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.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497227

Points: 4

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Spoken like a true AI.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128409

Points: 1

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123028

Points: 1

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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.

* Made Termux accessible enough for me to use.

* Made an MUD client for Emacs.

Gotten Emacs and Emacspeak working on Termux.

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.

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?

[1] https://github.com/devinprater/Talking-termux-app

[2] https://github.com/devinprater/elmud