I'm trying to get out of this. I'm a blind person. No one in tech goes to bed thinking about us, as it were. So, as a non-programmer, vibe coding accessibility fixes was an outlet to the daily million papercuts of using operating systems built by people who cannot understand me.
Well, I have barely anything to show for months of this. I made Termux more accessible on Android, made an MUD client for Emacs, fixed up some Emacspeak stuff because it's been abandonned going on 3 years now, and Emacs packages wait for no one, and tried added Grade 2 Braille entry support to BRLTTY. That failed because depression sucks and who would even use this vibe coded junk anyway.
The more open nature of Android made it rather easier. How far behind in features TalkBack is compared to VoiceOver, besides AI image description, made it feel like trying to heal a broken arm with pain pills. So I'm trying to tell myself that I can't fix everything, and that it's not my fault if other people, and companies, choose to not consider accessibility. I mean I can't help Google if they choose to not be helped.
Ah well, Global Accessibility Awareness Day is this Thursday. Maybe Apple will finally announce LLM image descriptions, and hopefully my iPhone 16 will be good enough for them because I can't afford to upgrade in this economy.
This sounds like a good amount to show, given it's done while pushing through some daily million paper-cuts and the macro-cut of depression. I don't know as much about the former, but can attest the latter is non-trivial.
Do you post somewhere where I could follow what you're working on?
You can 100% work your way to a senior position without ever leaving windows. The people who are like that just don't tend to be hanging out on platforms like HN.
Now the number of senior C# engineers in Europe who couldn't fix a broken deploy on IIS or SSL cert problem on a windows server? That is rather high in the windows field too.
To be clear, this was developing software running on *nix environments, and they were all using Mac (or WSL) and the usual open-source *nix dev tools. This is not a case of developers purely targeting Microsoft environments (indeed it would be excusable in that case).
i was hiring for a senior devops role a few years ago. part of the interview was ssh into a machine and debug some web server configs we purposely broke. step one was email an ssh public key to me. now, i dont remember the command cause i do it so rarely, i dont expect them to, but for a senior role we expect you can google this, its not supposed to be hard. the number of people that could not generate an ssh key was crazy. i had people emailing me their current company private key. and if we did spend half the interview on the key, they never could pass the trivial part of how we broke it, which effictively just required reading the log file.
They know that it's a magic box into which you paste whatever incantation is in the README.md or spoonfed to you by an LLM, but otherwise have no mental model of how it works. Hell, they didn't even have the reflex of pressing "arrow up" to correct a mistyped command. And don't get me started on the lack of mastery of their tools - whether Docker, package managers or other tools they use daily.
(and speaking of LLMs, those can actually be a wonderful teaching aid - but they don't seem to be bothered by their lack of knowledge and so don't even try to take advantage of them)
I bet the guys are good at Leetcode though, or whatever bullshit interview process that hired them. This is in a Western European company that has adopted all the "best practices" possible, and places high importance on career progression, and these are considered senior SWEs on track to become engineering managers.
@noprocrasted - thank you for your 100% spot on comments. +1. And you summarised it so well that I hope they will be remembered by job seekers of today.
Ugh such overreaction. ADB is still a thing. Apple doesn't even have an official command like tool where you can just push an IPA to your phone. Goodness.
With that reasoning every action would be justified to stop scammers. Google should capture all your calls and check if there could be scamming going on, right?
The current malware situation at android store situation does not help to carry that point:
> Google doesn't want millions of people to have every cent of their money stolen.
Megacorporations like Google do not care a single bit about ordinary people. They only care about making more money. How do they make more money? By preventing people from installing NewPipe and Blokada.
I sorta get that reasoning, but is a 24 hour cooldown really going to stop scammers? They're already used to multi-day scams, so wouldn't they just say they'll call back in a day to finish the process?
Yup. The specific scam here is built upon preventing the victim from talking to trusted individuals. A cooldown breaks the spell.
Complex, multi-day pig butchering stuff is not what Google is going after here or would have any hope to defeat. But they can deal with banking malware.
I think I tried on my Android everything I could try and 1. outside webpage reading, not many options; 2. as browser extensions, also not many (I don't like to copy URLs in your app) 3. they all insist reading every little shit, not only buttons but also "wave arrow pointing directly right" which some people use in their texts. So basically reading text aloud is a bunch of shitty options. Anyone jumping in this market opening?
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