Of all the features designed for blind users that are present on mobile devices, virtual braille input is, by far, the most powerful one.
Typing on a virtual representation of a physical [insert your keyboard layout here] keyboard works okay when you can see the keys, but when you're blind and use a screen reader, you have to explore the keyboard by touch. There are ways of making that process a little faster, but it's clunky and error-prone at best. Virtual braille input offers input based on relative finger positions instead of absolute input of a single finger. If you know braille, you can type. Talkback for Android and Voiceover for iOS both have this, though I'm only familiar with the apple version.
When you're on the go, you don't always have room for a physical keyboard, and the one the phone offers is very slow. Activate virtual braille input, and you can type and edit way faster than with normal commands. Get practice with them, and you can come pretty close to parity with traditional touchscreen typing input. it addresses the biggest pain point in using a phone without vision. Most of the swiping and tapping is pretty straightforward, sans inaccessible apps, but typing was always clunky at best. This isn't a perfect solution, but it's a massive improvement.
#blind #voiceover #talkback #braille #BrailleScreenInput #accessibility

important status update: I now have all ingredients necessary to make cheese and pickle sandwiches

(those being cheese, Branston pickle, and bread)

Sometime around the 2020 era, we lost the right to be mediocre at things we love.

No longer can you just bake bread...you must start a sourdough side hustle lol. Wanna stay fit and go jogging or running? Nah, you gotta optimize your biometrics for a marathon. What my point is that every hobby has been enshittified and gentrified into a brand opportunity.

This strange infatuation with optimization culture is killing the human spirit.

So this new year, starting tomorrow, one of my resolutions is to do something bad but fun. Maybe I write a terrible poem. I like to draw and paint, so perhaps I will draw a horse that looks like a table or sing off-key in the showers or in front of my loved ones. The algorithm driving the mainstream social media wants me to be a polished product, but my humanity lives in these messy, unoptimized, cringe-inducing joyful failures.

I will try to reclaim the right to be an amateur. Will you join me?

#creativity #hobbies #art #depression #socialmedia #newyear #resolution #happynewyear #MentalHealth #Culture #enshittification #creative #design #writing #reading #books #drawing #music #gardening #nature #running #fitness

chat what pride flag is this

lol both Instagram and TikTok have blocked me from creating or logging into an account because I’m using LibreWolf with a lot of the privacy settings turned up, and they can’t track me this way

ugh I just tried to log into my old Guild Wars 2 account that I haven’t touched in like 10 years, and it turns out it was locked because of some security thing, so I had to find their hidden support email address and hopefully they’ll unlock it for me

aaa - two exhausting days in a row. hopefully I can be a puddle tomorrow

since many don’t know how to pronounce @rowan ‘s true name, here’s a handy pronunciation guide

Dr. Coomer voice: nature is beautiful

favourite OSX release ?
we're partial to mavericks but try not to let that sway ur vote too much

( re-draft due to a glitch ! u will need to vote again if u voted previously sry ! )

I wanna give a huge shoutout to the postal service here having a free parcel locker service. When I'm caring for my granddad up the mountain we're too far away from town to get the post delivered and because of these lockers I'm still able to get my medication. And it's free

This is the sort of service that helps vulnerable folx in a whole number of really critical ways and I'm so grateful for it ❤️

a friend got me a speak and spell as a christmas present, it has a headphone jack so i sampled it and turned it into whatever this is

I just learned about FRED as an alternative to WASD and it’s actually got me slightly tempted to try it

the idea is that in a game’s keybinds, you set:

E: move forward
D: move back
R: move left
F: move right

that way you only have two fingers dedicated to the movement keys, instead of 3 like with WASD. also because your fingers are more centrally located on the keyboard, you can press a lot more keys a lot more easily

with WASD the only keys that I can press while moving in any arbitrary direction using WASD, are: Tab, Caps Lock, Shift, LCtrl, Space, Alt

but with FRED I can be moving in any arbitrary direction and also press: Q, W, A, S, Z, X, 1, 2, Tab, Caps Lock, Shift, LCtrl, Space, Alt

✅ Isopod touched

one of the worst parts of #Minecraft to me has always been inventory management. I haven’t been able to figure out any kind of systematic way to do it. as soon as I have things nicely sorted out, I’ll pick up some new items and those will throw my inventory organization into chaos. and mods like Inventory Tweaks help a bit, but not nearly enough

but I just tried Inventory Profiles Next and omg I’m in love. it lets you lock slots so that they’re visually distinct from non-locked slots and aren’t affected by sorting - which I’m going to use to mark items that I want to keep with me. it also lets you tell Minecraft “whenever I pick up an item, try to put it in my inventory first and not my hotbar” which is going to help me a lot with not feeling overwhelmed by my own hotbar lol

it also seems to have a system for switching between different inventory profiles, where different items go in different slots depending on which profile you’re using - which solves another huge problem that I’ve had in the past, of how to quickly and consistently change my hotbar depending on my current task

anyway idk I’m so excited to use this thing. I feel like it’s singlehandedly going to solve my single biggest pain point in Minecraft and turn the hectic chaos of inventory management into something manageable and even fun

(also it’s completely clientside! I love that. so you can play on a vanilla Minecraft server with Inventory Profiles Next and it won’t cause any issues)

Reminder to everyone on the TL for 2026: It’s going to be another tough year. Don’t forget to have some fun, and don’t feel guilty for it. You need it to survive.