I'm in the weights! I've successfully been immortalized! Except... I don't podcast; I hate my voice. Guess the models are trying to tell me to podcast. And other people say I should podcast. But that takes so much darn time!
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.
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.
Lol last night, on a forked and accessible version of Termux I vibecoded into existence, on an Emacs and Emacspeak vibejiggered to work on Termux, I vibecoded, with gptel-agent, an Emacspeak package to make it speak when tool calls are being asked for by the model, and automatically speak any explanatory text after all the tools are called and edits are made. All on my phone with a Bluetooth keyboard. It's so easy, even a blind man can do it! :)
And because it's all controlled by me, I can tell it how to have the package speak, what it should ignore, and I'm not stuck with whatever some sighted person at some big company thinks a blind person wants. Everything should at most be open source, and at least be hackable.
All that to say, AI has helped me out a ton. Now I can be as productive as Emacs, and a Linux terminal, and maybe one day a Linux GUI with real Firefox and such, allows. And it would have *never* happened without AI.
So let's please do continue bringing on the AI. Make it smart and local, so I can have continuous AI descriptions right on my phone, with the ability to screen share or even agent-control my phone to get around inaccessible apps. Oh and fix AI app accessibility so the app sends output to screen readers when I type to it cause I hate talking to my phone and not every blind person wants to speak all the time. Ugh I hate that stereotype.
I'm glad I have chatGPT to turn that image with benchmarks into an accessible table lol. I like claude Code, but their accessibility in anything other than accidental CLI accessibility is frustrating. Try it. Load a screen reader like VoiceOver for Mac (cause I know most programmers use Macs) and go to claude.ai. In the "write your prompt to Claude" box, type something like "What will the weather be like tomorrow?" and press Enter/Return. Try closing your eyes for a good 30 seconds and within those 30 seconds, tell me how you'd know if a reply has been given by the model. Then try the same thing with ChatGPT. I would /love/ to be proven wrong.
Gotten XFCE to run with Orca and AT-SPI communicating to make the desktop environment accessible.
None of this would have happened without AI. Of course, it's only useful for a few people that are blind, use Android, and love Linux and Emacs and such. But it's improved my life a ton. I can do actual work on my phone. I've got Org-mode, calendar, Org-journal, desktop chromium, ETC. all on my phone. And if AI dies tomorrow, I'll still have it. The code is all there for me to learn from, tweak, and update.
I just use one agent, Codex. I don't do the agent swarms yet.
I'm completely blind. I like Linux. I've started to love Android since getting a Samsung and getting rid of OnePlus, cause accessibility. Termux is cool, but it's accessibility wasn't. So, I had Gemini rangle it up a bit into my fork of Termux [1]
Now it reads (usually) only newly incoming text, I can feel around the screen to read a line at a time, and cursor tracking works well enough. Then I got Emacs and Emacspeak working, having Gemini build DecTalk (TTS engine) for Termux and get the Emacspeak DecTalk speech server working with that. I'm still amazed that, with a Bluetooth keyboard, I have Linux, and Emacs, in my pocket. I can write Org and Markdown, read EPUB books in Emacs with Nov.el, look at an actual calendar not just a list of events, and even use Gemini CLI and Claude Code, all on my phone! This is proof that phones, with enough freedom, can be workstations. If I can get Orca working on a desktop environment in Termux-GUI. But even with just Emacs and the shell, I can do quite a bit.
Then I decided to go wild and make an MUD client for Emacs/Emacspeak, since accessible ones for Android are limited, and I didn't trust my hacks to Termux to handle Tintin++ very well. So, Emacs with Emacspeak it was, and Elmud [2] was born.
Elmud has a few cool features. First of all, since Emacspeak has voice-lock, like font-lock but for TTS, Ansi colors can be "heard", like red being a deeper voice. Also a few MUD clients have sound packs on Windows, which make them sound more like a modern video game, while still being text-based. I got a few of those working with Elmud. You just load one of the supported MUD's, and the sound pack is downloaded and installed for you. It's easy and simple. And honestly, that's what I want my tools to provide, something I, or anyone else who chooses to use them, that is easy to get the most out of.
None of this would have been possible without AI. None of it would have been done. It would have remained a dream. And yes, it was all vibe-coded, mostly with Codex 5.2 on high thinking. And yes, the code may look awful. But honestly, how many closed-source programs look just as bad or even worse under the covers of compilation?
I hate that so much. When blind people are trying to start JAWS (the screen reader) by typing "jaws" into the start menu and pressing Enter, it will sometimes pull up a Bing page on Jaws the movie instead. And the blind person is just sitting there waiting for the screen reader to start. I tell people to use the run dialog for that reason. Sucks but that's what you have to do in the age of inshittisoft.