Hacker News: ClawsOnPaws

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Another Day Has Come"

ClawsOnPaws — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:59:58 +0000

I absolutely LOVE! Voice Vista. It is an amazing bit of software. I wasn't able to use SoundScape when it first came out because it was never made available in my region, but VV is, and I would never want to miss it anymore when traveling. I love it. A lot.

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Another Day Has Come"

ClawsOnPaws — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:58:59 +0000

It is just random bugs. Switching punctuation schemes. The terminal doesn't read very well, VoiceOver loves to say "not responding" in Safari and locks up, live regions don't always read correctly, quick nav (basically automatically holding down the voiceover modifier so you can more quickly use navigate through the screen) adds random delay to each key press, it's just lots and lots and lots of small issues like this that compound. This is just a small list of them. None of them are a huge problem by itself, but combined they do make things frustrating sometimes. And then of course the ability to script badly behaving, or completely inaccessible, apps is just missing, so you can't fix apps even if you knew how to. And of course VoiceOver on the Mac is all you get. So if you don't like it, tough luck. You won't ever get a real alternative that can access what VoiceOver can.

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Another Day Has Come"

ClawsOnPaws — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:17:54 +0000

Blind person using Apple products here, and at least for phones, I agree. I wouldn't say it's exclusively because of iPhone, but a large part of my independence is definitely it. There have been problems, bugs that go unfixed for years, MacOS VoiceOver is quite a disaster even though I do still use and enjoy the platform overall, and anything worth using can be criticized I think. But iOS has so many features built in that help me every single day. VoiceOver, but also all of the features utilizing vision like door detection, OCR, etc. they're in the magnifier as well so you don't need VoiceOver enabled to play with them, and I think a number of them also require a lidar sensor?

Anyway, my phone is such an important companion wherever I go that I keep several magsafe batteries on me whenever I leave the house for a significant time. It has made an absolutely huge difference in confidence. It is definitely one of the single most important assistive tech devices I have together with my computer.

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users"

ClawsOnPaws — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:01:36 +0000

Not to mention that this seems to completely ignore all the things that we might use computers for. Browsing websites is only one of the things I do. Many of the things I do I think would be extraordinarily clunky through natural language. Also I just do not feel comfortable talking to my computer out loud, especially when I'm anywhere with other people around. Or I don't know... playing games with friends on voice chat. It seems to be common for people to assume that a fix is very easy and simple. LLM's, OCR for screen readers, etc. If it really was as simple as just slapping OCR on everything, it would already have happened. Also I definitely like some privacy and would prefer my computing not to happen entirely through OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, and whether someone can use computers well or not, we shouldn't force them to do that exact thing. At least in my opinion. And that doesn't even go into the costs associated with all of that LLM usage.

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users"

ClawsOnPaws — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 20:40:09 +0000

You are correct. At least in my case, more synthetic voices like Eloquence are easier to understand at high speeds especially because of their 'formulaic' nature. You don't listen to each individual phoneme or letter, you listen more for groups of syllables, tone, etc. The more unpredictable the text to speech, the harder this is. Also, performance is another big point. If you have large bits of silence at the beginning of the audio, or slow attacks, then the responsiveness will suffer, whether that's because of the actual audio itself, or the generation time.

Some of this is surely ssubjective, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only screen reader user with these opinions.

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "VS Code deactivates IntelliCode in favor of the paid Copilot"

ClawsOnPaws — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:07:45 +0000

And sadly it is also not accessible to screen readers. VS Code for all its flaws is really, really good for screen reader accessibility. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it's not only one of the most accessible code editors we have, but one of the most accessible electron apps overall. So losing it to this Microsoft stuff would be a huge deal to anyone who relies on screen reader or accessibility tools. :(

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Show HN: Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters"

ClawsOnPaws — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 08:29:26 +0000

you are correct. This makes text almost completely unreadable using screen readers.

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Reverse engineering Codex CLI to get GPT-5-Codex-Mini to draw me a pelican"

ClawsOnPaws — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 12:44:52 +0000

Just as a quick datapoint here in case people get worried; yes, it is absolutely possible to program as a blind person, even without language models. Obviously you won't be using your eyes for it, but we have tried and tested tools that help and work. And at the end of the day, someone's going to have to review the code that gets written, so either way, you're not going to get around learning those tools.

Source: Am a blind person coding for many years before language models existed.

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "End of Japanese community"

ClawsOnPaws — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 13:27:10 +0000

The core thing here is the "I'm sorry you feel this way". This immediately deflects all sense of wrong-doing from the people actually doing wrong to the people feeling hurt. There are so many other ways to phrase this that are either more neutral or even acknowledging of some kind of mistake being made that's not on the volunteer's side, but that's not what's happening here. Essentially this means "We did the right thing and now we need to figure out how to make you understand this", not "Something went wrong and we need to figure out how to come to an understanding which might include us having done something wrong".

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Show HN: Halloy – Modern IRC client"

ClawsOnPaws — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 08:24:43 +0000

Heh, that roadmap is also not accessible to screen readers, at least on FireFox. That's unfortunate. But I understand it's a big undertaking with little reward for most people. I do think there are UI libraries with AccessKit integration, egui I believe?

Ah well. I'll check back on it every now and then either way.

