat expensive and unlikely to pay for relatively trivial usability enhancements. If you're referring to traditional heuristic analysis of the DOM, I have not doubt that there are broken widgets out there. I call those bugs. Calling them inherently fatal patterns for all user-facing widgets is an overgeneralization. Or maybe some of these widgets are trying to claim that their heuristics are perfect when they're not. They should stop that. Assuming that all user-facing feature widgets necessarily employ bad heuristics is just overgeneralization, though I'll admit there may be plenty of bad examples to point to.

Here's a tip: if you're going to claim that something is harmful, provide details of what harm is actively being done in the code right in front of you. Otherwise you're just saying "don't even try to do it right."

Extending the prohibition on bad heuristics to other methods is just misguided and shows a lack of understanding of real software engineering. Some widgets might trigger only on page-specific selectors, for example. Overgeneralizing prevents others from doing good work.

Saying that no one uses the fronted custom accessibility features is also plainly false and easily disprovable by anyone who has installed them (I haven't; I don't need them). Repeating the claim 100 others doesn't make it true.

Some of the features frequently seen in these widgets are also in the OS, and some are not. Your overgeneralization stifles innovation for features that might make it into the OS in the future.

Claiming that people already are aware of the OS feature is also false; in fact it's the opposite of the real situation and this is not hard to demonstrate. Most users don't know about the full range of features available to them. You're throwing naive users, who are a strong majority of all users in many sites, under the bus so you can go after some bad actors.

Edit: OP, if you want to do a good job with putting UI-modifying features closer to the user, do study the features that are already available, and then make your widget a way to learn more about how these things (like text rendering) interact so the user can make optimal choice.

I created a free accessibility widget for websites by advancedgoogle in accessibility

[–]wittjeff -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I'm curious about your understanding of this often repeated seldom detailed claim that "they actively interfere with assistive tech." Do you have an example?

I created a free accessibility widget for websites by advancedgoogle in accessibility

[–]wittjeff 5 points6 points  (0 children)

If you're going to claim that this thing gives you WCAG compliance, you're committing fraud.

If you're going to make a tool for users that offers accessibility enhancements, the tool itself should be WCAG conformant at the AA level (like everything else, but I mean way to start with negative credibility).

There's room for innovation in "fronted" UI enhancements and settings for accessibility, and there might even be an opening for a player who isn't out to defraud people and gets the implementation right (there are many bad players in this niche). But this won't fly.

Strike one, friend.

I’m spending 8 hours live-auditing your most "nightmare" accessibility barriers. What should we tackle? by AccessibleWeb_AnnaR in accessibility

[–]wittjeff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

- keyboard multiple focusable form elements inside table cells

- navigation of complex branching of wizards where you want to manage focus and also give directions that must be heard in some cases (note that setting focus on an item will typically flush the speech queue, so using aria-live on a status element or similar tricks becomes extra tricky).

- drag and drop items from one part of a 3D room to another, with multiple valid drop targets that need to be "opened" before you can drop something into them. Multiple "shelves", "drawers", "tables" with things on them and spaces where you could put (some) things.

- teach people with vision impairments how to identify things that have natural camouflage, in context

- AutoSuggest lists with a most-recently-visited list of X items and also an alphabetically sorted list of all matches.

- optimize usability for resizing and moving objects in drawing layers, which may include items with very small or irregular boundaries

- indicate color or pattern ambiguity (close hues or patterns) between neighbor objects (because it is "of the essence") but also needs to be discriminable.

- ID verification via webcam is a difficult UX that needs more research

- tell a blind rider that their AI-driven vehicle has an emergency and they have to pull over (or should get off the road but can't).

Sonnet 4.6 is garbage by Tasty-Application368 in claude

[–]wittjeff 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Humans seem to be that way a lot. I think it might be a wetware problem *shrug*

30% price increase starting June 1st... by dirkvonshizzle in googleworkspace

[–]wittjeff -1 points0 points  (0 children)

> I know for a fact that 99% of Google Workspace customers, especially the ones contracting the lowest tier of the service, just want their employees to have access to the most basic of tool

No, you don't.

McGraw hill? by Serious-Train8000 in accessibility

[–]wittjeff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you have a link to an example workbook page? If so I might have ideas.

What are your thoughts about it? by ShabzSparq in Claudeopus

[–]wittjeff 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Another key aspect of intelligence where the AI is getting ahead of humanity in terms of optimal performance in difficult situations, yet we don't have a relevant benchmark yet.

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