Have you thought about assistive technology/accessibility tasks as well? Would love to use such a device to control the touch screens on inaccessible coffee machines at my clients offices for example that I can't operate without sight. I'm sure there are way more examples of such things.
Throwing complex robots at inaccessible devices is not the proper solution, but by far the most quick and practical one. Not in the US, so not even able to buy one and I'm also hesitant to buy something that is totally bricked when the company/cloud goes under.
Braille tablets/multiline braille displays are finally coming. The traditional piezo-electric cells are not well suited for them, due to the space the cell + driver+ electronics need. Putting the four rows of pins in a cell does already require staggering the elements. If you disassemble a cell, you'll see that every row has another pin length the bottom row usually has the longest and the top row the shortest pins. So this is not very scalable for multiple lines of dots.
There are two commercially produced techniques for multiline braille displays now: the first comes from Dot (a Korean company) who makes the Dotpad, this technique is also used in the Humanware/APH Monarch which will be an Android based standalone braille tablet. The other technique is created by Orbit Braille and they have their Graphity braille tablet. I couldn't find any good technical documentation that describe how these methods work exactly, so if anyone has any pointers I would like to read more about it.
I disagree. To "solve" their CAPTCHAs I had to register by providing a working email address. I don't encounter HCAPTCHA problems that often, so when I need to solve a new one usually my cookie has expired and I have to reopen the link to get a new one before being able to continue. I just store such links in my password manager, but imagine you have to find an email with the link they sent you over a year ago before being able to just continue on with what you were doing. And even then, depending on ad blocking/privacy settings their cookie may not even work.
I think this whole thing is a big hurdle just because I'm unable to solve visual puzzles. Besides, having a company collecting email addresses of people who are disabled in one way or another and giving them an identifying cookie is a privacy/data disaster waiting to happen.
That being said, I think the audio alternatives for visual CAPTCHAs are also unacceptable. Even if you can hear them, they may be hard to solve especially if they are not provided in your mother tongue. I think we can and should be able to do better by now
Totally agree. Buying new appliances is hard if you are blind. It's either very cheap stuff that still has buttons, expensive stuff with touch screens which are unusable to me or expensive stuff that has touch screens and an app to control it. Besides not willing to fiddle with a phone and an app for every single action, the expensive stuff with apps will be unusable sooner or later when the software stops getting support and the appliance is still there.
Marijn has done much to make CM6 an accessible code editor. Now with Monaco (editor component of VS Code) and CM6 both being accessible, online code runners/playgrounds and interactive code examples in docs/courses are almost guaranteed to be accessible when they use one of those editors. This eliminates a big accessibility issue when you are learning to code and rely on assistive technologies.