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Show HN: Halloy – Modern IRC client"

ClawsOnPaws — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 18:58:44 +0000

I'd love to test this, however it seems to not be accessible with screen readers. I assume this is because of the GUI library not supporting accessibility. I found an open issue about this on the Iced GitHub where in 2024 it was mentioned that the version after next should support it, and the last comment was in february of this year (https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/issues/552)

I bookmarked this so hopefully once that effort gets further along I can give it a try!

I figured I'd leave this comment so that some folks can see that there are real people even on HN who require these features and that accessibility work is always appreciated. We definitely exist :)

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Vibe engineering"

ClawsOnPaws — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 12:58:06 +0000

I feel the same way. It also appears to be a lot more difficult to actually find jobs, though that's probably just the general state of the job market and less specifically AI related. All of it is thoroughly discouraging, demotivating, and every week this goes on the less I want to do it. So for me as well it might be time to try to look beyond software, which will also be difficult since software is what I've done for all my life, and everything else I can do I don't have any formal qualifications for, even if I am confident I have the relevant skills.

It's not even just that. Every single thing in tech right now seems to be AI this, AI that, and AI is great and all but I'm just so tired. So very tired. Somehow even despite the tools being impressive and getting more impressive by the day, I just can't find it in me to be excited about it all. Maybe it's just burnout I'm not sure, but it definitely feels like a struggle.

Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

ClawsOnPaws — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 15:47:11 +0000

Article URL: https://neurrone.com/posts/software-development-at-800-wpm/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44672149

Points: 174

# Comments: 76

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Building a Personal AI Factory"

ClawsOnPaws — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 22:15:44 +0000

I keep coming to the same conclusion, which basically is: if I had an LLM write it for me, I just don't care about it. There are 2 projects out of the maybe 50 or so that are LLM generated, and even for those two I cared enough to make changes myself without an LLM. The rest just sit there because one day I thought huh wouldn't it be neat if, and then realized actually I cared more about having that thought than having the result of that thought. Then you end up fighting with different models and implementation details and then it messes up something and you go back and forth about how you actually want it to work, and somehow this is so much more draining and exhausting than just getting the work done manually with some slight completion help perhaps, maybe a little bit of boilerplate fill-in. And yes, this is after writing extensive design docs, then having some reasoning LLM figure out the tasks that need to be completed, then having some models talk back and forth about what needs to happen and while it's happening, and then I spent a whole lot of money on what exactly? Questionably working software that kinda sorta does what I wanted it to do? If I have a clear idea, or an existing codebase, if I end up guiding it along, agents and stuff are pretty cool I guess. But vibe coding? Maybe I'm in the minority here but as soon as it's a non trivial app, not just a random small script or bespoke app kind of deal, it's not fun, I often don't get the results I actually wanted out of it even if I tried to be as specific as I wanted with my prompting and design docs and example data and all that, it's expensive, code is still messy as heck, and at the end I feel like I just spent a whole lot of time actually literally arguing with my computer. Why would I want to do that?

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Airpass – Easily overcome WiFi time limits"

ClawsOnPaws — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 20:08:51 +0000

Since this is only available for mac, couldn't this fairly easily be solved with shortcuts?

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Show HN: EchoStream – A Local AI Agent That Lives on Your iPhone"

ClawsOnPaws — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 14:47:04 +0000

Not available in my region, apparently.

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Google battling 'fox infestation' on roof of £1B London office"

ClawsOnPaws — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 21:50:21 +0000

If those foxes were to spontaneously combust, then Google would have a Firefox problem.

The Problem with the AI Hype

ClawsOnPaws — Sat, 17 May 2025 14:36:23 +0000

Article URL: https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/the-real-problem-with-AI/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014633

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Ask HN: My son might be blind – how to best support"

ClawsOnPaws — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 10:22:03 +0000

Fellow blind person here, adding my own anecdote. I click and echolocate. I have two different kinds of clicks. A soft click for very immediate surrounding which I can do rapidly if I need to, and a loud click for figuring out large spaces which I don't use very often for relatively obvious reasons. They're quite helpful for me and especially in new unfamiliar spaces it's almost a reflex that happens on its own unless I consciously try to stop it for social reasons. Just to add another datapoint. What works for one might not work for another, so there's a lot of trial and error involved in figuring out what works and what doesn't. This can be very frustrating sometimes but sympathy will go a long way.

Something I wanted to add, maybe this thread in particular isn't the best place for this but in general, I'm very lucky that my parents did not prevent me from doing things that others may have. For example, I climbed trees, rode a bike, and generally tried to do all of the things my sighted peers were doing. Naturally there were accidents, but not preventing me from doing those things, not preventing me from learning my limits, learning my balance and physical control, getting hurt and getting back up, I believe were absolutely vital to making me the person I am today. I imagine as a parent this can be very stressful or worrying, but I honestly do not believe I would be as independent now if I wasn't allowed to do those things back then. So unless it is absolutely certain that this is something that they will not be able to do at all, maybe consider letting them try it. It will absolutely help confidence, self worth and skills for later independence that are very, very, very badly needed and very easily missed. I'm not a parent however, so of course take this with a grain of salt. My experience may be slightly biased here.

New comment by ClawsOnPaws in "Where are programming languages created? A zoomable map"

ClawsOnPaws — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 10:25:56 +0000

I would have thought that would be Lua, not Elixir?